Three masters seek to define Poetry

The Ireland Chair of Poetry is a solemn, formal, academic institution. The poets who hold it, however, are different from conventional poets. Gather the three most recent Ireland Professors of Poetry around a table for a conversation – the incumbent, Paula Meehan; her predecessor, Harry Clifton; and the 2007-2010 chair holder, Michael Longley – and you’ll find yourself discussing a wide range of topics punctuated by recitations, jokes, snatches of song, back-and-forth banter and moments of sudden, striking profundity.

Longley says he surprised himself by his choice of lecture material. “A poem can happen in about 50 seconds. There’s a poem in my second book called Swans Mating, and the second stanza just came into my head, whoomph, Like that. Now, that does not happen with prose.”

Clifton agrees. “Writing prose is so different; it’s a whole conscious, grinding thing that’s coming from another part of your mind. But it’s a wonderfully rewarding thing to see a rounded statement that is not part of the poetry.”

“One of the great revelations to me,” says Clifton, “was the very first lecture in a general course in poetry given by Denis Donoghue. He came in – he’s about 9ft tall – and he just stood at the lectern and he read the whole of a poem called Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. To me that was an absolutely pivotal moment. I suddenly realised, as Mandelstam says, that the sun rises in the west. From that moment American poetry – from the very free to the very formal, conservative stuff – was an open field.”

To spend even a short time with these three very different poets is to experience a tiny fraction of their love of words – and their finely tuned sense of mischief.

During his lectures as Ireland professor of poetry, he adds, he repeatedly stressed to his students the importance of reading poetry aloud.