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I copied this poem out of The New Yorker ages ago.
I love imperative poems, poems which tell you to go and DO something (but not didactic poems, there is a difference). How can you argue with a poem which begins “be yourself”? It is slightly grim, this poem, and yet…and yet…I find it weirdly affirming (but then my favourite bands are The Smiths and Joy Division, so perhaps I’m a bit of a miserablist.)
YOU
by Dennis O’Driscoll
Be yourself; show your flyblown eyes
to the world, give no cause for concern,
wash the paunchy body whose means you
live within, suffer the illnesses
that are your prerogative alone-
the prognosis refers to nobody but you;
you it is who gets up every morning
in your skin, you who chews your dinner
with your mercury-filled teeth, gaining
garlic-breath or weight, you dreading,
you hoping, you regretting, you interloping.
***
I must be a miserabalist too cos I love this, and writing like it, writing that doesn’t preach or feel sorry for itself – well, maybe Denis is feeling sorry for himself, but doing it in a way that’s humorous. I’m always a sucker for self-deprecation. Great stuff. Thanks.
Oops that’s Dennis with two ‘n’s’ – sorry.
I totally agree with your take on The Smiths and Joy Division, might as well add Tom Waits to that list.
There’s a wonderful book by Michael Robinson entitled, The Long Sonata of the Dead, about the use of the Via Negativa in Beckett. He argues that Beckett affirms his most positive values via his negativity.
O’Driscoll is from Thurles, just down the road from where I live in Ireland. He works with my brother in the Revenue Commissioners.
No, John! The Irish poet featured here lives down the road from you and works with your brother! Who would have believed it? I love the final line and a bit in the poem : ‘you dreading,/you hoping, you regretting, you interloping.’ But not sure I get ‘interloping’ – does he mean that the person in the poem is trying to shift out of his skin after all and be an interloper in someone else’s? [either wanting to be someone else or to ‘invade’ someone else physically via love, sex, whatever…
I too love imperative poems, the tone of authority. Hail commander!
Hi Mary,
Dennis now lives in Dublin, but is originally from Thurles, which is very close to where I live.
He was the first poet I ever showed my work to. I still have his gracious letter. That was a lifetime ago, in the mid 80′s. He used to host a radio programme on poetry at that time.
He enjoys renown here and recently edited the collected interviews with Seamus Heaney entitled, Stepping Stones. To be honest, I don’t care for either his or Heaney’s poetry. I’m a Patrick Kavanagh man, and all that entails.
John
Wow, that was interesting to hear – thanks John. I didn’t even know he was Irish as I found the poem in the New Yorker.
What does being a Patrick Kavanagh man entail?
Helen
Hi Helen,
“Telling the truth even when it doesn’t serve your own self-interest.”
That was the motto by which he lived, wrote, suffered and died — nor artful eviqocating, no boringness and definitely no pretense.
Aah – what a brave maxim. I’m not nearly courageous enough to live that way…rely all too much on the ‘social lubricant’ of politeness…
It’s a tall order certainly, but one Kavanagh consistently personified.
There’s a funny-ish story about a review he was once asked to write of an amateur literary magazine put out by the Cappuchin monks. The editor [a priest], came to him and kept plying him with a fiver here, a fiver there. Kavanagh kept putting off writing the review, not in order to wheedle funds out of the parsimonious priest, but because he feared what he was going to write. Eventually, he penned the review and absolutely slated the magazine, cut it to shreds. The priest was devastated. He realized Kavanagh couldn’t be bought. His entire career was a series of such ‘betrayals’, what he perceived as the necessary defense of poetic standards. As he said, a critic must be profoundly biased, or ‘an evenly balanced scales may also hold nothing’.
Here is an interesting sample of some of his more colourful pronouncements.
John, given you admire Kavanagh’s life maxim…shouldn’t the poem above appeal to you? It is nothing if not honest!
I suppose …