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  • An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts

University of Nebraska Press

  • Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009
  • University of Nebraska Press

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  • Text and Context: Paula Meehan
  • Jody Allen Randolph (bio)

This special issue celebrates and critiques the work of one of the most remarkable contemporary Irish poets. Over the past quarter century, through six volumes of poetry and eight plays, Paula Meehan has uncovered a terrain unique to her vision: lyric, dramatic, committed, and communal. The essays and interview featured in this issue clarify the extent of that vision by tracking Paul Meehan's poetic choices, her playwriting, and the social and ethical commitments that underlie both.

And just as her poems are unique, so is her story. As the essays here show, Meehan found her world by displacing it. As a young Irish poet she left Ireland and traveled to the United States. She immersed herself in counter-cultural aesthetics, seeking out new narratives of Buddhism, neo-shamanism, bioregional ethics, and holistic healing. By so doing, she began her life as a poet by making profoundly original connections between Irish poetry and non-Irish influences, and positioning herself within them.

Meehan's early work shows her continuing these multiple displacements: of city by suburb, of culture by counterculture, of Catholicism by Buddhism, of home by away. The deliberate estrangement of these encounters is eloquently described in this issue by another poet: "Meehan appears in her own early poems like some gypsy wanderer," writes Mary O'Malley, "with a gold ring, a sheaf of poems and the world her rightful oyster." Meehan's later work is acclaimed for its sense of place. But a closer look shows that a rich and inventive displacement within it has continued. [End Page 5]

A small inventory of biographical critical detail is in order here: Meehan was born in 1955 into an inner-city, working-class community on Dublin's north side. Displaced as an older child to suburban Finglas in 1968, she witnessed the break-up of her community as inner-city tenements were cleared for development. Meehan was educated at Trinity College Dublin between 1972 and 1977, where her subjects were English history and classical civilization. While there she became deeply interested in street theater, first as a costuming assistant with the Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), and later as a member of the Children's T. Company. Meehan went on to earn an MFA in the US at Eastern Washington University (1981–83), where she attended workshops with number of American writers, including Gary Snyder. In Washington she laid the groundwork for her first two volumes of poetry, Return and No Blame and Reading the Sky , published in Dublin in the mid-1980s.

In the opening sequence of Return and No Blame ( 1984 ), Meehan's signature mix of lyric and dramatic modes is already apparent. The empty tenement returned to in memory, with its "fishbones," "mouldy crusts," and "abandoned kitchens," is haunted by voices of a community long vanished (8). In Reading the Sky ( 1985 ), poems set in Dublin alternate with poems set in American landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, where a "B52 bomber roar[ing] over . . . is as much a part of this lake / as those pines" (15). Poems that night walk through Dublin or climb to dangerous creeks in the mountains of Oregon are joined in Meehan's next two books— The Man Who Was Marked by Winter ( 1991 ) and Pillow Talk ( 1994 )—by poems set in "three wild rushy acres" in Leitrim where Meehan made her home between 1985 and 1989. Moving between barn and garden, these poems are held together with "blue baling twine," "chicken wire" (58), and "some forgotten lupins . . . holding in their fingers a raindrop each" (63), and darker images of "the twisty road that led away" from a troubled marriage (44).

Returning to Dublin in 1990, Meehan met poet Theo Dorgan, and the couple made their home on Merrion Square. When Merrion Square was developed a decade later, they settled in the northside suburb of Baldoyle. In Dharmakaya ( 2000 ), published during that transition, the back streets and river of Meehan's city sequences find a new hinterland in the seven-poem sequence "Suburb." In her most recent volume, Painting Rain ( 2009 ), written during the rapid-fire displacements of the boom years, city and suburb return. The central sequence "Six Sycamores" watches Stephen's Green, as if through time-lapse photography, transform from a prehuman landscape through Augustan grandeur to the text-messaging present. In "Death of a Field," a poem set in a suburban building site becomes an elegy for communal losses during the boom years. [End Page 6]

In the mid-1990s, Meehan's plays were first produced. Five have been published over the past decade. Mrs Sweeney ( 1999 ), Cell ( 2000 ), and Music for Dogs: Work For Radio (including Janey Mack is Going to Die, The Lover , and Three Hander ) in 2008. Her most recent play, The Wolf of Winter , was staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2003. These biographical details, added to the history provided by the bibliography in this issue, point to a new story in Irish poetry, a story of a poet coming into an original trajectory by integrating a variety of aesthetics, influences, and genres.

A child of an inner-city working-class culture steeped in a rich oral tradition of storytelling and song, Meehan came into her voice through an unlikely complication of that heritage. First on the street corners of Finglas and later in America, she immersed herself in a mid-century counterculture that was ending as she entered it. The American poet Gary Snyder became an early and profound intellectual influence. His regard for the natural world, his sense of community, his ecological activism, and Zen discipline all spoke to the emerging Irish poet.

In particular, Snyder's formulation of the poet's vocation as shamanic dreamer, healer, and myth handler for the tribe became a guiding principle by which to resist aspects of Irish culture that were oppressive. It is clear, looking at certain poems, that Snyder's influence was instrumental in Meehan's literary resistance to what John Banville recently referred to, in his description of the Ireland of those years, as "a closed state."

However, to argue that a North American counter cultural aesthetic displaced Meehan's Irish poetic heritage would be misguided. It is important, as several critics recognize here, to locate Meehan in a new space. She can be found at an intersection of counter cultural ideas and Irish lyric tradition. Her insight into the role of pre-Christian Irish bards, or fili , and her interpretation of contemporary poetic ethics are enriched, but never erased, by her early American encounters.

In Ireland, other voices added to her influences. In an interview featured in this issue (pp. 239–71) Meehan remarks, "Eavan Boland gave a very practical and powerful example of how to integrate what was outside the poem, and troubling it, with the poem itself. Her way of making certainly, but especially her articulation of the pressures she came under as a young poet has been a huge influence." At first glance, the discovery of Boland's voice after Snyder's seems unlikely; but with a closer look, perhaps not so much. Although profoundly different as poets, they can be easily associated [End Page 7] as exemplars. Both Snyder and Boland were poetic outsiders. Despite the distance between a California wilderness and a Dublin suburb, both were involved in restating community within their poems and realigning a poetic voice with it. Just as Meehan carefully absorbed Snyder's vision, it's clear that the young Meehan of "Caesarean Section in a Belfast Street" has studied Boland's "Child of Our Time"; the women of "The Apprentice" and "Not Your Muse" have older cousins in Boland's tirades to epic and lyric muses; and the images of domestic ambivalence and entrapment in "Journeys to My Sister's Kitchen" have precedents in "Monotony" and "Woman in Kitchen."

