Seán Hewitt: The Glimpse
Míchéal McCann: It's like I have a sunny disposition. I think being
amongst human beings is the greatest gift we have. But it's not
like I wake up, wake up in bed with my cats, and I throw open the
curtains. Do you know what I mean? You have to, like work hard to see
the world in that way, and it's not deluded.
Seán Hewitt: Welcome to The Glimpse, I'm your host Seán Hewitt.
Mícheál McCann is the author of three pamphlets of poems, the most
recent Keeper. His first collection, Devotion was published
in 2024 and he's the 2024 Publishing Fellow at the Seamus
Heaney Center at Queen's University Belfast. Originally from Derry
City, Mícheál now lives and works in Belfast and is our guest today
on The Glimpse.
Mícheál McCann's debut collection Devotion is many things, an
inhabitation of Irish literature, an account of queer life, an
exploration of love and relationships, and a light filled
and tender look at domesticity. In one time bending sequence, McCann
reinhabits the Irish lament, originally composed by Eibhlín Dubh
Ní Chonaill, creating a heartfelt and grief-filled reimagining, which
places a queer love story right at the heart of the Irish tradition.
His poems are unusually open and welcoming and I think, full of a
sense of gratitude for the small moments in life that can act as a
solace in an increasingly fraught world. Mícheál McCann, welcome to
The Glimpse. It's so good to have you here.
Míchéal McCann: Thanks, Seán you've said nice things. I appreciate it.
Seán Hewitt: You're very welcome. Where are you speaking to us from?
Míchéal McCann: So from the Seamus Heaney Center, actually. I borrowed
down here from work up in the mountains in West Belfast. And it's
very foggy. You can't see 50 feet in front of you. It's a very sort
of, this is my type of winter evening, not particularly festive.
Seán Hewitt: Okay, that's very different weather in Belfast
than what
we have here, which is unusually clear for Dublin. As I
mentioned in the intro that this year your debut collection Devotion
came out. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how the
past year since the launch of the book has been for you?
Míchéal McCann: How's it been? So wonderful, you know, it's one of
those things where it's wonderful because your thinking about
publishing changes entirely when you're fortunate enough to publish
a book. You know, you strive for so long. I mean, we met when you just
put out Lantern, I remember, and I was trying to put out pamphlets and
stuff. And I think you have this idea of, like a quest, you know,
when I reach the collection stage, you know, but you're still as
unsure of yourself, and plodding along, and you're just sort of
doing the same things, but in the way you are at that stage. So it's
great. It sort of, it's humbling, you know, it's been really good for
that reason, you know. And I feel very lucky, like it's been held so
conscientiously by Gallery. You know, they've done a really
beautiful job with it, especially with the lamenting stuff, so.
Seán Hewitt: How long were you working on the book?
Míchéal McCann: Probably the guts of about two years, probably. A lot
of the poems were written from about 2021, onwards. The lament, in
and of itself, was about six months where I feel like I blacked out and
came to and then just had this, like 35 page long poem that sort of
still mystifies me a little bit. And then other poems just come in
that sort of organic way that you know yourself. I don't know it's
such a thrill, isn't it? You know, I remember talking to people
who think that a book's organic. Do you know what I mean? I just think
it's not a mechanical process.
Seán Hewitt: Did it change along the way a lot? The book?
Míchéal McCann: In the way that I suppose I worked with Leontia Flynn
on my PhD, and I don't think the poems changed, but maybe my eye for
how poems should look changed. Do you know?
Seán Hewitt: Yeah. I mean, it's sort of evolution, maybe, but not
necessarily always in a linear direction. I think it's like a
folding inwards of inspiration and different sorts of language. The
title in your book is "Keen for A--" and Irish readers would know
that poem from school, I guess the "Keen for Art O'Leary." Would you
tell listeners a little bit about that poem, some of them may be
unfamiliar with it and and what drew you to it?
Míchéal McCann: Yeah, so the "Keen for Art O'Leary" was, it was never
written down. It was uttered by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill about 251,
years ago, actually, last year, it was his 250th anniversary,
obviously. So she's a noble woman of sorts. Her husband, Art O'Leary,
was killed by British forces in Cork at that time. And, you know,
keening was a sort of profession, you know, professional wailing
women. But actually, prior to that period, even men would have done it
as well. But this woman uttered this keen so extraordinary, so sort
of full of anger and this frightening desire for her husband.
You know, that people were like so stunned that these other keeners
took register and noted down the poem.
And it's sort of long and frightening, really frightening.
