PRISM INTERNATIONAL’S ERIKA THORKELSON INTERVIEWS DAVE LORDAN

I met award-winning Irish writer and performer Dave Lordan on an unseasonably glorious April day in Bray, County Wicklow, just outside of Dublin. He’d recently returned from a trip to New York where he had been introducing North Americans to his bombastic oratorical skills. That day, we talked about the recession, pop culture and politics— basically, everything other than poetry. A couple weeks later, I thought I’d back up and get to his opinion on his specialty. The results are below.

How did you come to writing poetry?

By means of blank tapes, flagons, unmanageable and incomprehensible teenage lust, diesel-soaked dope, paper strawberries and homemade bear-traps. Is there any other way?

Poetry for me is a way of surviving others and of making myself as separate and distinct from other people as possible. I’m hoping it will help me evolve into another species altogether.

I also thought poetry might be a good place to hide from the police and executioners, which, in certain circumstances, is everybody else in existence. Everything but me to me is death.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?

Whether or not it is in reality, in the poetic medium of language, everything is connected. Therefore, there isn’t anything we can speak of that, when concentrated on, doesn’t offer up material for poetry. So I often write about what I choose to write about. Other than that, random lines enter my head when I am out walking, or when I am falling asleep, or feeling a bit manic, and I try and build something up out of them.

How extensive is your revision process? Do your poems change a lot between the initial spark of an idea and the published product?

All the fun and all the life is the writing and revising. Writing is an autoerotic and even narcotic distraction to which I am addicted and which I am in mortal fear of losing supply of. Other writers go on about hard work. I don’t know what they’re talking about. If it were work, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. It’s play, it’s excess, it’s the height of irresponsibility, or fuck it. When I’m writing (writing is revising), which is fairly often, I go into a kind of trance of composition. I’m high. I don’t think about or even much take notice of very much else. It’s a good thing I don’t drive a car or operate heavy machinery.

When a poem is finished I don’t really care about it anymore because I’m on to the next one. Does anyone care about the hit they took yesterday? I might be concerned, vainly, about what other people think of the poem, for a little while, but not about the poem itself. Finishing a poem is a way of discarding it. In fact, I have to believe that I would write poems for the sake of being involved in writing them, whether or not there was anything to do with them after they are finished, or whether or not I ever finished them.

What are the most important mechanical facets of a poem to you—rhythm, line breaks, word choice, narrative voice? How would you describe the use of form in your poetry?

I use the forms I am capable of using variously, as I please, to say what I want to say in the way that I want to say it at the time. Every poem is different, separate and has its own unity, and all of those mechanical elements will come into play in individually varying proportions. Again, the formal aspects are only a way of containing, refining and promoting the impulse to write, which is for me the most important thing. I had the madness of writing before I knew a thing about form.

You began as a spoken word poet—what’s the relationship between performance and written poetry for you? What’s gained and lost between the two forms?

I didn’t begin as a spoken word poet and I won’t end up as one either. An artist is allowed to have phases. The spoken word scene will peak and decay like any scene, and I’ll still hopefully be writing poetry, and performing it.

There’s a few bob in spoken word occasionally these days and I can give most crowds what they are looking for for twenty minutes or so. Everyone I knew as a kid was a manic performer, a street-screamer, a pub-thrasher, a tree-groper, a bush-shitter, a jacks-flasher, a midnight-ranter etc… but they didn’t get paid for it. I just bring the loud and grotesque repertoire bequeathed me up on stage for a while and it seems to please people. When I am on stage, I think I am like one of the twisted post-human characters in a Bosch painting, gone active. It feels great and I would do it even if there was nobody watching.

Much of your work lays bare the darker side of human nature and history—greed, corruption, and violence. Why do you choose these subjects as opposed to more cheerful ones?

I am interested in teleology and in metaphysics, and in the opposites or negatives of those. I wonder if we are going anywhere or nowhere, if we mean, or could mean anything or nothing, if there is substance, or if everything is a lamentable ghost. I am interested in conducting my own exploration into these questions, in finding my own answers or in satisfying myself that there are no answers.

