You went to Ireland during your time at college?
I went to Ireland on a study abroad the summer term after my Freshman year. We travelled from Louisburg and Westport in Mayo to Dublin, and up to Belfast where we stayed for three weeks, before finishing out the program in Galway and the Aran Islands.
In Belfast I met Mebdh McGuckian. She stayed in touch with me, we emailed back and forth, and I sent her some of my poetry and she was very supportive. After I graduated, she encouraged me to attend the Seamus Heaney Summer School, and later to apply for a Masters there.
I do remember that first trip to Ireland, I wrote a sequence of poems called Poems Éireann tracing our circuit of the island as we went. It ended up winning Carleton’s in-house poetry award, so I ended up with a bit of a reputation as a poet for that.
What happens after college?
I moved to Austin, Texas, of all places, “for a girl,” as they say. It worked out pretty well, though – we’ve been together almost 17 years. Married with three kids now. Anyway, after a few years down in Austin, I applied to Queen’s University to do a Master’s. I had been in Belfast in 2005 and in 2009 when a number of paramilitary groups were laying down arms and disbanding. Maybe I should’ve just settled there permanently as a good luck charm. In any case, eventually I ended up in Belfast at the Seamus Heaney Centre.
After I cut my teeth in Belfast, I moved back Stateside, to Manhattan, for a year, working at the Strand Bookstore while applying for PhD programs. I ended up at the University of Connecticut, where I earned a second Master’s and a PhD. My dissertation work focused on the role translation and translingual practices – code-switching, code-meshing, that sort of thing – and play in poetic making.
What kind of ideas do you investigate through your work?
Language is a key conundrum in every poet’s work, of course.
I was late coming to English in terms of reading and writing, so I was continually finding moments where I wasn’t using the language “correctly,” but rather in my own ignorant and eccentric way. And because I would often “misuse” the language – and that could be very embarrassing at times – I did often think that I wasn’t particularly bright. I thought I was lacking or deficient in some way.
However, the longer I have worked with languages, I have formally studied half a dozen languages to varying degrees – Spanish, Hindi, a little Sanskrit, German, Irish and English – I think I have come to the conclusion that I am never entirely trusting of my capacity for any language, let alone English. And that isn’t a bad thing.
The Welsh poet-painter David Jones, in his book “In Parenthesis”, there is a character in the middle of the book, Dai Greatcoat, a quasi-self portrait, who has a big speech modelled after Taliesin. Before the speech, it is set up with the phrase, “He articulates his English with an alien care”, and that struck me when I first read it. I think that is very much what I feel when I use English, that I never entirely trust what it is that the language is doing, and I think that is the reason why I gravitated so strongly to Irish literature, because of this sense of language being “other”.
James Joyce expresses something similar to that feeling in “A Portrait of the Artist”, when Stephen Dedalus is explaining the word “tundish” to the dean: “His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech.” The dean is English, of course, and Joyce’s young Irishman has confounded him with the word for “funnel” used in Lower Drumcondra, “where they speak the best English.”
So language and the process of communication is a key part of your work?
Language is both interior and exterior, in a way, just like identity. We have a tendency to think in terms of interiority when we consider “individual” identity, and then there is language which is formal and exterior to a certain degree, which we use to communicate. I view that as a very daunting reality, something that I struggle with, but it is also a saving grace of sorts.
When you attempt to communicate, to write in a language that is not native, of course, that is something else again. My own work with macaronic verse, especially incorporating the Irish language, for example – and I would never claim mastery of the language, it’s an ongoing labour of love, one that I think is important, especially in the broader diaspora. It is one of the most beautiful and tenacious languages. I’m drawn to it for that very reason, and I find that certain things are expressible in Irish that simply cannot be expressed in English.
There are things which can be discovered through Irish that cannot be discovered through English, and things that can be discovered and expressed through the interaction of the two languages together that could not be through either by itself. And there are some fantastic poets out there working in this vein: Ciara Ní É. Doireann Ní Ghríofa comes to mind, of course. Gearóid Mac Lochlainn.
But when I write anything in Irish, I’m able to consult friends of mine who are native speakers to catch me when I stumble, and I find my way through the language bit by bit, so that at the end of it all there’s a poem in Irish. It’s much the same method, I think, as workshopping poems in general – even though the poet’s name appears as the author of the work, it’s always a communal effort, and poetry benefits from that. But it’s because you have created a living thing, a piece of poetry that, despite your own potential limitations and deficiencies, is something that lives outside of you – in other words, exterior. I do find that a beautiful and, in many ways, an inspiring thing. And, indeed, it is something that, in turn, informs my work in English, too. In a sense, that communal negotiation of language is its own form of communication.
So, yes, language and the various processes of communication are preoccupations in my writing.
If you would like to see more of the work of Matthew Ryan Shelton – see link below