I’m stuck in Atlanta for an extra few days because Heathrow is undergoing some kind of snowpocalypse. So I may not get home for Christmas, but I’m not going to think about that. I’m going to think about people because that’s pretty much what everything boils down to at some point.

More importantly, the connections between people. Collaboration is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Ryan Van Winkle had some interesting things to say about the way he writes, and the idea of community (especially the wonderful Forest arts collective) was something he praised as an oppurtunity to learn wonderful things one wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to, a means of constructive criticism, and also a way to hardened your convictions (you only know how much you really feel about a poem when you have to defend it, perhaps).

Bernard O’Donoghue is one of the big guns of Irish poetry and currently positioned at Oxford University (plus on the syllabus for my Irish lit seminar next semester). His brief introductory essay to his 1995 collection, Gunpowder, lays out the central tenets of his approach to writing poems, the most significant being the relationship between the writer and community.

O’Donoghue likens poetry to traditional music, an analogy I rather like, saying:

Poetry, like traditional music, is a product of and a repayment to community

This description seems a much more positive slant on the kind of dynamic that Brian Cowen blunderingly described earlier this year at the inauguration of Harry Clifton as Ireland Professor of Poetry. However, to what extent can this statement survive the cultural weight is sets itself up for? Even within the small space of this essay, O’Donoghue succumbs to a language of violence that recasts this utopian ideal of conscious and subconscious collaboration between the poet and community. He admits that drawing upon the community for inspiration becomes an exploitation of sorts.

Of course, what is really questionable about the notion of any kind of community/poet dynamic is the existence of such defined groups and relationships. Partially, this feels more pertinent now, 15 years later, when globalisation and the spread of technology have torn down traditional concepts of community. And if you want to talk about the relationship that poets have to this phenomenon, I suggest asking Chris Emslie, who is knee deep in writing a thesis based on the idea that what unites contemporary poets (in Britain, at least) is individualism. Firstly though, and to avoid the narcissism that makes critics and readers automatically try and weave their own experience to any art, it is important to question just how solid the community that O’Donoghue is describing actually is. Irish communities in the 90s were fraught with tension.Community itself could almost be considered a negative word, with the sense of ‘belonging’ being utilised by militia forces to militarize. To belong to a community could translate to becoming another community’s target.

I would argue that O’Donoghue is really engaging in a kind of idealistic escapism here. The perfect dynamic he describes breaks down throughout the essay, with the nurturing symbiotic relationship he describes being taken over by his language of exploitation, and particularly ‘poaching’, that reflects the violence of Irish communities at the time. The sense of responsibility that O’Donoghue elucidates is a much more sinister issue, to me. I don’t want art to endure any sense of debt, but I have not immersed myself in a sociopolitical situation and used that for my poetry comparable to the Troubles. I don’t doubt that living in that context would make a writer want to soothe and speak for those he/she was living amongst

Inevitably when I read these kinds of manifestos on writing I reimagine them in terms of myself, or at least, my context. In this case, I definitely extrapolate some truth from O’Donoghue’s large scale comments. His community is much larger– a local society and a sense of history– but to me, the poet ‘as a licensed poacher, claiming a kind of ruthless poetic licence to draw on other people’s experiences’ makes sense in a personal way. I am guilty of culling my friends’ soundbytes for poems, often with a kind of secrecy that suggests the poacher.

Similarly, I’m a huge believer in the collaboration that occurs in workshops. And beyond the literal figures on community, isn’t all art collaborative? Half the work of the artist and half the work of the consumer? (My arithmetic is pretty weak, ratios are not exact…)