Poetry is my way of asking and exploring and answering and discovering.

To these ends, I focus on the worst, which is obviously plentiful. I don’t think extremes are aberrations from the sociocultural order, but distillations of it, clarifying indications of its hidden structures and of its lines of advance. For me, the essence of the world shows up in its shadow, in what it marginalizes, excludes, represses, abuses, imprisons and neglects, especially in how it does all these things and to whom and at what time and place. Particulars are important—especially particulars of language, language being, among many other things, an architecture of oppression.

In “Definition of a Runner,” you refer to Jonathon Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which is probably the most famous piece of rhetorical prose of all time. The story told in “Definition of a Runner” might easily have been written as straight prose non-fiction. How does the form of poetry work with this story? How might the effect of the story change if it was told in straight prose?

I doubt if the piece would have any effect whatsoever in poetry or prose, which maybe is really what it’s all about. “A Modest Proposal” had no effect on child poverty in Dublin or on the vampirism of the ruling class, then or now. I wrote “Definition of a Runner” as a poem rather than a prose piece because it pleased me to do so. Poetry foregrounds the playful and the sonic, the sensual and even libidinous side of language, which I like. It’s one of the paradoxes of poetry for me that, no matter how dark the material, I am always getting a buzz out of it. What I would like to effect—if I could ever effect anything—is the vengeance of the downtrodden. I’d like to be writing the marching songs for the advance of an unstoppable red rebel army. All other art is quite useless.

I’m curious about the line, “That more clerics have not been torn to pieces by the adults of the children they abused is, for me, the great conundrum of modern Irish history, of modern Irish spirituality, of modern Irish philosophy, of modern Irish culture and identity. Of modern Irish poetry.” What do you think is the relationship between your work, Ireland, and Irish identity? How does it come out in “Definition of a Runner?”

That modern Irish culture has not sought in any serious way, aside from extraordinary individual exceptions such as the late Paddy Galvin, to address the church-state child-abuse-system of our so recent past is proof enough that modern Irish culture does not exist, or has only chimerical existence. Therefore, myself and my work can have no proper relation to it. Modern Irish Barbarism on the other hand…

It’s enough to remember that the Irish state wasn’t founded on a revolution for freedom, which is the amnesiac romantic version of it, but on a counter-revolutionary victory in the civil war which followed our war of independence. All our problems, up to including those of the present day, flow from this original and profound—but in no way final—defeat of the people’s revolt.

So what I am saying in that part of the poem quoted in your question is, to my mind, tautological. The only question worth asking anywhere, anytime and in any medium—the only question which offers the prospect of a meaningful response, to which indeed the answer might be the unleashing of meaning itself—is why the oppressed and exploited have not yet arisen with success.

What do you think the world needs to know about poetry in Ireland today?

I’m not sure there is that much to know. “Poetry in Ireland” isn’t a category I’m all that interested in. Most mainstream career poets are oriented on publishers and universities in England or the States anyway, so I don’t know if “Poetry in Ireland” is anything more than a set of hopeful directions to publishing houses in London or admissions in Princeton.

There is a lot of spoken word now, in alongside other live arts forms, giving people a cheap night out during the recession. Some spoken word is poetry, and some of it is circus. It will be interesting to see how that scene develops. As in the States, I imagine some of Irish spoken word’s leading figures may be destined for power-compliant careers in the local culture industry. These people are more properly called entrepreneurs than artists and fair play to them: they are surviving the recession, which is all that matters. There are others in the scene with an active-minded orientation on historical and contemporary avant-gardes, who may choose or be forced into a more challenging and perhaps more luminous spaces.

When is your next book due? Where will we be able to get it?

I’m due to put a book of poetry out with the experimental Wurm Press later this year. I have a book of short stories Out of My Head coming out with Salmon Publishing next year, who also publish my poetry.