And the thing that grabbed me, I remember reading it for the first
time, and there's a scene where she comes across his corpse in this
sort of like little hilly patch, and, you know, an old woman has,
she thinks, thrown like a robe over his dead, bloody body. And Eibhlín
Dubh Ní Chonaill sticks her hands into the wounds and lifts the blood
and drinks it and drinks it. And, you know, as a gay person,
blood is very burdened in a different way, you know. So I
suppose that was what started to set my mind going like in I guess
there's two ways to think about the past and literary canons and stuff
that exclude certain kinds of people. You know, do you see that
as like an opportunity to carve into something or move away? I
suppose for me, I love Irish literature so much, and I have
enough of a note of unscholarliness about me that I just thought what
would happen if I tried this. Then I did.
Seán Hewitt: Which is a lovely freedom to push into. I think it's
a poem that's been translated many times by different poets and
scholars from different backgrounds. When it comes to
introducing that poem into your book of poems, with its sense of
history, the violence in it, you know, the kind of other worldliness
of that poem, but also you know bringing it in to a queer
relationship with your own poems. What does that mean to you? Or, you
know, how did you go about thinking about inhabiting that different
angle on history? Because I think it's an important thing that a lot
of queer writers have to think about. It's kind of marking out a
kind of historical reference point for their own work, and either you
stand firmly in the center of that canon, as I think that this poem
does, you know it's such a radical thing to do. Or you can kind of
about face and turn against the canon completely. What was your
relationship to it?
Míchéal McCann: When I came across that poem, one thing that struck me
is that it is a keen but it's also a love poem, and I was trying to
sort of at that time, work through a really awful death that happened
in my family, and at the same time, I feel fortunate to be in a
relationship that has a lot of love in it. So I think the poem pierced
me in an odd way. I will say I wrote the poem without thinking of
any of this, you know. I think, like all good poems, if you're
thinking about reception or historicity or whatever, it's gonna
not be worth toilet paper, you know. But I guess when I finished
it, I was sort of really seized by this sense, like, who am I to do
this? You know, it's because it's sort of when you're writing about
queer subjects in a context that hasn't been written about. You sort
of feel like, am I standing on people's toes? Seán, I don't
really know how to answer your question, except to say that I was
compelled to write it and I decided to be brave and just let it.
Seán Hewitt: As writers, often we're asked to kind of put logic
back on a decision that we never made logically, and it could be
quite difficult to retrospectively, kind of come up with the origin
story of something that just arrived. It seems that Devotion as
a collection is fundamentally a book of love poems, or it is at
least pitched towards love. But underneath it, there is a lot of
violence simmering, whether it's incidental violence historical
violence. Is that something that, as you were putting the book
together became apparent to you, or was it always a kind of conscious
concern that you wanted to temper love with violence in the book.
Míchéal McCann: I suppose I write a lot about family and the terrain in
which I live, you know, political violence and, yeah, the
ramifications of that are very real. Love isn't just love blandly
thrown on a wall. You know, it's so complicated by the trajectory for
which it took to manifest. Itself. And so like, I think, as a queer
person, as a person who lives in this part of Ireland, as a person
who is just still alive in this part of Ireland, like to not
acknowledge violence is to just be locked in your room and not
thinking about stuff that's happening outside.
Seán Hewitt: What I thought was really beautiful about the book is
the way that you had ordered the poems so that we kind of tumble
through deepening understandings of the place in which the poems are
being written from, and the poem that you're going to read for us
emerges in some way out of that. Would you introduce the poem that
you're going to read for us and tell us a little bit about it first
and read it for us.
Míchéal McCann: Marilyn Robinson is a very important writer to me, and
one of the things I feel like I've learned from her is that it's
important that we're not all recruited into the same models of
thinking. I think writers are these sort of little magpies for not just
thinking and creativity, but we're just sort of these like
cheesecloths through which so much stuff passes. And this poem that I'm
going to read was me thinking about a certain kind of knowledge that I
know as a queer person is true, and also an emotional truth that I feel
like I want to be a parent, right? And I guess I was wrestling with
the fact that two things can be true at once, or maybe perhaps that
love breaks down book learning quite quickly. So I'll read that
because I think talking about poems is never as good as just reading
them. But you're very generous.
