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Paula Meehan Task
Paula Meehan Task
Paula Meehan Task
“I’m just delighted I survived. I still can’t believe it. I keep reminding myself I’m only a
whippersnapper. If I glimpse myself in a mirror, it’s like, who’s that?” Paula Meehan,
at her home in Dublin. Photograph: Dave Meehan
Ciaran Carty
Sat Feb 28 2015
It’s more than 40 years, and nine books, since Meehan emerged
from childhood in the inner city Dublin tenements to give voice to
the disenfranchised everywhere, less in anger than with compassion
and an intuitive understanding that, through verse, imbued their
lives and memories with mythic dignity.
Now here she is in Roly’s Bistro, a tiny figure with flowing white
hair, making her way between the tables like a feather caught in
the breeze of lunchtime chattering. We sit at a window looking out
on Ballsbridge. She sips sparkling water. A puppy she got at
Christmas chewed her credit card. “It’s as if he’s wired to the
moon. He takes a ball to the top of the stairs, drops it, chases it,
and he’ll do that all day.”
“I’m not nostalgic for the poverty, but the attempt to ameliorate
those terrible living conditions led to much displacement and
breaking apart of the community.”
She remembers hiding under the table and listening to things she
couldn’t begin to understand until she was older. Her granny would
see her. “‘Out!’ she’d say. ‘Out.’ And up on her lap , the smell of
kitchen and sleep. She’d rock me. She’d lull me. No one was kinder.”
Her mother died at 42. “And I was convinced I would, too, when I
reached that age. But my doctor assured me I was fit as a hoot.”
This year Paula will be 60. “I’m just delighted I survived. I still
can’t believe it. I keep reminding myself I’m only a whippersnapper.
If I glimpse myself in a mirror, it’s like, who’s that?”
She lives in Baldoyle with poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan, whose
childhood in Cork in many ways parallels her own.
“I’m eldest from a family of six, he’s the eldest of 15. He had to
take responsibility from an early age. He jokes that he became
Secretary of the Soviet of Orphans. There’s something fearless
about him. He understands people and sees something in everyone,
yet at the same time knows when to remain detached.”’
The nuns at St Michael's Holy Faith Convent didn't know what had
hit them. "They couldn't handle girls coming in from what they
would see as corporation housing. I was not compliant . . . So I
didn't last long. We were absorbing the language of protest and
reading about revolutions. I led a protest. So they threw me out.
Looking back I've a lot of sympathy for them having to put up with
us. It must have been a culture shock for them. But for us it was a
sense that we had a right to education."
She studied for the Inter Cert by herself and went to vocational
school for the Leaving Cert, which got her into Trinity College.
"I wasn't a good student. I just did the things I wanted to do.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin taught me etymology, the history of words
and sounds. I couldn't wait to get to Greece listening to WB
Stanford, a great classicist. I'd skip lectures for street theatre
with Jim and Peter Sheridan, Neil Jordan, Garret Keogh and Suzie
Kennedy.
She dropped out for a year, hitching to Crete "to walk in the
landscape that gave rise to the ancient myths, to stand in the cave
where Zeus was born". This sense of the past in the present, the
living myth embedded in landscape, fed into to her memory poetry.
It was enhanced when a scholarship brought her to America to
study for an MA in creative writing with James McAuley and the
Beat poet Gary Snyder.
“The northwest was a vital place for poetry. It had only been
settled 100 years before. Looking back through the stories of the
indigenous population gave me a new take on our own early culture,
which was also full of stories and songs about hunting and fishing.”
Dublin now seemed to her "a haunted city, haunted not just by my
own childhood but through the architecture by all the people who
had lived before." Kevin Byrne, who remembered her poems from a
John McGahern workshop, published her first collection Return and
No Blame at Beaver Row Press in 1984, an eye-grabbing debut from
the very first page:
Tom Murphy wrote a wonderful letter which she read and read until
it was in shreds. "That galvanised me. Feck it, I thought, I'm going
to stand up for the word."
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