Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two November-December 2024
The Kind Of Poetry I Want, guest editorial by Thomas McCarthy.

These are bad times. These are bad times for the sensitive and for the poet. These are bad times for the innocent. If the 24-hour news cycle – CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC News – with its terrible images of Gaza slaughter, its terrible images of kidnapped young Israelis, its terrible images of occupation in Ukraine, its terrible images of wholesale hidden slaughter in Sudan, has not sent us into a tailspin of despair, then we must be heartless or idiots, or both. Our souls are blood-stained and the soul of mankind is diminished. This is the terrible world we live in.
All the moral authority of the UN seems to mean nothing anymore: no tyrant gives a damn about UN Resolutions or Security Council observations. Anarchy is let loose upon the world. Only the Arms Industry is smiling and munitions factories across the world have gone into frantic over-drive. This has to be the wrong kind of Roaring Twenties that we’ve inherited. It is everything we did not expect as the Waterford crystal ball fell on the night of December 31st 2019. We didn’t deserve this, the world didn’t deserve this. If the 1920s descended into Fascism then our 2020s have descended into an unimaginable, heartless brutality.
On that December night of 2019 I dusted down my copy of ‘Cocktails: How to Mix Them’ by ‘Robert’ of the Embassy Club, published by Herbert Jenkins in 1922. It had been a gift to me from Brigadier FitzGerald’s housekeeper at his apartment in Stack House, Ebury Street. I was checking the recipe for ‘Side-Car’ a lovely cocktail of Cointreau, Cognac and lemon juice, a mix that had been introduced to London by the barman McGarry at the Buck’s Club.
Earlier that year I’d had a sample of that drink mixed perfectly at the ‘Monte Carlo’ in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was dining with that true Irish-American friend of Ireland, Peg Flanagan. Peg, a graduate of Macalester College, was the proud possessor of several ‘Republican Bonds’ that her grandfather had bought in Michigan in the very early Twenties. So we were kind of celebrating a revolutionary Centenary in our luxury, untroubled American manner. At that luncheon we were confident that the Twenties would be marvellous, a feeling that I’d shared earlier with poets Lani O’Hanlon and Virginia Brownlow in the drawing-room of Molly Keane’s house in Ardmore, Co. Waterford. At that house in that summer we’d been trying to anticipate the kind of celebratory, affirmative poems we might begin to write.
But now we are back in the bad times: our Twenties are shattered with little hope that any of us will see an end to this shattering of the world. An adjustment is no doubt required in the world of poetry. A new kind of poetry is wanted, or at least a more alert poetry. Where should poets look for new mentors? Should we now be ‘refusing to sanction/ The irresponsible lyricism in which sense impressions/ Are employed to substitute ecstasy for information,/ Knowing that feeling, warm heart-felt feeling,/ Is always banal and futile’ as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote. For McDiarmid (1892-1978), a committed Communist, son of a country-postman, there was no escape from the responsibilities of poetry. Thought implied commitment and conscience demanded Communism. He continues with that provocative, challenging poem ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ in this manner:
‘Only the irritations and icy ecstasies
Of the artist’s corrupted nervous system
Are artistic – the very gift of style, of form and expression,
Is nothing else than this cool and fastidious attitude
Towards humanity. The artist is happiest
With an idea which can become
All emotion, and an emotion all idea.
A poetry that takes its polish from a conflict
Between discipline at its most strenuous
And feeling at its highest – wherein abrasive surfaces
Are turned upon one another like millstones,
And instead of generating chaos
Refine the grist of experience between them.
‘Grist’ is such an interesting word here, ‘grist’ meaning grain that has been ground between stones; hence the ‘grist-mill’ marked on so many ancient maps. What is broken down, what is harrowing, must be turned to flour. Bread has to be made out of suffering, this is MacDiarmid’s key message. A new poetry can emerge from a harrowing, abrasive disorder. In Ireland, as in Asia, we are far away from the destruction of Gaza. But we are not a disinterested party, not in Ireland anyway, because we’ve sent a battalion or half battalion of troops each year for forty years to man the ‘Blue Zone’ between Lebanon and Israel.
This constant UN deployment of Irish troops has given Irish people a sense of belonging to a conflict elsewhere, a sense of being responsible, however tangentially. This is why Ireland must seem weirdly ‘interfering,’ this silly little country as small and ineffective as a bunch of poets assembled in front of a battle-tank. I mean, what can you do, what can anyone do? But powerlessness propels us into urgent poetry.
Poetry abhors suffering, it rages without power against suffering. The long suffering of the industrial working-class of Glasgow was what really enraged the Communist Hugh MacDiarmid; the long suffering of Gaza is what enrages all sentient beings, not just Muslims throughout the world. But I would go further than this, it is human suffering, even more than political injustice, that makes the blood of poetry boil. Poetry gets close, really close, to the human experience. In this it is like nothing else. It is not a political programme, it is more: more holistic, intimate, humane. Poetry holds hands in a pitiful, Zen-like gesture. Its power, though, is in its ability to witness. As witness, it is unbeatable.