However, there the likeness ends. As Eric Falci argues in this issue (233), Meehan's stanzaic forms "in part derive from Boland's, but to quite different ends and effects." A similar independence governs her absorption of Snyder. Meehan's poems may reference breath and speech patterns gleaned from the American poet, but her formal choices are markedly different. While Snyder rarely uses intentional rhyme or conventional meters, Meehan has worked with a range of traditional stanzas and poetic forms, including rhymed couplets, tercets, villanelle, sestina, and most frequently the sonnet. As Falci observes, "both the 'well-made' poem that typifies much of the Irish tradition and the more loosely shaped poem that is indebted to contemporary American poetics are represented in her body of work" (230). But importantly, neither can account for the extraordinarily original use of a revivified public poem in Meehan's signature work, which neither Snyder nor Boland could or would have attempted.

One of the real excitements of Meehan's emergence over the past two decades is how little it could have been predicted. When Thomas McCarthy describes her voice as "unexpected and unheralded" he articulates the element of surprise. Her first book, he writes, fell on Irish poetry "like an LP from Motown Detroit."

But with the surprise comes the challenge. It is not only hard to locate Meehan within Irish poetry; it is also not easy to see how she located Irish poetry as she was finding her voice. The poets who surrounded her in the 1980s were committed, political, visible. In the North, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley were making powerful political statements in their work and nearer her generation, Paul Muldoon. By the 1980s and 1990s, a path-breaking generation of women poets had also come forward: Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, [End Page 8] and Medbh McGuckian. Their books, their voices redefined Irish poetry, occasionally causing controversy, but increasingly stabilizing a new register of subject matter and tone, and adding to perceptions of what the Irish poem could achieve.

Whether it can be argued that Meehan herself was directly enabled by this new emergence is open to debate. But the reader of Meehan clearly is. For that reader, it is nothing but illuminating to look at "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks" in light of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's "The Sister." Or to see "Death of a Field" in light of Medbh McGuckian's "The Flitting." Or to look at "The Pattern" in terms of Eavan Boland's "The Pomegranate." Or to reread "The Trapped Woman of the Internet" in terms of Boland's "Time and Violence."

One of the difficulties in aligning her with these and other poets lies in the sort of poem she writes. Although it would be tempting to put Meehan in the company of women poets, the public poem she developed is clearly different and stands apart. Meehan was certainly interested in the interplay of oppression and freedom in the daily lives of women:

First she'd scrub the floor with Sunlight soap, an arm reach at a time. When her knees grew sore she'd break for a cup of tea, then start again at the door with lavender polish. The smell would percolate back through the flat to us, her brood banished to the bedroom. And as she buffed the wax to a high shine did she catch her own face coming clear? Did she net a glimmer of her true self? Did her mirror tell what mine tells me? I have her shrug and go on knowing history has brought her to her knees. She'd call us in and let us skate around in our socks. We'd grow solemn as planets in an intricate orbit around her. ( The Man Who Was Marked by Winter 17–18 ).

However, Meehan's interest in the subject, unlike that of the generation of women poets before her, is a continuum rather than a crisis. It was already familiar to her as a countercultural goal before it entered a feminist vision. [End Page 9] As she explained in our interview for this special issue, "through my early engagements with Connolly, Sinn Fein, [and the] workers' movements, I would have been . . . galvanized by the idea of the brotherhood of man . . . [as] a revelation and energizing force." And, as she goes on to explain, it was the politics of liberation of poets like Snyder "that prepared me to hear the powerful arguments that feminism was to put at my disposal."

Also unlike the previous generation of women poets, Meehan does not breed her revelations in a private space. She does not define a self which is aware and menaced by self-awareness, as the speaker is in McGuckian's "The Flitting." Nor does she allow for the inwardness of the mother's voice in Boland's "The Pomegranate." She is clearly interested in a public poem that can galvanize a community, precisely because it offers a shareable version of the events that matter to, and the wounds that have occurred in, that same community.

The power of this public poem comes from the reader's sense that the poet is also discovering something hidden, something concealed by shame and dereliction. This is the public poem in its old role of conscience and clarifier, of scourge and minister to hypocrisy and self-deception. Given the strengths of the political poem in the 1970s and 1980s—in say Heaney's "Punishment," Longley's "Wounds," or Boland's "The War Horse"—it might also seem tempting to see Meehan's public poems as descending from prior accomplishments. But looked at closely, hers is not the political poem as we know it, not a private leverage of the public situation, but a public perspective from the start. It is closer, in this way, to "September 1913" by Yeats, with its social and historical critique. It bears a family resemblance to the projects of both "The Great Hunger" by Kavanagh, and "Butcher's Dozen" by Kinsella—both poems with a considerable J'accuse .

The signature public poems we see first in pieces like "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks," "Woman Found Dead Behind Salvation Army Hostel," and later in "Death of a Field" keep this project consistently ahead of them. As Andrew Auge points out, the intervention of "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks" into the public "cultural crisis of the prior decade, triggered by the fierce legislative battles on contraception, divorce, and abortion; the tragic cases of Anne Lovett and Joanna Hayes; and the 'moving statues' phenomenon has been frequently acknowledged."

In the 1980s, at a time when the Northern poets were revising their poetic stances toward a private invigilation of a public history, Meehan was moving toward a more communal stance and vision, the first growth of which Katarzyna Poloczek charts here. In "It Is All I Ever Wanted" Meehan [End Page 10] describes that vision: "to hold in these hands / that have learnt to be soothing /my native city, its hinterland" (61). The result is that in a hybrid space between North American counterculture and the Irish lyric, between developments in Northern poetry and women's poetry, between choices of genre in lyric and drama, Meehan has developed a compelling and original public voice that returns the Irish poem unashamedly to old loyalties of origin and community.

The enthusiasm and excitement generated by publication of this special issue largely stem from providing a forum in which the conversations Paula Meehan's work have started can be continued and elaborated on more fully. Many of the essays presented in this issue are scholarly and exacting commentaries. But they also show a relish for the craft, the subject matter, for the poem of place and the placing of the poem, as well as Meehan's reach into drama.

Some articles here are intimate and evocative. As Thomas McCarthy writes of Meehan's subjects: "The garden, the kitchen, the cobbled Dublin street: each is a metaphor surely, an image for the sociologist or critic to juggle with; but each is a lived place, an architecture built up around a set of very personal experiences or memories." This perception is lyrically compressed in Brendan Kennelly's words, "Her city is streets and people / not out there / but in her heart." And then suddenly expanded again into this evocation by Ciaran Carson: "I hear you read your poems aloud and your feet keeping counterpoint to their music untwining the lines widdershins." And expanded once more, as Gary Snyder propels us into the deep time of a North American future where "Thousand-year later wealthy Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers" will not find our wood houses, but instead, "oak and pine."

