Mentors

When I was sixteen, I sent a sheaf of poems to Dermot Bolger, a 24-year-old whom I had heard was running a poetry press out of Drumcondra, a suburb of north Dublin. This was amazing on several fronts: one, that he was so young (he founded it when he was 18), but more importantly that it was publishing inner city Dublin poets, young poets, people who had never had a voice. It was without budget and an early book of Dermot’s own poems were sold by word of mouth in the factories and pubs of north Dublin. The poetry establishment in Ireland at the time was firmly rooted in Heaney, Mahon, poets of the North, of the stony grey soil, and of history. Dermot was publishing Raven Introductions, a series that published ten or so poems by a handful of newcomers and gave a forum to a whole generation of young, mostly urban poets coming up in working class Dublin.

“The way I try to defend it,
this demeaned spirit and country,
is by naming its constituents…
picking their hindered, wary steps
through concrete wastelands, refuseheaps,
tax offices, supermarkets,
dole queues, hospital clinics,
army checkpoints…”

                Philip Casey: Ordinary Mortals

In 1983, Raven Introductions 3 included a clutch of my poems. The year after, Raven Arts Press published an anthology called After the War is Over, in response to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit to Ireland. It was not what you would call a warm and fuzzy welcome for the President, and it included a poem of mine. While I was still a teenager, Dermot made it possible for me to feel that I was taking my place among real poets writing about things that mattered.

It was a very exciting time to be a fledgling writer in Ireland. New presses were springing up everywhere and when a book came out, we would read in pubs (what better to attract seasoned Guinness drinkers than a bit of a poetry reading…or was it the other way round?). One early Raven Arts “book tour” involved about 6 highly suspect characters, including myself, driving round the country in a battered old minivan. Venues sometimes had fewer audience members than readers, but since the tour also featured the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol, any disappointment was well drowned. By this time, I was reading English at Trinity College, but in my secret double life, I was reading my poems at the International Pub and county council libraries across the country.

Dermot was my mentor. Over the next few years I sent him every poem I wrote and, since it was long before personal computers entered the Irish household, we exchanged frequent letters. His were typed on tissuey paper, and they contained both encouragement and editorial advice, some of which has stuck in my head to this day. He published my first two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. In 1992, he shut Raven down and founded New Island Books, which published my first novel. He has gone on to be a highly respected novelist, poet, and playwright himself.

I sometimes wish we lived in an age of art patrons. Some wealthy dude could pay me to sit at my desk and write poems. But I think of Michelangelo, many of whose early commissions made him miserable because they were someone else’s vision and holding him back from his real work. I have never had any limits on my freedom to write, except the rigors of my full time job and the million details of being a working mom. But they are all just excuses. I started writing poems when I was nine, but the real work of it began for me the day I got Dermot Bolger’s first response to the poems I had sent him. Send more, he wrote, send more.