I was reminded of the unbeatable witness of poetry this year as I watched powerful literary work being published about the ‘conflict’ in Gaza, a heart-rending poetry that describes HE blast-bombs, ruined hospitals, dead doctors, murdered aid-workers, heroic ambulance drivers, resourceful, starving mothers. In all of this year, two poems from the Irish anthology of pity stand out for me, two immortal poems that are the bread of life from the grist-mill of Gaza.
The first of these poems is simply called ‘Gaza’ published as the Saturday feature poem in the Irish Times on June 29th this year. I can’t quote it all because I don’t have the poet’s permission to do so. The poet is Eoin McNamee, now Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College, Dublin, a poet whose novel, The Bureau, will be published in March 2025. The poem is about the slaughter of the innocents, but at its core is a local Irish Saint, St. Eunan, who lived in the Seventh Century.
This saint belonged to the poet’s townland and the poet, watching the suffering of Gaza, is reminded that his local saint is most famous for an important Seventh Century text Lex Innocentium. St. Eunan had walked the battlefield after a great slaughter in Ireland and saw a dead child attached to its dead mother’s breast ‘White milk on one cheek, blood on another.’ The sight of this horror stimulated the old saint to write a famous Gaelic law, The Law of the Innocents:
‘This witness led him to set forfeits
For the killing of women and children in war.
This witness led him to set law about them.
The well water is black at sunset this time of year
In this country of the west, of gull and kestrel.
In this cold country of eel and swan
This is the saint’s well which is for all time law.’
(Eoin McNamee)
The whole is an astonishing poem, and to come upon it casually in the Saturday page of a daily newspaper while I sat drinking coffee in a shopping-mall was to be restored to an immortal humanity. The whole moral force of the world folded itself about me and lifted me up. This text made my soul soar to the heavens, it seemed to make the dead walk across the café floor.
The second Gaza poem is, I can say with confidence, a poem in two thousand. It is the winner of the Seán Dunne Poetry Prize organised this year by the Lafcadio Hearn Gardens in Ardmore, Co. Waterford. I was the sole judge of this competition where I read nearly two thousand poems submitted from all over Ireland. There were many fine poems submitted to this competition; and indeed an impressive number of Gaza poems some of which made it into to the Commended and Highly Commended categories.
This winning poem is called ‘Seeds are not Numbers’ and it was written by poet Giada Gelli, an Italian poet writing in English, a librarian who has lived in Ireland for many years. The poem is written in memory of the Palestinian poet and Professor Dr. Refaat Alareer who was murdered along with his family in the Gaza bombings. After the young poet quotes the Palestinian activist Arrigoni ‘Gaza, Stay Human: Restiamo Umani’ she continues:
‘Kind Rafaat,
lend us your knowledge
of context and history, of poetry and literature,
of how power oft strives to be rid of the likes of us,
but forgets that we are seeds and, sure enough,
seeds will always sprout back.’
The poem is filled with resilience and pride, and the hope that one day the poet Rafaat may rise again, and that his strawberry fields, too, may fruit again someday. Here the direct humanity of poetry is at play, poetry as witness, poetry as memory-keeper and poetry as fortune-teller. For, the poet implies, everything will be as it once was if Palestinians hold their humanity: restiamo humani.

But let us remain human. The suffering that poetry abhors is everywhere, universal and merciless. Poetry does demand the entirety of the witness, this is poetry’s imperative and it can sometimes be awkward and inconvenient. Nearly six months before Eoin McNamee published his wonderful Gaza poem in the Irish Times and seven months before I read Giada Gelli’s masterpiece, I was sitting in another café, on New York’s Upper Westside where a light snow had begun to pepper down.
The snow was falling on all these posters, posted everywhere, with the word KIDNAPPED boldly printed above an assemblage of tiny photographs of beautiful young people. The young people in the photographs were missing Israelis, youngsters who’d gone to a Music Festival and been kidnapped by Hamas that very October. These youngsters stared in the window at me as I drank my coffee and tried to read the New York Times. That evening I was alone in my hostel room listening to the frantic piano-playing of a young person in a room next door.
At six am the following morning the same frantic keyboard-piano playing began again, for two and a half hours. The playing was interspersed with tense phone conversations; a young woman was obviously getting last-minute coaching over the phone. The hostel I was staying in was quite close to the famous Juilliard School. It occurred to me that the pianist must be practising for an audition, perhaps an audition for entry to Juilliard. As I listened to her playing I wrote this poem:
Kidnapped
Perhaps a candidate with hopes of Juilliard,
A girl called Tamar, or Sapir, or Noa,
Each with a place in a New York conservatoire.
I stand transfixed at this coffee-stall
On West 80th, wanting more than anything
To bring them home. Is there anything
More loving than music, anything more
Lovely than a festival in the sun. Remember
Pearled Sheila Goldberg holding the piano hands
Of Mr. Charles Lynch, her loving kindness?
