—MARGENTO
Before talking about your film poems (or would you rather call them poetry films?), I’d like to note the pervasive filmic nature of your published poetry. Every now and then they read to me as films in their own right, yet films made with lyric forms and tropes. In “Flight,” for instance, the opening poem in the collection Lark Water, rough and intriguing enjambments submerge the reader in a uniquely filmic style and atmosphere, e.g. “Listen / for the songs he always meant to sing, stranded mid-air, / drowned out by a plane that flies over the empty chair / he dragged into the middle of the road,” and then, immediately in the subsequent stanza, “Picture him as he clambers out of the plane-crash/ of his past and climbs onto that chair . . . ” and so on and so forth.
That’s an intriguing place to start the conversation. I hadn’t thought of my poetry as being inherently “filmic” but I do know that when I began writing poetry the initial impulse was image-driven. Something I still aspire to do when I write is to trust the secret life of images and follow them as they unfold in my head. Of course, there are external visual stimuli too—in my case these often come from landscape or the visual arts. The opening poem of Lark Water, “Flight,” is one of three poems in that collection inspired by an exhibition, Burrow, by the contemporary Irish painter, Gerry Davis. The paintings evoke strange, enigmatic, even surreal scenes, but are painted in a hyperreal style. I’m fascinated by that kind of tension between content and style. “Flight” is inspired by many of the images across Davis’s exhibition, brought together in a way that suggests a narrative with a single subject, “a young man.” It’s interesting that the film poem, Finding Mothers (Barra Convery, 2022) also borrows images from this poem, and draws them into its exploration of what it means to be a “lost boy,” including the opening image: “picture a pram in a dark, empty warehouse,” but we can come back to that.
In terms of the enjambments in the poem, there is a “roughness,” as you say, to some, as the poem yokes together the experiences of its subject, the unnamed “young man.” I didn’t think of it in cinematic terms when I was writing, but the sudden shifts in focus do resemble “jump cuts” in this sense. The form of the poem works against expected lyrical conventions of smooth-running lines and coherent line breaks and allows the reader to share the experience of a life that is unpredictable and out of control. Some of the line breaks position forceful verbs at the end of a line, such as “crackles”, “surges”, and key sentence beginnings also unexpectedly occur there, as in “Salvation” and “Listen.”
Do you see, hear, dream of, or think up films and performances that could only be realized within the medium of poetry?
Well, poetry is the only medium in my gift to write. I don’t believe I could make the translation/transition to either stage or screen without the collaboration of an artist with experience in those areas. Words are the tools of my craft, so alone, I can only translate the images in my head or in my dreams into words. I do love writing in different voices, however, which is why monologues feature a lot. And in the process of writing these, I am very definitely “hearing” a voice, a “character”, so I’m aware of the potential for performance in those cases.
Translation seems not only important to, but constitutive of your poetics, and also seems to work on multiple levels. The very title of the above-mentioned collection, Lark Water, is taken from a poem by Federico García Lorca that you included—in your translation—in the collection, as “Ballad of the Black Sorrow by Federico García Lorca” (not the only translation you have included in a collection you have authored). The translation is appropriately followed by a poem of yours which it inspired and explicitly informed, an instance of, in Jerome Rothenberg’s words, “writing-through” preceded by, if you will, the “original translation.” One of my favorite illustrations of your translational poetics, though, is the fascinating “Annunciation in a Northern Clime,” also in Lark Water. The traditional scene of the Annunciation is not only “translated” to different regions and climates (and also to concerns of climate, ecology and even, subtly, biodiversity) but also “mistranslated” as an ironical, perhaps postfeminist, revisiting of another literally classical story, that of “Leda and the Swan.” An irony, one of the many undertones that accompany translating the focus and tone of a traditional story, is that the retelling is actually inundated by a both sophisticated and irresistibly intense lyricism. Would you say that the collaborations involved in your film poems and/or the films are consistent with the major role translation—in multifarious senses I’ve outlined—plays in your poetics?