To an Imagined Child. Friends of certain militant dispositions would
have kittens hearing me address you like this. To have a child, they
say, is a heterosexual fallacy! There's enough tragedy on this
drowning world without a replica of me, making matters worse. And yet
book-learning crumbles in the face of a child's toy, a small pink
hairbrush. I dream of you to the soft cluck of knitting needles. You
would know me always in the same coat, waiting outside the school
well before I had to. Maybe some part of us is meant to be weighed
down, I might say to my friends. A diving line is often deployed in
murky caves so a diver can ascend to gentle water. Child, I would
stand still with this line around my trunk In the shallow water of
our lives, so that you can tug twice for I'm okay. I'm okay,
daddy, Go well into your own life and stand among flowers you cannot
grow and smile knowing that wherever I go you follow as a
prayer follows hope.
Seán Hewitt: Thank you. You're welcome. I was really struck by the
quietness and intimacy of this poem, and I wanted to touch on the
last line first, particularly, as you mentioned, Marilyn Robinson is
one of my favorite writers too. I wonder about poems and prayers,
which often kind of come up together, and is sometimes seen as
as kindred. Does that prayer-like intention, ever inform the way that
you write? You know, do you ever see poems as being related to the
prayer?
Míchéal McCann: I think so. But for me, when I'm in that zone, it
doesn't come often where I want to write a poem, or, you know, like
you're on a plane, for example, and this moment of clarity, that's the
only way I can understand writing poems. This moment of clarity
pierces you, and you can sort of take that consciousness and impress
it into a poem. You know, I think that's just what a prayer is, you
know, it's like a hope for or an impression of something better or
something different, or, you know, like a type of light that directs
you out of the mark of your own life. So, yeah, absolutely.
Seán Hewitt: I think I'm really struck by the way that you describe
it. You know, the fundamental thing that really rings through all of
your poems is that impression of clarity, but also of hope and a
sense of things might be better. Kind of at the end of stanza three,
you say, you know, "there's enough tragedy on this drowning world
without a replica of me making matters worse. And yet" And what
another poet might have done might have been to make this a lengthy
poem of critique of you know, what other people might say and to
take down, but you actually, from stanza three, just lift into a
dream, a sense of a better future or a different life. Do you find
yourself approaching things positively, rather than you know,
succumbing maybe to the temptation to anger or critique or negativity?
Is that? Is that something that's, you know, apparent to you in your
own writing.
Míchéal McCann: That's a really beautiful question. I read a book a
long time ago now by Michael Snedeker called Queer Optimism.
It's a book about happiness and joy, which we know in critical
writing doesn't get written about a lot. And he talks about the
difference between sort of naive happiness and sort of
adult-informed happiness, or joy, or whatever he's talking
about. And to be clear, you know, that book proceeds through like
suicide, of not wanting to be alive anymore and persisting, and that is
what informs that sort of subjectivity you're talking about.
You know, it's like I have a sunny disposition. I think being amongst
human beings is the greatest gift we have. But like, I haven't like,
that's a hard one. It's not like, I just wake up, wake up in bed
with my cats, and I throw open the curtains. Do you know what I mean?
Like, you have to work hard to see the world in that way, and
it's not deluded. Do you know what I mean?
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, I don't see much poetry by men that's looking into
the kind of the domestic sphere. And that seems to me something
different here. You know, queer domesticity seems like something
that might be out of fashion, or, you know, you just don't hear about
it a lot and part of the kind of voices in the back of your
poem that might accuse you of a heterosexual fallacy, are perhaps
some of the reasons why we don't hear much of this really
important facet of queer life. You know, we all have home lives as
well and I think that often queer literature is looking in
other places to pull away from these ideas that it might call
heterosexual or, you know, it might say, are in some ways, traps into
which we fall after liberation, assimilation, or
something like that? It made me think about your experience with
queer poetry as you started writing, I wondered what that
process of discovery was like for you and who have been your kind of
guiding lights, or, you know, touchstones.
Míchéal McCann: I had a very formative year around the age of
19, I think when, in like one hour, was introduced to Elizabeth Bishop
and Mark Doty. You can imagine how dazzling that was for me. And I go
back to both of them a lot for very different reasons. You know, I
actually, to be honest, Mark Doty was, you know, Mark Doty helped me
sort of write about my life in concrete terms that I never quite
had access to before, but there's something about just that
devastating clarity, without giving anything away, that Bishop has. You
know, Sylvia Plath has done as much for me as someone who shares the
same sexuality as me. You know, like I've mentioned Marie Howe
before, I think of all poets living or dead, she's had the most
transformative impact to me, do you know? So, yeah
Seán Hewitt: I can hear her in the background of your poems.