Definition of A Runner by Dave Lordan

Do you know what A Runner is in Ireland, where I’m from,
in the year that I was born?
A Runner is what the other children call a child, a boy or a girl,
who keeps trying to run away
from the institution where they are being held prisoner
by priests or by nuns or by ‘brothers’.
I found out what A Runner was at a gathering of artists and
surviving survivors of clerical child abuse in our
National College of Art and Design last year.
We were all there at the invitation of the poet and performance artist
Lisa Marie Johnson to talk to each other about art and survival,
art and memory, art and redemption.
About a lot of stuff I don’t really honestly believe in.

During our conversation I asked the table’s length of surviving survivors
some questions that have perplexed me for a very long time:
Why has nobody taken revenge? Why is it none of you have ever bare-handedly slaughtered a priest or a nun or a brother? Or even arsoned a convent or church?
That more clerics have not been torn to pieces by the adults of the children they abused is,
for me, the great conundrum of modern Irish history, of modern Irish spirituality, of
modern Irish philosophy, of modern Irish culture and identity. Of modern Irish poetry.

I think the surviving survivors had been expecting these questions,
or they had been asked them many times before
by friends and relatives,
or these questions were so at home in their own minds
that the answer came automatically
and simultaneously from the half-dozen of them:
Because we are still afraid, they all said.

Because the terror takes root so deep down inside you
when you are small and it grafts itself to your bones
and it splices itself into your cells and it grows as you grow;
although it always grows faster than you
it always weighs more, is always stronger, always taller than you are,
is always there, in a hood and habit, towering over you,
its big fists hammering down like a Brother’s.

The surviving survivors then started to talk about another man,
a regular of their group,
who had not turned up at our meeting
though he had promised the others to come.
I am going to call the missing man Paddy.
Paddy had not been well recently,
not since, on Westland Row,
he had spotted a priest who had been
one of the chief torturers of his childhood.
Bumping in to that old sadist had brought an awful lot up for Paddy;
all the fear, all the rage, all the hurt, all the despair.

This absent Paddy had been A Runner
the surviving survivors told me.
What’s A Runner? I asked. And they told.

Paddy got caught every time he ran.
Paddy would be half way up the high wall,
(all these theologised borstals had high, blank walls)
or three quarters of the way up,
or struggling to the top and nearly over it,
and a Brother of Christ would catch him by the leg
and yank him back down. Paddy always got caught.
The Brothers had a special way of punishing A Runner
in this vile prison for the innocent. They broke the child’s bone
with a good clatter of a hurley stick,
a weathered one kept handy for the job.

Often it was a wrist they broke,
sometimes an ankle. To make the children crawl. To make them beg.
To make them think twice about attempting to run away again.
But Paddy never stopped trying to run, no matter how many times
his wrist or his ankle got broke.
Freedom was a-beckoning just beyond that wall.
Freedom to be a child like the other children.
Paddy heard laughing and jousting just beyond that wall.
If he could only just make it over the once
Paddy thought he’d have a chance to laugh and play along.
He was that innocent. He was that holy.
He was that much of A Runner,

You had to run away a few times to
get the name of A Runner. You had to show repeatedly
that your desire for freedom was greater than
the fear of broken bones, or of dying.
The clerics often killed children in those places.
They killed them for hate and for rage and they killed them for pleasure.
They killed them with savage beatings
and they buried them hurriedly in unmarked graves
and the Guards ignored it
and the doctor signed the death certificate as accident
and that was that: covered up. Forgotten.

A Runner: the most noble title of my nation.
So much more than Taoiseach, or President, or Saoi.
But we have never been a nation.
Our nation died in 1923 at Ballyseedy.

Swift saw us coming: a nation of bonechewers,
a nation that dines on the bones of poor children.

Paddy’s aged a lot, the surviving survivors were telling me,
since he had the misfortune to run in to that toxic old goon of a priest
- still in his frock and all.
He doesn’t come to meetings or take part in social activities with the other
surviving survivors like he used to anymore.
He stays in his bedsit talking to himself
because he can’t run away
from himself.

Cowering in his bedsit: the cherished one
of all the group,
totem of the uncrushable will to be free
against all odds,
Paddy the Runner:
a shivering snivelling child in his fifties
behind four blank walls