I think you may be right. When I think about it, a lot of my work could be described as translational. I have translated a range of Latin American and Spanish poetry from Spanish and Galician, and this interest in rendering anew a pre-existing artistic expression is also present in my poetry. It’s there in ekphrastic poems responding to the work of Arshile Gorky, for example, or to Titian, or to arpilleras, the activist, textile art form. There are also responses to music and to other works of literature.
The experience of writing my own poems in response to Lorca’s was bordering on involuntary. I’ve lived with his Gypsy Ballads (Editions of the Occidente Magazine, 1928) for a long period of time and, despite knowing them very well, the process of translating three of them was slow and difficult. But before I had finished each translation, I was bursting to write these response poems or echo poems (“Yellow”, “Antoñito” and “The Cut Stem”). I’m never sure what to call them, though I like Rothenberg’s idea of “writing through.” They were written very fast, as though the translation process had unlocked or released something just waiting to arrive. Translating from one language to another demands the closest reading possible of a literary text; the translator really has to occupy the text and its world. That act of imagination can then lead to an additional imaginative step that extends beyond the source text and its translation into another language.
I appreciate your insights into “Annunciation in a Northern Clime”. Yes, I’m drawing on a biblical narrative and, as you say, re-locating it geographically as well as locating it in a wider context of mythical and archetypal narratives, pre-Christian as well as Christian. Mythologies the world over are inhabited by divine entities who impregnate women—they are still at it in Nick Cave’s latest album Wild God (PIAS, 2024). There is definitely a re-telling of the story of the Annunciation from a feminist and ecological perspective here. I don’t know if I’d describe it as ironic, exactly—I think the principal intention was to be assertive. The poem re-locates the miracle of conception from the sexual organs of a god to the irresistible potency of nature and re-locates Mary from the position of a passive object of divine penetration to an autonomous subject participating in nature’s agency: “I was the calyx that contained the bud; the carpel, a house with no door”.
The film poems can certainly be seen as a logical extension of this translational tendency. I became interested in collaborating with artists working in other art forms when a theatre director whose work I greatly admire, Max Hafler, asked if I would like to expand on the “Aulis Monologues” in Anchored, and adapt them for stage. The end result was The Sacrificial Wind (Max Hafler, 2017), a fifty-minute theatre piece that revisits the Greek mythical story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which marks the departure of the Greek fleet to fight the Trojan Wars.
The story is told in a series of monologues by those who witnessed the sacrifice at Aulis, including Agamemnon, Achilles, Calchas the priest, footsoldiers, Iphigenia herself, as well as her mother Clytemnestra, a Chorus and Euripides.
A further translation of the piece came about during the 2020–2021 Covid lockdown, when I collaborated with Max Hafler and a young film director, Barra Convery, to produce a film piece. The shift in medium was in one sense liberating. The fact that the stage version had involved three actors playing eight roles plus Chorus had imposed logistical limits in terms of the sequencing of the monologues. Working in film, we had none of these limitations, but Covid restrictions made it impossible to come together for a shoot and so each actor, with the directors’ guidance, had to film themselves at home on their mobile phones. The film version is performed by nine actors, one for each character, whose head and shoulders address the viewer from a black background. The change in medium and style of performance changes the piece radically. The stage version involves a lot of ensemble voice and movement; it has the emotional charge of live performance with all its echoes of ritual, whereas the film version is extraordinarily stark, intimate and challenging; there is simply no escaping the eye contact of each character.
The Sacrificial Wind. Written by Lorna Shaughnessy. Directed by Max Hafler. Made during the January 2021 Covid lockdown and first screened online February 2021.