And I think I'm glad you mentioned Mark Doty as well, because I, you
know, in a geeky way, there was something in some of your line
breaks that I was like, "Oh, you know, that's such a good
line break." And then I thought, "yeah, that's also
quite a Mark Doty line break, "child, I would stand still with
this line around my trunk in the shallow water" line break, or
actually stanza break "of our lives." And I think that “of our
lives” is such a Mark Doty-esque addition, because he has this way of
pulling the apparently normal, just standing with you in water into
something kind of expansive. You know, he has that kind of prayerful
expansion in his problems that always seem to me to give them a
great sense of lift and kind of the unexpected. I love him too.
Okay. Mícheál McCann, we are going to take a short break now, and when
we come back, you're going to tell me about one of your favorite and
my favorite poets, Fiona Benson, and a poem about fireflies.
Míchéal McCann: Sounds good.
Cathy & Peter Halstead: We hope you're enjoying this second season
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Seán Hewitt: Mícheál McCann, we were speaking about your poem “To an
Imagined Child,” and now you're going to read one of my favorite
poets, and I imagine your favorite poets as well, or else you wouldn't
have chosen Fiona Benson. This is a poem from Firefly Suite. Would you
tell us a little bit about why it is that you've chosen it and then
read it for us?
Míchéal McCann: How to summarize Fiona Benson in a few words? For
anyone listening who hasn't heard of her, go and read her. She's a
mixture of tender heartedness and ferocity I've ever read. And the
reason I chose this poem is that she marries technical virtuosity
with incredible feeling, you know, and isn't afraid to be very ugly in
the poems, you know, there's like, sort of a sharp jankiness to them,
and then there's also incredible control. And oh gosh, I'm actually
becoming incoherent. I love her work so much.
Seán Hewitt: No, I think so too. I mean, she's such a brave poet as
well as an astute one, and I find her poems completely incredible. So
why don't we stop gushing about it? We'll gush again afterwards. But
would you read it for us?
Míchéal McCann: Yes, I will read it. So this is the first poem from
a sequence called Firefly Suite. So this poem is called "Big Dipper,
Fireflies (Photinus pyralis)" and It's dedicated to Mair Bosworth.
Silently at dusk The big dippers rising from the grass – green and
upwards, cinders, gentle, wandering stars – and we two on our knees
cupping them up, holding them close, like something we lost at
the edge of the forest and loved. How we are enthralled as the soft
green flush in the lamp we make of our hands comes and goes, how we
peer into the improvised chambers we make with our fingers to see
them housed, their beetle wings striped like sunflower seeds, and
the tender segments of their bellies glimmering like tree-sap
breathing, an emerald electric pulse. And though we've been
disenchanted, strangers to ourselves in multiple prisons,
unleaved, unskyed (I've been ready to lie down dearest dust, I have
wanted to die) once more in wonder the raw green girl who lives in me
still trembles, ignites; and we open our hands like books, let them
fly.
Seán Hewitt: So good. I kind of want to talk about every single
line at this point. But you know when you when you read it, their
bellies glimmering like tree sap breathing an electric an emerald
electric pulse. And although I've never seen fireflies or big dipper
fireflies, you almost feel that you could recreate them in your mind
from this, which is a strange thing with insects as well, because
they're so kind of alien to us. But even the idea of them having
beetle wings, stripes, like sunflower seeds, the tender
segments of their bellies glimmering, you know, we go from
this quite otherworldly opening, which almost seems like,
a fairy tale opening, where at the edge of the wood there are glowing
things as kind of even the sense of constellations and stars and two
people wandering towards it, and then zoom in straight down onto the
tiniest, kind of tender moment. And when I said before about Fiona
Benson being a brave poet, that parenthesis towards the end of the
poem is such a brave moment.
Míchéal McCann: Staggering.
Seán Hewitt: "I've been ready to lie down, dearest dust. I have
wanted to die." It just takes the heart out of you when you read
that, because everything in that moment is suddenly weighted with
its possible other life or its past life, that seems to actually
increase the form of wonder in the poem.
Míchéal McCann: I think it's all about reenchantment, you know, like
that. We have these sort of improvised chambers, like blue,
green and like this little parenthetical note doesn't detract
from that, but it also, you know, is really interesting to me about
how the human spirit moves towards a wonder, despite, yeah, you know,
I just, I just, I find it so remarkable how she's managed to
make that parentheses and this glimmering, glowing, moving poem
work together.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah. I mean, in some way, it's a poem about re
enchantment and everything that that kind of entails. It seems to
me, a sort of redemption of things and grace, maybe. And in some
ways, having the admission in parenthesis there at once kind of
gives you a sense of the disenchantment that we're moving
away from, and what power there must be in enchantment to do that.