Many of the richest conversations here revolve around Meehan's growing reputation as a poet of place, and the way that has been mediated by both class and gender. In an insightful essay, Luz Mar González Arias explores how by "fitting each surprising / city street to city square to diamond," Meehan's work elaborates on a previous cartography. It becomes "a necessary layer in the textual palimpsest of Dublin" constructed by Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey, Kinsella, and Boland. By inscribing the voices of her Dublin—ordinary, female, and working class—onto the existing literary map, Meehan's poems become artifacts of cultural memory in the archive of a continually disappearing city. [End Page 11]

In her 1999 play Cell , Meehan's working-class women look out from their prison cell on another vanishing city, the much heralded New Ireland of the recently departed "Celtic tiger" economy. From her cell window, Lila can see a moon, a weeping willow at the end of a back garden, and "the top-half of a lamppost with the election post with your woman's face on it . . . wait a minute . . . A New Ireland. Forward to . . . something. I can't make it out. I wish I could see more of the garden" (20). As Kathryn Kirk-patrick has commented elsewhere, "Mary Robinson's New Ireland is as hidden from her as Eden itself." From her position as an imprisoned working-class woman, "she cannot even envision such a place, much less participate in it." Kim McMullen further elaborates on this notion in her essay on Meehan's stage plays and radio monologues: "the trauma and disenfranchisement that preoccupy Meehan in her plays can be seen not simply as the struggles of certain Irish men and women whom the boom has yet to reach, but rather as part of the boom's damaging—if unintended—social consequences."

Meehan's sense of place as mediated by unequal access and environmental injustice extends beyond human boundaries to plants and animals. Returning to Meehan's grounding in countercultural and bioregional ethics, Kirkpatrick suggests that her narrators engage in a "strategic animism . . . [that] retrieves animals and plants from the margins" to reopen "a dialogue with an animate non-human realm still embraced by indigenous cultures." Both Meehan and Snyder, she explains, advocate "a change of consciousness and a shift in paradigm [that] require[s] intelligent retrievals and artful appropriations of alternative cosmologies." Jefferson Holdridge describes a parallel shift in Painting Rain : "Meehan as poet is not there to let poetry work its magic in unison with nature, as she was in Dharmakaya , but rather to let nature work its magic on her so that she becomes the voice of what will soon be absent."

In several essays, Meehan's interest in the poet's vocation as dreamer, healer, and memory-maker for the tribe is explored. Michaela Schrage-Früh's analysis of the healing power of dreams in Meehan's work and Lucy Collins's essay on the tribal role of memory to heal and integrate individual and collective pasts are groundbreaking studies of Meehan's applications to an Irish context of countercultural staples like dreams and the unconscious. Anne Mulhall's essay is another. Here Meehan's work becomes an aesthetic space of transformative potential, where "originary archaic space[es] of connection" can be shared as collective, familial, and personal memory, conscious and unconscious, are shaped into occasions for transformation. Dreams, the unconscious, healing, transformation are all local [End Page 12] inflections that extend outward, as several contributors point out, to a global consciousness of the poet's vocation. Even her most local social commitments, Pilar Villar-Argáiz suggests, are driven by an ethical "globalist impulse" that sets Meehan apart in Irish poetry.

As Meehan's ethical commitments set her apart, so do her formal choices. Her signature "alloy of drama and lyric," as Boland describes it, is explored by several contributors. Describing in our interview how her recent sequence "Six Sycamores" integrates six short monologues with the lyric compression of six sonnets, Meehan says, "I wanted to get a conversation between the casual throw away vernacular of the little pieces and the more tightly wrapped language and ritualized energy of the sonnets." Describing a similar process in Meehan's plays, Eileen Denn Jackson explains how "by juxtaposing colloquial dialogue with a more formal prosody, Meehan hones an original "dramatic lyricism" into a richly sonic art.

In shaping open forms like the elegy, as well as closed metrical forms like the sonnet, Meehan refreshes the communal purposes of the Irish lyric. Máirín Nic Eoin's Irish translations of Meehan's elegies make this clear, as do the originals. Associating Meehan's elegies with Irish oral culture in the form of the caoineadh , Anne Fogarty draws on Angela Bourke to connect Meehan to a tradition of women's lament calling mourners' emotion into full expression and catharsis. As contemporary elegist, Fogarty observes, Meehan not only "give[s] contour to subjective reality," but she also "assumes a more impersonal and urgent role as an expressive commentator on, and visionary hierophant for, communal experience and social change and dislocation."

What the formal choices, influences, ethical commitments, displacements, and inheritances tracked in this special issue reveal is both expected and unexpected: that this inheritor of Yeats and O'Casey, observer of Snyder and Boland, contemporary of Northern poets and women poets, is standing in her own original space. By repositioning her voice in the Irish poem as dramatic and lyric, communal and committed, she forces a fresh look at the established categories. In Plays like Cell and poems as different as "The Pattern," "Child Burial," "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks," and "Death of a Field," we see the work of a poet whose voices have led her forward into a broad restatement of the role of the poet in the context of Irish poetry. The possibility that the communal and creative can coexist, with neither limiting the other, is what emerges from her courageous, dominant stance. Yet her voice remains, for all its communality, a solitary one. This issue leaves her there, original and alone, defining the new space she has provided in Irish poetry. [End Page 13]

Jody Allen Randolph, guest editor of this issue, served as Assistant Dean of the British Studies at Oxford Programme at St. John's College, Oxford, and has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, University College Dublin, and Westmont College. She has edited or co-edited special issues of journals on Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley. Recent publications include Eavan Boland: A Sourcebook (Carcanet, 2007), selected for a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and the London Independent Best Books of 2007, and Eavan Boland: A Critical Companion (Norton, 2008). She is currently at work on Interviews from a New Ireland , a series of interviews with Irish writers and visual artists forthcoming from Carcanet Press in 2010.

Works Cited

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Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to the following: Pat Boran at Dedalus Press for permission to quote from Cell ; Peter Fallon at Gallery Press for permission to reprint "Child Burial" and "Elegy for a Child" and for permission to quote from The Man Who Was Marked by Winter and Pillow Talk ; Jefferson Holdridge at Wake Forest University Press for permission to quote from Dharmakaya and Painting Rain and for streamlining the permissions process; Paula Meehan [End Page 15] for permission to quote from Reading the Sky, Return and No Blame , and unpublished plays.

Many contributors to this special issue, myself included, are indebted to our stellar team of research assistants: Sarah Groeneveld at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Jennifer Lorden at Keble College, Oxford; Shonagh Hill at Queen's University, Belfast, and Anna Chase Jordan in Santa Barbara, California. I am indebted also to Anne Karhio at National University of Ireland, Galway, who worked as a research associate on the bibliography and special issue. Thanks are due to filmmaker Elaine Crowley at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, whose diligent research filled out the broadcast section of the bibliography and who shared with us her film documentary, Paula Meehan: Living the Craft , while it was in its early stages. I'd like to thank Luz Mar González Arias for her constructive support on the project from beginning to end. I would also like to thank Judy Gilats for her guidance in seeing the journal production through to completion, Jim Leonard for his careful editing, and David Gardiner both for his support as editor and for making the project possible. I am grateful to Paula Meehan and Theo Dorgan for their patience and generosity in answering queries. [End Page 16]

Next Article

Unfinished Business: The Communal Art of Paula Meehan

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Home   ›   New Releases   ›  Poem of the Week: “The Exact Moment I Became a Poet” by Paula M...