So the original poems traveled from page to stage to screen, acquiring nuances and characteristics I could not have predicted or designed on my own—these were the products of translation from one medium to another, and the process of collaboration with other artists.Having experienced the dual magic of translation and collaboration, Barra Convery and I applied to the Irish Arts Council for funding to make a twenty minute short film based on the “Finding Mothers” sequence of poems from Lark Water. Here again, translation features on more than one level. The sequence was inspired by J.M. Barrie’s novel, Peter and Wendy (Hodder & Stoughton, 1911), which was written some time after the family-friendly play that most of us are familiar with, and is very different in tone: it’s a pretty savage satire of bourgeois marriage in Edwardian England—very sly, very funny, but with a real bite. It’s clear Barrie was aware of the damage done to both women and men by the rigid patriarchal structures and mores of his own class. My discovery of the book coincided with my sons’ teenage years, when I was becoming attuned to the social dangers that young men have to navigate in those impressionable years. This, in turn, got me thinking about the nature of the Lost Boys in the Peter Pan story, which I explore in the “Finding Mothers” sequence, as well as in other poems in the collection, including “Flight”. The poems offer a fairly dark view of Peter Pan’s character, his influence on Wendy and on the Lost Boys, and this is further amplified through the visual language of the film poem. Barra’s screenplay deconstructs the poems, placing words by one character in the mouth of another; introducing narrators, either acted or voiced; and really expanding the reach of the original texts.
A fundamental shared principle in all my collaborations with Barra is that a film poem must be more than illustrative. It must go further than simply reproducing in film the images used in the poem, and it must allow the expansive nature of the medium and the director’s imagination to come into play. Poetry, for all its evocative powers, could not take the poems to the variety of physical and imaginative places that the film does. The intention of the piece is still very identifiably that of the poems, as are the main characters, but the tone darkens almost inevitably when visual representation is added to the verbal. And there are totally unexpected gains. For example, a section of a poem about Wendy where the “narrative voice” describes her “fall” into puberty in Neverland. The voice is unidentified, but is clearly the voice of an older woman, while what we see on the screen is a Wendy in her thirties, and so three generations of women are invoked simultaneously by combining textual, audio and visual transmission.
“There she lands, on the terra un-firma of puberty. Half-conscious, she opens her eyes to the terrified faces of unwashed boys, wishing only to be a nice, motherly person in a house with red walls and a roof of mossy green. There she lies, as they build the little prison around her. There are no other girls in Neverland, only jealous, pouting fairies and budding mermaids who flirt outrageously. Wendy discovers she cannot compete with their magic tricks or synchronised aquatic grace. She is now a sewer of pockets and tucker-in of lost boys. The boy who forgets has thimbled a contract she didn’t know she had signed.
A thimble. An acorn. A kiss.
It’s a wonder she can fly home at all,
being neither innocent nor heartless
after Neverland.
Finding Mothers. Written by Lorna Shaughnessy, Adapted & Directed by Barra Convery. 2023.