But also, I think, in bracketing it, it almost comes as an aside in
this moment, so it doesn't actually puncture the moment of the poem. It
doesn't end there. You know, we go straight back to the wonderful
thing. And so the moment of tenderness is held within the poem.
Míchéal McCann: I think it's made all the more brilliant for its
presence, though, do you know what I mean? I just, "brave" is the word
she used, you know? But I think we are like an accumulation of all the
things that have brought us to the point we're at. You know, I very
much read this poem as like a flashing moment within a really
extraordinarily beautiful experience where I've been ready to
lay down dearest dust. I have wanted to die, and then it goes
again. You know, it's miraculous, is what I would describe this in
her whole work as.
Seán Hewitt: I mean, to begin a sequence like this is impressive,
because where are you gonna go after? The idea of writing that
poem and then sitting down and thinking, "Okay, and another one"
is an incredible feat that I'm extremely jealous of and amazed by.
You know, I have a new sense of wonder in the world. I've become
very sad that I haven't seen the Big Dipper Firefly, or had this
moment myself,
Míchéal McCann: I find myself thinking about the term
reenchantment, because there's nothing divine going on here, you
know, like the very title of the poem, even, like the little sort of
Latin species note indicates like there's nothing miraculous about
this, you know, yeah. And I think an extraordinary way for me to
think about this poem is this was here all along, you know.
Seán Hewitt: I think that this poem, and the sequence is, it was
part of a project for Fiona, wasn't it? About biodiversity And
insects and, I think that you can listen to the podcasts that
Mair Bosworth produced, of this, of the sequence. Am I
right?
Míchéal McCann: I think you're right. I remember that
Seán Hewitt: That’s where it comes from and I think that part of the
precision in the language is obviously Fiona's, but it's also
kind of informed by the sort of close attention that scientists do
as well. And maybe the bracketed kind of species name there is a
bridging of the gap between the poet's world view. The big dipper
fireflies is kind of the poet's way of describing, and then the
Latinate name is the scientific and in this poem, they kind of blend
together. You know, there's such a small precision in the language,
and then it has this lift which feels poetic as well. I don't know.
I think that there's something that feels almost collaborative about
the way that this poem comes together.
Míchéal McCann: I mean, I'm sure listeners are thinking within the
minute, but one of the greatest honors of my whole life is
realizing that you can just live a life talking about poems like we've
been talking about a parentheses for how long, but what we're doing
in the world we live in is one of the few things that doesn't hurt
anyone. We're talking about parentheses and like, you know, but
I'm serious, like, and that's so extraordinary to think.
Seán Hewitt: Well, I mean, in some ways it's, you know, you were
talking about, kind of the redirection of attention. And
that's kind of what reading poems like this does to us, even for a
half an hour in the day, you're pulled towards an attention on
something as small as a parenthesis and what it might make you feel, or
how strangely brave you know, three lines of poetry can can be in the
middle of a poem. So there is something in that. I don't
know what we should apologize for. Yeah, what are you working on now?
Míchéal McCann: None of your Business (laughs).
Seán Hewitt: I like it when people refuse to tell me these things.
Míchéal McCann: I am working on my second book of
poems at the minute, which sort of orbit the lives of the saints,
hagiography, where I'm sort of zoning in and out of written lives,
unwritten lives, my family, otherwise, you know, and it's fun,
it's very different. And, yeah, I'm writing, that is what I'm doing.
Seán Hewitt: That is very exciting, as I'm talking to you now, I can
literally just put my hand above my bookcase and pull out the Penguin
Dictionary of the Saints, which I used to have by my bed. I found it
in a charity shop, and I would every night or so do you know
letter E of the saints, and there's such incredible stories and so much
variety in them, I can't wait to see what you do with them. That is
very exciting news.
Seán Hewitt: Mícheál McCann, it has been a real pleasure talking to
you. Thank you for taking the time to come on The Glimpse
Míchéal McCann: That was a gift. Thanks, Seán
Míchéal McCann:
Seán Hewitt: Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host. Seán Hewitt
Mícheál's poem "To an Imagined Child is from Devotion, published
in 2024 and aired with the kind permission of the author and the
Gallery Press. Fiona Benson's poem Big Dipper Fireflies is from
Ephemeron, published by Jonathan Cape in 2022 copyright Fiona
Benson. It was aired with the permission of the author, care of
Rogers, Coleridge and White
Coming up next week, poet Nithy Kasa talks about the challenge of
balancing her life, identity, and work between Dublin and the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Make sure to subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your
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Drop us an email at the glimpse poetry podcast@gmail.com The
Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry
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Director, and our co founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks
for listening.