Wake: Up to Poetry

Poem of the week: “the exact moment i became a poet” by paula meehan.

Paula’s Meehan’s “The Exact Moment I Became a Poet” recounts the injurious, if inspiring, tale of when the poet as a child first understood the emotional gravity that words contain. First printed in Meehan’s fifth volume Dharmakaya , the poem is reprinted in Meehan’s most new selected poems, As If By Magic.  The collection, encompassing Meehan’s works over the past three decades, illuminates Meehan’s compelling talent and artistic legacy within contemporary Irish poetry. Meehan has held the esteemed position of the Ireland Chair of Poetry for her uniquely feminist voice and poetry capturing working-class Ireland.

"The Exact Moment I Became a Poet" by Paula Meehan

The Exact Moment I Became a Poet

      for Kay Foran 

was in 1963 when Miss Shannon rapping the duster on the easel’s peg half obscured by a cloud of chalk

said Attend to your books, girls, or mark my words, you’ll end up  in the sewing factory. 

It wasn’t just that some of the girls’ mothers worked in the sewing factory or even that my own aunt did,

and many neighbours, but that those words ‘end up’ robbed the labour of its dignity.

Not that I knew it then, not in those words—labour, dignity. That’s all back construction,

making sense; allowing also the teacher was right and no one knows it like I do myself.

But: I saw them: mothers, aunts and neighbours trussed like chickens on a conveyor belt,

getting sewn up the way my granny sewed the sage and onion stuffing in the birds.

Words could pluck you, leave you naked, your lovely shiny feathers all gone.

– Paula Meehan , from  As If By Magic: Selected Poems (2021)

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‘Poetry, memory and recovery: Paula Meehan’s transformational aesthetic’, in An Sionnach Special issue on Paula Meehan, ed. Jody Allen Randolph. 5:1&2 (June 2009): 142-155.

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Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa , julia hölzl , Bracha L. Ettinger , roula haj ismail

Sheila L Cavanagh

Much has been written about Antigone who buried her brother Polynices in Theban soil despite the prohibition issued by King Creon (her uncle) in the Sophocles tragedy. In order to understand the magnitude of Antigone’s radical act in the play by the same name I engage the scholarship of Israeli feminist psychoanalytic scholar Bracha L. Ettinger. By engaging Ettinger’s theory of the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference, I consider how ways of being in the Feminine tap into the matrixial domain, thus expanding the bounds of what counts as subjective experience in psychoanalysis. I situate Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial in relation to Lacan’s analysis of Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII). I also focus on Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘debinding’ (2010) and Judith Butler’s (2002) writing on gender and kinship disorder in the tragedy. My objective is to build upon Ettinger’s analysis of Antigone to better understand how it is not death, exactly, that is at stake in the drama, but rather the status of the Feminine dimension in the Theban city-state. If Antigone’s transgression can be understood through a matrixial lens it behooves us as feminist scholars to more fully understand the affective landscape and maternal ethics of difference enacted in the play.

poligrafi, No 65– 66/ Vol. 17, pp. 119-137

Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa , julia hölzl , roula haj ismail , Gina Rae Foster , Bracha L. Ettinger , Lenart Škof , Tadashi Ogawa

Nadia Arbelo-Brownson

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The Exact Moment I Became a Poet | Summary and Analysis

Analysis of The Exact Moment I Became a Poet by Paula Meehan

the exact moment i became a poet analysis

‘The Exact Moment I Became a Poet’ is a poem by Paula Meehan. Meehan is known for her witty and playful approach to poetry. For the first time, the young poet realized that words are extremely powerful and can cause significant psychological harm. The poem talks about how the teacher’s remark appeared to  degrade the poet’s working-class family and neighbours . The girls were warned that they might end up working in the sewing factory. Nonetheless, the poet recognizes that the teacher was correct, and she pursues education while resenting the snobbery that elevates one job over another. The poem discusses how  words can be extremely painful and expose unpleasant realities . Paula Meehan’s poetry is heavily influenced by the  complexities of family relationships . Buying Winkles and The Pattern are some of her popular poems, the analyses of which may be accessed in the link below: 

Analysis of Buying Winkles by Paula Meehan

The Exact Moment I Became a Poet | Summary and Analysis 

‘The Exact Moment I Became a Poet’ brilliantly captures a  child’s mentality . Meehan was an 8-year-old student at Central Model Girls’ School on Gardiner Street when this poem was written in 1963. Meehan describes a pivotal moment in her childhood in this poem, a time when  she first realized the power of words . She is acutely aware of  social disparities . She realized that people in her part of  Dublin’s inner city were denied the same opportunities as those in the city’s more affluent areas . The poem also touches on  women’s strength and power , which is a recurring theme in Meehan’s work.

The Exact Moment I Became a Poet, Lines 1-9

was in 1963 when Miss Shannon rapping the duster on the easel’s peg half obscured by a cloud of chalk said Attend to your books, girls, or mark my words, you’ll end up  in the sewing factory.  It wasn’t just that some of the girls’ mothers worked in the sewing factory or even that my own aunt did,

The poet brilliantly captures the  image of a typical classroom scene  – the teacher banging her duster amid a cacophony of chalk dust. Miss Shannon’s words infuriated the young poet. She describes the sewing factory as a  worthless and unappealing workplace . Some of her classmates’ mothers worked there. These classmates would undoubtedly be embarrassed if their mothers’ workplace was mentioned in this manner. Indeed, the young poet was embarrassed by the fact that her aunt, as well as a number of her neighbours, worked in the same factory. The poem brilliantly  captures the mindset of a child . Even if they lack the words to express such concepts, eight-year-old children can understand concepts like “labour” and “dignity,” according to Meehan’s poem. It also serves as a reminder that  children have exceptionally vivid imaginations , which can lead to strange and disturbing fantasies.

The Exact Moment I Became a Poet, Lines 10-18

and many neighbours, but that those words ‘end up’ robbed the labour of its dignity. Not that I knew it then, not in those words—labour, dignity. That’s all back construction, making sense; allowing also the teacher was right and no one knows it like I do myself.

Miss Shannon’s use of the phrase ‘end up’ particularly irritated the young poet. She realized that this phrase implied an unfavourable outcome. It implied that those who worked in the sewing factory were  failures in life . They are stuck in low-paying, meaningless jobs that no one wants to do. However, the young poet believes that the  sewing factory’s ‘labour’ has its own ‘dignity .’ She must have realized that, while not glamorous or well-paid, this work was important in its own right. She must have witnessed that the factory’s women took great pride in what they did, producing well-made, long-lasting garments. Miss Shannon’s words had  robbed the women of their “dignity ” by making their “labour” seem completely pointless and menial, she realized. The poet admits that she’s doing ‘back construction,’ that she’s  reconstructing a memory . She uses words like ‘dignity’ and ‘labour’ when she was eight years old. The poet admits that when she was eight years old, she had no idea what these terms meant. She did, however, have a basic understanding of the emotions and concepts that these terms refer to.