I am really grateful to learn about the real world circumstances that influenced your specific (and special!) films and performances. The story of Sacrificial Wind is a heart-rending one, and the way you tell it—the dramatic urgency, the compelling testimony and tone, the indelible language and imagery—makes it even more so. On top of all that, the directors Max Hafler and Barra Convery—and . . . perhaps fate itself—had the actors perform their parts in a setting uncannily consistent with the overall atmosphere of your piece—recording themselves on their phones, alone, while in lockdown during the pandemic. And there is perhaps even more to what you relevantly call the “translation” of the poem into performance: the way you work with form. You combine in this case irregular English meters with allusive incorporations of Greek forms—Sapphics may come to mind for instance (I think Seamus Heaney had a somewhat similar technique in his translations of Greek drama). In your approach, however, form bends to capture the urgency I was just mentioning, imprinted with a colloquial rhetoric and fluency that traverses line breaks and stanzas like keen (and indeed “sacrificial”) winds. That seems to have played out brilliantly in performance and in film. The readers (the actors included) can already “hear” your characters in the poem itself, like you have said you sometimes do before or while writing . . .Well, I’ve always loved theatre, and at secondary school and college I was involved in active amateur productions, acting and directing. I count myself lucky to have been schooled at a time when “rankings” based mostly on academic grades didn’t dictate curricula and policy the way they do now. For my seven years of secondary education, the school I attended in Belfast devoted two whole school days plus class-time hours of rehearsal to a Shakespeare festival where every class staged a scene from a play by Shakespeare. That’s unimaginable today. So maybe my penchant for monologue dates back to those formative years of eleven to eighteen, memorising and performing monologues and soliloquies that spanned the emotional range from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to King Lear. And when you hear a colloquial register in the voices of characters in Sacrificial Wind, it’s possibly because I had the physical and at times quite visceral experience of having Shakespeare’s monologues in my mouth, forming those words and hearing them come out in my voice. In the transition from page-poems to stage or screen, I was very aware that the monologues had to be speakable by the actors. I worked with the cast throughout the rehearsal process, tweaking the text at times where the compression allowed by a page-poem simply wasn’t going to transmit what we wanted it to, in performance, in real time. Sometimes this meant relaxing the syntax, and this, in turn, made the text more speakable, more accessible, closer to natural speech patterns; it also, as you observe, affected line breaks.
The whole question of linguistic register is fascinating in any revisiting of ancient myth. Every generation needs its own version of classical Greek myth, told in the language of the now. In the case of the story of Iphigenia, where so many protagonists are regal, there is a need to preserve a social register that reflects their status while being sufficiently colloquial to allow the audience to identify with them on an emotional level. I can’t say it’s something I always approached consciously, but the imperative of convincing speech was definitely in the forefront of my mind during rehearsals.
In terms of form, I tend to work from the inside out when writing poetry. I rarely start out with the intention of writing in a particular form, but rather respond to the demands of the lines as they emerge, along with tone and a sense of how much space is needed around words, lines, stanzas—how much silence needs to happen in the blank spaces in and around the poem. The visual arrangement of the words on the page are inseparable from its sound for me, that play between the voiced word and silence. So, to answer your question, while there are plenty of 4-line stanzas in Sacrificial Wind, it wasn’t a conscious echo-ing of Sapphic form.
The path that led me to write the original “Aulis Monologues” was not direct. The story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia is part of the cluster of myths surrounding the Trojan War; the sacrifice of the Greek King’s daughter in exchange for fair winds for the Greek fleet in their campaign against Troy is not as well known as most other parts of that received heroic narrative. I wasn’t aware of it until I read an extraordinary book of poetry by Nicaraguan poet, Michele Najlis, published after the Sandinista revolutionary government’s electoral defeat in 1990. The book haunted me for many years and I eventually wrote an article about it that sparked a series of articles on Hispanic versions of Iphigenia’s sacrifice. Writing my own poems was a parallel, creative response. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (so slippery, so ambiguous) was also a key influence, so much so that he appears as a character in the poems and scripts. The relationship between myth and translation is endlessly fascinating, but that’s a whole other conversation . . .
Fascinating indeed, and specifically so when it comes to the ways your own poems were translated to film. As you already explained, the Peter Pan in your sequence “Finding Mothers” draws on a satirical rewriting of the literary “myth.” The film Finding Mothers in its turn then does a sort of re-reading, a “trans-creation” of your poems. A darkly suggestive phrase such as “the lie of the land,” for instance—which might also ironically suggest “lay of the land,” enhanced by the striking, ingenious enjambment, “where the lie of the land she knew/ will fall away from beneath her feet”—appears countered by the visual of the actor’s feet stepping steadily on the ground. Yet paradoxically, this solid stance perhaps underscores the sense of foreboding . . .
