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Leontia Flynn: I need to write or nothing makes sense

Poet who lectures at Queen’s University Belfast reflects on her new collection Taking Liberties, and her career

Leontia Flynn: 'I think poetry seeks to preserve and hold on to things – experiences, encounters, people – in the middle of change.'

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Martin Doyle
Sat Sep 9 2023 - 05:00

These Days (2004) won the Forward Prize for best first collection. The Radio (2017), your fourth book, won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. How has your work evolved thematically and stylistically?

With each book I think I’ve tried something different stylistically, and by the last collection, The Radio, things had gotten elaborate and formal and I was writing lots of different things. I wanted to throw it all away and try something different again: poems with short lines and lots of white space, and for them to be more in tune with my life and the new turn it was taking. I’d written about family, and mothers, but here it’s more of an inside view. I’d written about social change and technology, and maybe that’s here too in the sense of the poems endlessly scrolling or doom-scrolling and everything being awful.

How would you describe your new collection, Taking Liberties?

A book of poems in which personal crisis is played out against a backdrop of political crises.

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Why did you choose its epigraphs by George Sand, Chaucer and Putin?

I knew the title of the book early on and had lots of different quotations about freedom that I compiled as I wrote the poems. I had Susan Sontag saying “I want to be free. I’m prepared to pay the price – in terms of my own unhappiness – for being free.” I used the Sand and Chaucer in the end because they’re about personal, sexual freedom. I used the threatening one by Putin, because he made it as I was in the middle of writing.

‘A poem would carry the self far beyond the self’ is a line from a poem in Taking Liberties. What does poetry mean to you?

It means everything; I need to write or nothing makes sense. I’ve also had the experience of poetry taking me somewhere unexpected or feeling it assumes a life of its own, and not just being an expression of “me”. That’s partly what I meant there, as well as that reading a really good poem surprises, then changes you, rather than confirming things you already knew.

[ Mid-term in Belfast, a new poem by Leontia Flynn ]

You once said: poems are not things I write, but things I think of. Could you expand?

This makes it sound easy, so I might just have meant that I write poems in my head till the very last minute, even if they’re long or take a long time? Otherwise there’d be too many drafts. I don’t just sit down and bang them out – though it’s more like rhythmical speech than thought. Heaney said of poetry, via Robert Frost, “the feeling finds the thought and the thought finds the words”, and I’m in favour of feelings.

Your doctorate was on Medbh McGuckian, and your poetry is studded with literary references. How conscious are you of being part of a tradition?

It was impossible to ignore tradition when I was starting to write, and the tradition was very hierarchical. So after a certain point, you have to create your own tradition. It certainly doesn’t mean saying “Guys, I’m here and I would like to be part of your club.” It also means reading outside and around the traditions you’ve inherited to find your people. Medbh McGuckian’s poetry is much more studded with literary reference than mine, and her references are to a tradition of European and women’s writing – so that was a very liberating education.

Two new poems respond to the deaths of poets Matthew Sweeney and Ciaran Carson. Is poetry especially suited to the elegiac?

I think so, yes. I think poetry seeks to preserve and hold on to things – experiences, encounters, people – in the middle of change. Hearing of someone’s death on social media still feels particularly shocking to me, though it became a common event as I was writing. I heard of Matthew Sweeney’s death while I was on a boat going to Clare Island – but I knew Ciaran personally and worked with him.

In Classrooms and in Science Labs is a response to the Uvalde school shooting. How did you choose its form?

It’s the same form as most of the book – four-line stanzas, short lines. I wrote the beginning of the poem in 2017 after reading about the active shooter drill learned in some American high schools, using the instructions more or less verbatim. Then I couldn’t finish it, and put the poem away. After the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May last year, I watched Kimberly Rubio and her husband on the news as they talked about their daughter, Lexi, who was murdered along with 18 other children and two teachers in the massacre. Their strength and courage was extraordinary. Later, in August, I read longer interviews with the parents, and the rest of the poem wrote itself. Most of the details are also verbatim. I didn’t add much to it, because what else is there to say. She was 10 years old. The Rubios are still campaigning for gun control.

[ Leontia Flynn wins Irish Times Poetry Now Award ]

What inspired the poem Nina Simone Is Singing?

Spotify tells me that I am in the top 0.5 per cent of Nina Simone listeners. I’ve always listened to her music. About four years ago I watched What Happened, Miss Simone on Netflix (I’m not doing much to suggest I abstain from digital technologies here), and learned more about her life, particularly the end of her marriage and her subsequent time in Liberia and France. She was a genius, and had to be a genius while suffering discrimination on the grounds of not only gender but race. I think about her all the time.

I am not allowed to put my daughter in a drawer, but I was quite scrupulous about using the time I was not with her to write

Dickenson in Amherst is one of several poems exploring the artist’s need for solitude. How hard is it in this always-on world to be alone long enough with your thoughts to write a poem?

It’s very hard, but we make it hard. I can never overestimate how much space you need to write a poem, or how much time it will take. When I began writing the poems in Taking Liberties – though it’s not quite going off-grid to live in a cabin – I did put my phone in a drawer from Friday to Sunday. That saves both energy and time, even if everyone in your family WhatsApp thinks you’re dead.

Perhaps relatedly, you explore the tension between parenthood and career in a wonderful riff of metaphors in In Arts Centres.

I am not allowed to put my daughter in a drawer, but I was quite scrupulous about using the time I was not with her to write. As the poem suggests, the distance is only ever temporary; you can’t get out of motherhood, though I think I used to think that at some point I would. The problem is even if you pull off the impossible, no one can really get their head round the idea of being an artist and a mother. I know I couldn’t. It would be less difficult if I was actually paid for either activity.

Responding to the Brexit vote in 2016, you wrote about the North: “Despite my Irish passport, it just got harder to feel like I’m in two places at once.” How do you feel seven years on?

I’m nostalgic for Brexit. Watching it unfold – it was like an endless circus. It was so deranged and destructive, with its cartoonish players. The current stupid Tory pirates are somehow more pitiable. I can’t even remember where we’ve been left up here. Are we going to have the Troubles again? It all got swept away by Trump and Covid and lockdown and climate change and the next crisis. Brexit felt like the first online 24-hour wraparound immersive political crisis experience.

[ Leontia Flynn: Serious about the butts of her jokes ]

Which projects are you working on?

I started a new book.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

Lots. In Paris, on top of the usual modernist haunts, I found the flat Elizabeth Bishop stayed in. I visited Dorothy Parker and F Scott Fitzgerald’s houses in LA years ago. When I was in Iceland I stayed in the same hotel as Auden and MacNeice did in 1936.

Who do you admire the most?

Oh I can’t think of anyone right now, but it honestly definitely used to be Tina Fey. How could you be so prescient and funny?

The best and worst things about where you live?

Belfast – where do you start? It’s so beautifully located, and in summer it’s just incredibly green, even in the city. It surprises me every year. Also it’s small and easy to get around, and no one kicks you in the back if you stand on the left on an escalator, and it has a very high percentage of creative people. But everyone my age has at least low-level PTSD, and it can be incredibly snobby and nosy and claustrophobic, so you have to go away a lot.

What is your favourite quotation?

James Baldwin: “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

Taking Liberties is published by Cape Poetry

Poetry