Not that I knew it then,

not in those words—labour, dignity.

The poem also touches on the themes of  women’s strength and power . She reminds us that in the 1950s and 1960s inner-city Dublin,  working women  like these – often doing difficult, repetitive work – were the primary breadwinners in their families, bringing in enough money to keep poverty and despair at bay. Looking back, the poet realizes that Miss Shannon was partially correct in her assessment of the sewing factory. Meehan’s personal life experiences have taught her that  such factories are exhausting and dehumanizing places to work . Meehan, for one, would not want to work in such an environment for the rest of her life. 

The Exact Moment I Became a Poet, Lines 19-27

But: I saw them: mothers, aunts and neighbours trussed like chickens on a conveyor belt, getting sewn up the way my granny sewed the sage and onion stuffing in the birds. Words could pluck you, leave you naked, your lovely shiny feathers all gone.

Miss Shannon’s words sparked the young poet’s imagination, resulting in a bizarre and disturbing fantasy. She imagined the sewing factory, complete with its crew of

 ‘ mothers, aunts, and neighbours. ‘ 

Despite accepting the truth of Miss Shannon’s remarks, Meehan insists that the ‘mothers, aunts, and neighbours’ who worked there maintained  a sense of ‘dignity .’ She insists that, despite its lack of glamour, their work was valuable and meaningful. The stanza mentions a noteworthy  metaphor  in which humans are compared to chickens. Their self-esteem is compared to the “ lovely shiny feathers”.

that cover the body of a chicken. Hurtful words are likened to hands plucking the chicken’s figures. Plucking hands will leave a chicken naked, completely devoid of feathers. In the same way,  hurtful words can strip us emotionally naked, stripping us of our dignity and self-esteem . Meehan, on the other hand, captures the power of hurtful words, such as those spoken by Miss Shannon in that long-ago classroom, to diminish, belittle, and humiliate us. The poet employs a  surreal and torturous image  of the ‘trussed’ women on the conveyor belt. She imagines that these women had been ‘trussed,’ implying that their legs and arms had been tied together and that they had been placed on a ‘conveyor belt.’ She imagined the women being ‘sewn up,’ as if they were chickens being prepared for the oven:

getting sewn up the way my granny

sewed the sage and onion stuffing

in the birds.

Meehan describes a pivotal moment in her childhood in this poem, a time when she first realized the  power of words . She suddenly realized that words could have a significant impact on one’s imagination. Her teacher’s  words triggered an image  that was not only distressing but also extraordinarily vivid. The poet imagines a procession of helpless women being pushed along a conveyor belt until they reach a monstrous sewing machine that mutilates their bodies one by one. She could see the ‘trussed’ women on the conveyor belt with a strange and disturbing clarity in her mind’s eye for a brief moment. She suddenly realized, too, that  words could have a significant impact on one’s emotions . Miss Shannon realized that her comments about the factory had the power to hurt not only the factory workers, but also the factory workers’ daughters, nieces, and neighbours who sat beside her in the classroom, making them feel weak, vulnerable, and exposed.

Even as a primary school student, the poet was acutely aware of social inequity. She realized that people in her part of D ublin’s inner city were denied the same opportunities as those in the city’s more affluent areas . And, of course, this lack of opportunity was passed down from generation to generation. This  social inequality  is vividly conveyed in the poet’s daydream. Society is compared to a nightmare factory where inner-city Dubliners have processed this inequality generation after generation. The image of these women being ‘trussed up’ depicts their limitations as a result of a lack of opportunity. The image of them being mutilated by a massive sewing machine exemplifies how their  disadvantaged upbringing left them mentally and physically scarred .

  Words could pluck you,

leave you naked

The Exact Moment I Became a Poet | About the Author

Paula Meehan was born in Dublin in 1955 and still resides there. She went to Trinity College in Dublin and Eastern Washington University in the United States to study. The Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Butler Literary Award for Poetry, the Denis Devlin Memorial Award, and the PPI Award for Radio Drama are among the many honours she has received. She has five collections of poetry under her belt. Her poetry collections include  Return and No Blame  (1984),  Reading the Sky  (1986),  The Man Who Was Marked by Winter  (1991),  Pillow Talk  (1994),  Mysteries of the Home  (1996),  Dharmakaya  (2001), which received a Denis Devlin Award,  Six Sycamores  (2004), with artist Marie Foley, and  Painting Rain  (2005). In 1996, a collection of essays titled  Mysteries of the Home  was published.  Mrs Sweeney  (1997),  Cell  (1999),  Kirkle  (1995),  The Voyage  (1997), and  The Wolf of Winter  are some of her stage work. Artists as diverse as avant-garde composer John Wolf Brennan and folk singer Christy Moore have set her poetry to music. She has worked with dancers, visual artists, and filmmakers throughout her career. Paula Meehan is a member of Aosdána, an Irish writers’ and artists’ organization.

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Paula meehan.

(1955 - Present)

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Irish poet and playwright Paula Meehan was born in Dublin, the eldest of six children in a working-class family. Her parents periodically moved to and from London in search of job opportunities, so Meehan spent time both in the UK and in Dublin with her grandparents. Although her home with them was loving, her parents’ living situation was often precarious, an experience that gave her a lifelong sensitivity to the struggles of the economically marginalized. Meehan’s grandfather taught her to read at an early age, and one of her formative poetry encounters was discovering the Emily Dickinson book he kept in a drawer. She attended various schools for her primary education, finishing at the Central Model Girls' School. She was expelled from her Catholic secondary school for organizing a protest and prepared independently for her Intermediate Certificate. Meehan attended Dublin’s Whitehall House Senior College to study for her Leaving Certificate while also participating in a dance drama group and writing lyrics for the local music scene.

Meehan received her BA in English, history, and classical civilization from Trinity College, Dublin. She traveled widely after college, to Germany, Greece, Crete, and the Shetland Islands. In 1981, she embarked upon an MFA at Eastern Washington University, where visiting professors Gary Snyder and Carolyn Kizer became literary influences. She settled down in Dublin in 1983. There, she began holding writing workshops for prisoners and low-income communities in inner-city Dublin. For Meehan, writing and social justice are intertwined; even as her academic and literary star ascended, she continued to prioritize work with disenfranchised groups. As she told The Independent in 2018, "The artist can sometimes be more powerful as an activist by following the muse."

In 1984, Meehan published her first poetry collection, Return and No Blame , with Beaver Row Press. Since then, she has authored eight further solo poetry collections, including Reading the Sky (Beaver Row, 1986); The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (Gallery, 1991; Eastern Washington University Press, 1994); Pillow Talk (Gallery, 1994); Dharmakaya (Carcanet, 2001; Wake Forest, 2002), which won a Denis Devlin Award; Painting Rain (Carcanet, 2009); Geomantic (Dedalus Press, 2016), winner of a Cholmondelay Award for Poetry; and two volumes of selected poetry, Mysteries of the Home (Bloodaxe, 1996) and As If By Magic (Dedalus Press, 2020). She frequently collaborates with creative practitioners across genres; she has written poetry for film and dance, and songwriters have put her poems to music. Her book collaborations include Six Sycamores (2004), which features sculptures and drawings by artist Marie Foley, and Museum (2019), a project with photographer Dragana Jurišić inspired by 14 Henrietta Street, the home of the Dublin Tenement Museum.