When you think unbearably of the young
Detained in small rooms, no room service
At this hour in a strange place, the sound
Of a piano coming through from another room;
The full round bowls of ivory notes
Shuffled against the dawn like so many
Glasses snapped against a silver rack
In that Irish bar last night. We are so close
To Juilliard it must be a young woman practising
For her third audition. I can feel the anxiety
In her fingers. Just imagine a daughter repeating
Scales, a proud father, an anxious mother.
The poem came at once: ‘a proud father, an anxious mother’ was the phrase that came to me first, but I put it at the end of the page in my notebook, knowing that there were words to come before that. By the time I’d made a fresh coffee and found a discarded half-bagel from Zabar’s Café, I had all the other words. I got up and went outside and walked along Columbus Avenue, the one street in New York that still can’t make up its mind. I kept wandering and the light snow kept falling as I turned cross-town, eventually walking down Madison Avenue where I stopped at a gallery window where a magnificent Chagall watercolour was displayed on an easel.
I remained so long staring at the artwork and its almost equally impressive golden frame, that an elderly gallery employee came outside and invited me in to take a closer look. We soon fell into conversation, about Norah McGuinness and Jack B. Yeats, both of whose works the gallery had sold during the year. I admitted I couldn’t afford a Chagall, but the curator invited me to the back of his shop, to see the other Chagall lithographs, the Sean Scully oils, the de Kooning prints that lay on the floor against a wall lined with hessian. Inevitably, via Chagall and Avigdor Arikha, we discussed Ireland and Irish life, and Ireland and Israel.
The gentleman had bought and read David Marcus’s A Land Not Theirs in the mid 1980s, so he was aware of Ireland’s small Jewish community, made famous in the literary world by the character of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. And we regretted then that none of these things seemed to matter anymore as relations have become so bad between Ireland and Israel. We shook hands as I left the gallery and I walked away and marvelled at the sadness of this world that divides people; marvelled too at how frail cultural connections really are.
Days later I returned to Ireland from New York. It was like returning from Israel to Gaza: mentally it was that stark. I was returning to an Irish city, Cork, that had been burned to the ground by British Crown Forces in December 1920 in an act of revenge and grand military looting by the forces of Occupation. The Irish government and the entire Irish population were by then traumatised and depressed by the wanton destruction of Gaza. About a fortnight after I’d returned to Ireland, the Hostages and Missing Persons Forum in Israel revealed that a young art student at the University of Haifa had been murdered in captivity. She had been kidnapped by Hamas at that Supernova Music Festival on October 7th. Almost immediately, sitting in a Costa café by the banks of the river Lee in Cork I wrote this other small poem:
In Memory Of Inbar Haiman
I’m thinking only of you, darling Inbar Haiman,
Of the visual things you must have kept
Inside: how you would have communicated
Suffering in the poetry of your images. This dated
Report of your passing brings home the inept
Powers of being beautiful and being young –
You just twenty-eight, long hair turned to the sun,
Your heart so in love with Israel. Dear child,
Dear much-loved one, rubble closes over you
In bloody terror on this night of a harvest moon.
Where do you go with such texts? Why do they get written when more direct and urgently political poetry is what this ruined world needs? Poets live in a parallel permanence, sometimes they are elsewhere. I have no doubt about this, yet I am not interested in a mere ‘faults on both sides’ idea of this Mid East conflict, any more than committed activists are interested in such observations.
The conflict is too a-symmetrical. It occurs to me now that I might just as easily and spontaneously have written such a poem for the dead poet Dr. Refaat Alareer. My feeling for the tragedy of both deaths is equal. In hell there is no pecking order and in the persistent hell of this conflict there is no one loss more important than another.
My poems of Palestine will come too, of that I’ve no doubt, but they may never be the equal of what Eoin McNamee and Giada Gelli have already written. You are not ready to write until you are ready to write from the heart. And I will yet write such poems from the heart too, as McNamee and Gelli have done. A feeling of love attaches us to all victims and such attachment is a powerful virtue in every work of literature.
What do poets want, then? I mean what do poets want in the current situation of which we are all fully informed witnesses? For certain, we must remain steadfast as attached witnesses, as Saint Eunan was a witness to the grief of a silenced battlefield in ancient Ireland. What a poet should want, therefore, is very simple. Simple: Hamas hand over those hostages, Israel stop the bombings. Is that not simple? Yes. Yes, it is. Truly, for now and for the future, this is the kind of poetry I want.
© Thomas McCarthy
Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork. He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing programme, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published The First Convention (1978), The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996), Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (2009) as well as a number of other collections.
He has also published two novels and a memoir. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review.
He has also conducted poetry workshops at Listowel Writers’ Week, Molly Keane House, Arvon Foundation and Portlaoise Prison (Provisional IRA Wing). He is a member of Aosdana. His collections, Pandemonium and Prophecy, were published by Carcanet in 2016 and 2019. Last year Gallery Press, Ireland, published his sold-out journals, Poetry, Memory and the Party. Gallery Press published his essays Questioning Ireland in September of this year.; and Carcanet will publish a new collection, Plenitude, in 2025.