I’m delighted you picked up on the play on “lie” and “lay” there. Barrie’s novel really exposes many lies that undercut Edwardian society of his class. As I already mentioned, he shows no mercy in his savage satire of marriage and how women are conditioned from childhood into a domestic confinement that is emotionally and intellectually demeaning. Wendy is sold a myth of domestic bliss and solidity not experienced by Barrie’s own wife in their very unhappy marriage. Mrs Darling is depicted sympathetically in the novel but has to endure the puerile, if hilariously captured, antics of her husband after the children’s flight to Neverland. Reading Barrie’s book inspired simultaneous responses of laughter, revulsion and foreboding in me that I wanted to capture in the tone of the “Finding Mothers” sequence. I think it’s the sense of foreboding that is really amplified by the film. Is that because the visual medium allows for its amplification? Is it because the director was particularly drawn to that darkness and foreboding? A bit of both?
I also love what you are saying about the space and silences around the words in your poems; the film plays creatively with those as well. At times literally so, as in the “Shadowless” scene set in a cramped, shadow-haunted den (or shack). And once again, I think form, consciously or not, plays an allusive role in—as you were putting it in speaking of your performance-informed background—“viscerally” shaping those spaces and silences (that’s where I mostly heard the Sapphics in Sacrificial Wind, in the shorter lines trailing in the middle or at the end of the monologue blocks). The couplets seem to advance towards a sonnet form, only to resist it (which another poem in the sequence, “Defending Neverland,” does with tercets rather than couplets). Here, the “shadow” of the patriarchal form is upturned, as the very opening couplet does not really “fall in line.” The actor kind of mirrors that with his medium-specific means: just as the character resists (mature) masculinity, he resists, for instance, obvious sonic resolution, threading most of the slant rhymes and alliterations into his mischievous-sounding monologue . . .
I hadn’t thought consciously about the form of the poems as resisting patriarchal structures, but you have a point. And it is interesting that no matter how radical the ideas were in English poetry at that time, the forms were rigidly traditional, received, compliant. What interested the director and myself more in the depiction of Peter Pan was his insidious influence on Wendy and the Lost Boys, and how his character, while appearing to resist the traditional path of maturing into manhood, actually perpetuates an utterly imperial model of masculinity. He is unattached to any woman but is marked by a repressed craving for his lost mother. He arms the Lost Boys, martials them into his makeshift army and obliges them to fight his battle for the domination of Neverland; he demands blind obedience. The novel has darker notes than the earlier play: it includes allusions to boys being physically “altered to fit their trees” and disappearing when they begin to grow beards. The poem’s title is “Shadowless,” and there is a Jungian sense of the shadow self at play here too. Peter cannot mature because he is unable to recognise the shadow self which he has denied to the point that it is no longer visible. I think Barra’s choice of location for this scene, a shadow-filled den (actually a reconstruction of a bronze age crannog) and Cillian’s wonderful embodiment of Peter Pan’s immature cunning really expose the danger that this model of masculinity—repressed and incapable of self-awareness—poses to others.
Do you have any other collaborations with theater and film directors lined up? Will Macha Press be involved in any capacity in such collaborations or any other types of intermedia/cross-artform projects?
At the moment, most of my energies are going into Macha Press, the new publishing collective which I co-founded with six other poets. As you know, we recently launched our first title, ! All’arme / ? And what . . . if not by Eilish Martin (Macha Press, 2024), along with her exhibition of handmade books and graphic artworks in Belfast. Eilish’s recent work is a wonderful example of a conversation between the verbal and visual that reflects our interest in poetry that is hybrid, interdisciplinary. I’m also working on a collection that is due to come out with Salmon Poetry in 2025, and finishing up a research project on multilingualism in Galway and Belfast with colleagues from the University of Galway and Queen’s University Belfast. There just hasn’t been time to work on a new film collaboration, though I have a few ideas loosely connected with some fantastical territory my recent poems have strayed into. Not clear enough to articulate, still very much at the level of hunches and intuitions, but they would definitely involve more than one genre and folk motifs from more than one culture.