Meehan’s many honors and awards include the Marten Toonder Award, the Butler Literary Award, the Laurence O’Shaughnessy Award, and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. She is a member of Aosdána and was named Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2013, becoming the second woman to hold the post. In 2015, she was inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame. Meehan’s plays include Mrs Sweeney (1997) and Cell (1999), as well as several plays for children; they have been performed widely on both stage and radio. Her poetry has been translated into languages including French, German, Greek, Estonian, Japanese, and Irish. One of Ireland’s most prominent living poets, Meehan writes poetry known for its wit and attention to craft, its confidence in ranging across topics from natural science to myth to current events, and its centering of forgotten people and places. Meehan lives in Dublin with her partner, poet and writer Theo Dorgan.

More Paula Meehan

Video: Meehan reads her poem "Crossing The Threshold" for Dublin City University

Text: Meehan's poem "The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks," shortlisted for the 2015 A Poem for Ireland competition

Text: An article on Meehan at age 60 from the Irish Times

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Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation

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4 Paula Meehan: Poetry across Boundaries

  • Published: November 2021
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This considers how Meehan’s work promotes transgression of boundaries between self and non-self, social class, and nation. Subheadings: Creating Distance explores the geographical and ideological distances from Ireland which Meehan generated during her early career, and wrote about in her first three collections. Gary Snyder and Meehan’s Poetry of Breath offers an account of the formative influence of Snyder’s environmental Buddhism on the development of Meehan’s mature poetic practice. Three Female Images of Ireland scrutinises the dramatic monologues, ‘The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks’, and ‘Pillow Talk’, as well as the character Alice in Meehan’s play, Cell . It does this in order to explore how Meehan gives the agency of voice to previously emblematised female figures, and thereby critiques traditional ideologies of Ireland. Inside History: A Jobbing Poet of the 1990s gives an account of the integration of Meehan’s poetry in the cultural life of Dublin, and her collaboration with artists, dancers, musicians and film-makers.

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Leaving Cert Notes and Sample Answers

“Hearth Lesson” by Paula Meehan for Leaving Cert English

  • Post author: Martina
  • Post published: September 7, 2023
  • Post category: English / Paula Meehan / Poetry

"Hearth Lesson" by Paula Meehan for Leaving Cert English You may also like: Complete Guide to Paula Meehan for Leaving Cert Introduction: The poet speaks about how she is often…

comscore

Leaving Cert English paper 2: Students delight as poet Paula Meehan makes predicted appearance

‘if meehan did not appeal to candidates, mahon, kavanagh, rich and donne provided relief for many’.

essay on paula meehan poetry

Leaving Cert English paper 2: “Even TikTok was not spared as hope mounted that new poet Paula Meehan would make an appearance – and appear she did.” Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Times

It was biggest cliffhanger of the Leaving Cert: would the predicted poets appear? This year, students didn’t fall off the cliff, with widely-tipped poet Paula Meehan appearing on the paper – but those who put their hopes in Elizabeth Bishop may have been disappointed.

“Even TikTok was not spared as hope mounted that new poet Paula Meehan would make an appearance – and appear she did,” said English teacher and online grinds provider Gillian Chute .

“The Meehan question asked candidates to discuss how she employs ‘vibrant and forceful language’ to ‘challenge the often-oppressive forces’ in her poetry,” Ms Chute said.

“While the question may have proved challenging for some, candidates that could tackle the nuances of the question would have welcomed it.

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“If Paula Meehan did not appeal to candidates, Mahon, Kavanagh, Rich and Donne would have provided relief for many as they completed the line-up in the 2023 studied poetry section. A fantastic cohort – even if it was surprising to see Adrienne Rich on the paper for a second year in a row.”

Clodagh Havel, an English teacher at the Institute of Education, said this was a paper that students should be happy with, once they gave themselves the chance to pause and compose their approaches.

“For some, the comparative [section] is the most dreaded, the most challenging part of the paper but thankfully they were greeted by a welcoming general vision and viewpoint question,” Ms Havel said.

“It was straightforward and accessible with no verbose or obtuse demands. The phrasing of the theme or issue question did likely cause a moment for pause though, forcing a little bit of reflection.”

Lorraine Tuffy, Studyclix.ie subject expert and a teacher at Jesus and Mary Secondary School in Enniscrone, Co Sligo, said that Lady Macbeth was hotly tipped to be the focus of this year’s Shakespeare question.

“Having last appeared on the paper in 2007, a question on Lady Macbeth was widely anticipated and the bard’s most ruthless insurgent’s presence on the paper will have come as a relief to many,” said Ms Tuffy.

“Her absence in exam questions since 2007 meant many candidates will have carefully revised the protagonist’s ‘dearest partner of greatness’. Students considered how Shakespeare uses both Lady Macbeth and the witches to heighten the dramatic impact of his play.”

The other optional question was less appealing for its verbosity, Ms Tuffy said, with students asked to write about how “Macbeth’s unstable and tragic identity is shaped by a variety of ambiguities and complexities in his character”.

A question on the other single text options was relatively inviting, with a particularly appealing character question on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Ms Tuffy said.

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Paula Meehan

Paula  Meehan

A STRAY DREAM

Death of a field.

Gemeente Rotterdam

ReviseWise

  • Leaving Cert. English (Higher) 2023: Paper 2 Section III Poetry B
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I believe Meehan uses carefully crafted, vibrant and forceful language to accentuate the oppressive forces of her world, which are often clearly evident in her poetry. By addressing these forces, she challenges them.

The poem ‘Buying Winkles’ catalogues the young girl’s joy at the adventure of striking out on a journey to purchase winkles for the family. The language has a vibrant and forceful element. Simple words and phrases have the power to develop the narrative and the themes in her poem. The word ‘spare’ is significant as it suggests the mother did not have very much expendable income. Poverty is an oppressive force in her world and it is clear that this family often suffered. Words are skilfully crafted to draw us into her theme as our attention is drawn to the sibilant ‘s’ sounds in ‘spare’, ‘sixpence’ and ‘say’. It is evident that the child’s home is not very nice as she refers to the ‘ghosts/ on the stairs’ and a blown ‘bulb’. She leaves this rundown building and sets out on her quest with a sense of relief.

The whole event and even the winkles become heroic. This is illustrated in the description of the winkles as they ‘glisten blue like little/ night skies’. This is a vibrant and aesthetically pleasing simile as not only does it suggest a sense of colour, it also elevates the winkle to something grand and classical. The oppressive and dangerous forces of her world are evident even if she seems oblivious to them. Male characters ‘smell of men together with drink’ while the women ‘at sills or those/ lingering in doorways’ could suggest prostitution. Even the winkle vender seems vulnerable as she is sitting outside a pub and her customers are inevitably inebriated.

The excitement of the adventure for the child slightly masks the reality of poverty. This is an oppressive force that Meehan experienced in her life and it is well addressed with carefully crafted and powerful language. Her impoverished, tenement lifestyle is contrasted with the ‘light in golden mirrors’ and the ‘hot interior’, which was probably not a feature of her own home. Words like ‘golden’ and ‘hot’ are juxtaposed with the blown lightbulb of their tenement flat found in the opening of the poem.

The issue of money and the fact that it is an oppressive force in her formative life is well developed in the poem ‘Hearth Lesson’. Money that is wasted or squandered will rekindle a childhood memory when her mother finally made an impact on her father. Words like ‘crouched’ have a powerful impact as it suggests she is feeling small and insignificant or impotent while her parents fight it out. She seems nervous as she avoids getting caught in the crossfire. It could also suggest the oppressive poverty that they live in as she is huddled close to the fire trying to get warm.

Her language is vibrant and powerful as she describes the argument in classic and heroic terms. The father Zeus throws thunderbolts and the mother Hera ‘had the killing glance’. The lively and engaging imagery continues as the argument is described in a manner suggestive of a poker game or some other gamble. Gambling may have been a reason behind some of their financial argument as she refers to a horse with the term ‘neigh’. He, in turn, raises the stakes again by referring to the ‘mental state of her siblings’, suggesting that he found an issue with the intellect of some of her family. Her language has a life and vibrancy as the argument now becomes a tennis match where many of the shots were ‘lobbed’ over her head, suggesting the content and matter of their discussions were beyond the comprehension of the young poet.

Despite this lack of understanding, she is aware that the root cause of their issues was the oppressive factor of money. The lack of money is described as, ‘the root of bitter words’. Consequently, she is surprised when the father hands up his entire wages to the mother, but is even more surprised when the mother throws the wages in the fire. The language again takes on a vibrant and lively aspect as she uses slightly odd adjectives; ‘blue’, ‘pink’ and ‘green’, which we would not normally associate with a fire. The flames escape in an interesting zoomorphic simile, ‘like trapped exotic birds’, suggesting money was exotic and hard to find.

The poem, ‘Prayer for the Children of Longing’ is a provocative reflection on the oppressive forces acting on the city. The image of a winter tree brought from the North may symbolise Christmas, joy and hope to many, but not to those suffering from hardship and poverty. The opening line is powerful and dramatic as our attention is drawn in through the rhythmic beat of the alliterative ‘f’s found in ‘from’, ‘far’ and ‘forest’. In the second stanza she asks for the ‘clarity of ice’ so we can see the reality of what is happening. The city is oppressed by the drug trade, which also comes from far away, but does not bring anything other than a false hope to its victims. She brings the chill and cold of winter to life as the ‘snow’s breathless quiet’ freezes the world into quiet submission. We are left with the feeling that the children of longing give in to the ‘needle in its track’, a clear symbol of the marks left by a heroin addict’s addiction. The ‘comfort of snow’ could be the numbing comfort found in drugs, but there is a clear warning as it will knife you ‘in the back’.

The fifth stanza clearly accentuates the oppressive depravations suffered by the children of longing. The repetition of ‘th’ in ‘the’ and ‘that’ provides a sense of the list of hardships and danger. Their voices echo through the streets that have defeated them. The streets are personified as a tyrannical force that has ‘brought them to their knees’. These oppressive streets are filled with poverty and hardship. The children are left destitute and homeless, looking for shelter in alleyways. The drug has provided a false dream; they have been led astray and have had their minds blown apart. The children of the impoverished streets were promised a better life but this was not delivered. Again, this could be a metaphor for addiction. Despite the bleak subject matter, all these images are engaging and ironically, full of life.

The repetition of ‘Let’ in the sixth stanza sounds like a prayer. She could be suggesting that by remembering their pain, we, as a society, might attempt to improve the future. Meehan accentuates the bleak and oppressive forces of her world, but through a vibrant and forceful language she challenges these forces. She is also an advocate for change and there is a sense here that if society can change then the future will be brighter.

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From The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry by Peggy O'Brien. Copyright © 2012 by Paula Meehan. Reprinted with permission of Wake Forest University Press. All rights reserved.

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Verse 2024 – Leaving Cert English Higher Level Poetry + Portfolio

The Verse Higher Level 2024 textbook for Leaving Certificate English poetry. Accompanied by the Verse Higher Level 2024 Poetry Skills Portfolio book.

€ 20.95

About this Title

The Textbook

  • A full, annotated sample essay and sample essay questions for new prescribed poet Paula Meehan.
  • All past questions for each poet are included.
  • Contains all eight poets prescribed for examination in 2024.
  • Features a clear, colourful A4 layout . A key image accompanies each poem.
  • Timeline for each poet offers relevant biographical detail to give context to their work.
  • Pre-reading and comprehending and responding questions for all poems.
  • Exploring sections after each poem offer immediate, clear analysis in a concise format. Relevant quotations and biographical details are integrated in the commentary, providing a model for essay answers.
  • Creating questions contains innovative writing assignments prompted by the poem, which allow practise for Paper 1 through the study of poetry with common formats such as letters and blog posts.
  • End-of-chapter theme sections contain handy reference tables showing the main themes within each poem. Major themes are explored in-depth , bringing together an overall analysis of the poet.
  • End-of-chapter language and imagery sections offer notes on key literary techniques used by the poet with relevant examples for each.
  • Sample essay plans and paragraphs for each poet develop skills in building structured answers that respond accurately to the question asked.
  • Unseen Poetry section offers friendly guidance on approaching the unseen question with a variety of fresh poems and songs.
  • Glossary of poetic terms gives clear explanations to refer back to when needed.
  • Exam Advice sections provide useful information on preparing for and answering on prescribed and unseen poetry.

Poetry Skills Portfolio

Create an invaluable revision guide for exam-time. Build up knowledge of studied poets. Develop writing skills for producing exam-standard essay answers.  The Verse Higher Level Poetry Skills Portfolio  contains:

  • biography tasks
  • theme, language and imagery note templates
  • paragraph-writing tasks
  • dedicated space for writing sample essays.

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IMAGES

  1. AUT213-21 Prescribed Poetry

    essay on paula meehan poetry

  2. Paula Meehan Poetry

    essay on paula meehan poetry

  3. A STRAY DREAM

    essay on paula meehan poetry

  4. DEATH OF A FIELD

    essay on paula meehan poetry

  5. AUT213-21 Prescribed Poetry

    essay on paula meehan poetry

  6. (PDF) “The Enchantment of Myth in Paula Meehan’s Poetry”

    essay on paula meehan poetry

COMMENTS

  1. Paula Meehan

    Irish poet and playwright Paula Meehan was born in working-class Dublin and earned degrees from Trinity College and Eastern Washington University. She is the author of the poetry collections Return and No Blame (1984); Reading the Sky (1986); The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991; US edition 1994); Pillow Talk (1994); Mysteries of the Home (1996); Dharmakaya (2001), which won a Denis Devlin ...

  2. (PDF) "Paula Meehan's Dublins: Landscape, Community ...

    This essay maps how the poet Paula Meehan transforms the contours of the Dublin of her verse, the private and the shared lives of her Dubliners and their relationship with its physical environment ...

  3. Project MUSE

    Over the past quarter century, through six volumes of poetry and eight plays, Paula Meehan has uncovered a terrain unique to her vision: lyric, dramatic, committed, and communal. The essays and interview featured in this issue clarify the extent of that vision by tracking Paul Meehan's poetic choices, her playwriting, and the social and ethical ...

  4. Poem of the Week: "The Exact Moment I Became a Poet" by Paula Meehan

    Paula's Meehan's "The Exact Moment I Became a Poet" recounts the injurious, if inspiring, tale of when the poet as a child first understood the emotional gravity that words contain. First printed in Meehan's fifth volume Dharmakaya, the poem is reprinted in Meehan's most new selected poems, As If By Magic. The collection ...

  5. (PDF) 'Poetry, memory and recovery: Paula Meehan's transformational

    'Poetry, memory and recovery: Paula Meehan's transformational aesthetic', in An Sionnach Special issue on Paula Meehan, ed. Jody Allen Randolph. 5:1&2 (June 2009): 142-155. ... Sullivan for their attentive reading, invaluable suggestions, and perceptive comments on this essay. 12-muhall-pp142-155:sample 9/29/09 10:33 PM Page 154 154 An ...

  6. The Pattern

    Paula Meehan is a poet and playwright from Dublin, Ireland, who grew up in a working-class family. Her poetry collections include Return and No Blame (1984), Reading the Sky (1986), The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991), Pillow Talk (1994), Mysteries of the Home (1996), Dharmakaya (2001), which received a Denis Devlin Award, Six Sycamores ...

  7. Paula Meehan: the poet at 60

    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 ...

  8. The Exact Moment I Became a Poet

    The poem discusses how words can be extremely painful and expose unpleasant realities. Paula Meehan's poetry is heavily influenced by the complexities of family relationships. Buying Winkles and The Pattern are some of her popular poems, the analyses of which may be accessed in the link below: Analysis of Buying Winkles by Paula Meehan

  9. Paula Meehan

    Paula Meehan. Irish poet and playwright Paula Meehan was born in Dublin, the eldest of six children in a working-class family. Her parents periodically moved to and from London in search of job opportunities, so Meehan spent time both in the UK and in Dublin with her grandparents. Although her home with them was loving, her parents' living ...

  10. 4 Paula Meehan: Poetry across Boundaries

    Abstract. This considers how Meehan's work promotes transgression of boundaries between self and non-self, social class, and nation. Subheadings: Creating Distance explores the geographical and ideological distances from Ireland which Meehan generated during her early career, and wrote about in her first three collections.Gary Snyder and Meehan's Poetry of Breath offers an account of the ...

  11. The Creative Process: Making Poems by Paula Meehan

    Paula Meehan. Hands down, one of the best parts of being Anam Cara's director is getting to know the writers- and artists-in-residence and their work. They have taught me and each other much about the creative process. Their genre/medium may be similar to someone else's, but their approach is always unique and inspirational.

  12. PDF Aoife's Notes

    Aoife's Notes - Leaving Certificate English Notes

  13. The Meehan Podcast: A guide for Leaving Cert English students

    Listen to our H1 audio notes on the poet Paula Meehan. My name is Laura Daly, I'm an experienced English teacher from Dublin and in this podcast, I will bring you through each of Meehan's poems that could appear on the day of your exam. I will take you through all 10 of Meehan's poems that feature on the Leaving cert syllabus.

  14. Paula Meehan Archives

    Martina. September 7, 2023. English / Paula Meehan / Poetry. "Hearth Lesson" by Paula Meehan for Leaving Cert English You may also like: Complete Guide to Paula Meehan for Leaving Cert Introduction: The poet speaks about how she is often….

  15. Leaving Cert English Poetry: Paula Meehan. Tips, Tricks, and ...

    If you're studying the poetry of Paula Meehan for the Leaving Cert, this podcast is for you!English teacher Laura Daly joins us to give you ideas and in-dept...

  16. Leaving Cert English paper 2: Students delight as poet Paula Meehan

    "If Paula Meehan did not appeal to candidates, Mahon, Kavanagh, Rich and Donne would have provided relief for many as they completed the line-up in the 2023 studied poetry section.

  17. Paula Meehan

    Paula Meehan was born in 1955 and raised in two famous working-class districts of Dublin, before graduating from Trinity College and Eastern Washington University. She has conducted workshops with many inner-city communities and prisons as well as universities. Her work is much translated and among the prizes she has won are The Martin Toonder ...

  18. The Meehan Podcast: A guide for Leaving Cert English students

    By Laura Daly. Listen to our H1 audio notes on the poet Paula Meehan. My name is Laura Daly, I'm an experienced English teacher from Dublin and in this podcast, I will bring you through each of Meehan's poems that could appear on the day of your exam. I will take you through all 10 of Meehan's poems that feature on the Leaving cert syllabus.

  19. Leaving Cert. English (Higher) 2023: Paper 2 Section III Poetry B

    B 3. I believe Meehan uses carefully crafted, vibrant and forceful language to accentuate the oppressive forces of her world, which are often clearly evident in her poetry. By addressing these forces, she challenges them. The poem 'Buying Winkles' catalogues the young girl's joy at the adventure of striking out on a journey to purchase ...

  20. Leaving Cert English Prescribed Poetry

    Prescribed Poetry. Aoife O'Driscoll - Poetry of Derek Mahon Bishop - 'First Death in Nova Scotia', 'The Fish', 'The Prodigal', 'The Filling Station'. ... Approaching the Essay Frost - Design Frost - Mending Wall Frost - The Road Not Taken ... Meehan, Paula - All Poems - Slideshow Montague - A Welcoming Party

  21. Ashes by Paula Meehan

    Ashes. Paula Meehan. The tide comes in; the tide goes out again. washing the beach clear of what the storm. dumped. Where there were rocks, today there is sand; where sand yesterday, now uncovered rocks. So I think on where her mortal remains. might reach landfall in their transmuted forms,

  22. Leaving Cert English Higher Level Poetry + Portfolio

    The Textbook. A full, annotated sample essay and sample essay questions for new prescribed poet Paula Meehan.; All past questions for each poet are included.; Contains all eight poets prescribed for examination in 2024.; Features a clear, colourful A4 layout.A key image accompanies each poem. Timeline for each poet offers relevant biographical detail to give context to their work.

  23. Poetry

    LC Poetry Notes - Aoife's Notes. image not found. The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks | RTÉ - Poem for Ireland. The LC English course broken down into topics from essays to Yeats. For each topic find study notes, sample essays as well as past exam questions with marking schemes.