FROM THE ARCHIVES:Following the publication of his first poetry collection in 1968, Michael Hartnett described his life up to then in three articles. This extract is from the first. – JOE JOYCE
IN 1955 I wrote a very bad piece of verse which was published in the Limerick Weekly Echo. I was thirteen: I wrote the piece for no good reason, unless it were to make up for my poverty.
One of my teachers descended on me wrathfully; it was a copy of the work of that great poet, T. D. Shanahan, he said. The headmaster, Frank Finucane, defended me.
The other teacher challenged me to write a set poem in two weeks. Frank Finucane called his class to a halt, and with his encouragement I finished the poem in ten minutes.
The other teacher retreated, and never spoke to me again. So, at thirteen, I found that being a poet in Ireland is, contrary to what the Americans think, an incongruity.
That was in Newcastle West, Co. Limerick.
I left the national school in 1956 and lost an ally. Secondary school came then, and I made a new enemy, my English teacher.
For five years I was beaten more often for “meditating the Muse”, as he called it, than for lack of learning. But my poetry changed for the better, not because of the school but because I partook of an old Irish custom: the girl I loved at the time entered a convent. This, and the claustrophobia of Newcastle West, its rich and its poor, its bullying priest, turned me to write about myself.
Any oppression I encountered was not direct. I was oppressed by what was inherent in the town’s way of life, the patronising society that doled out bread and boots to the poor, the reading of subscriptions from the pulpit, the quashed scandals, dark secrets about the Troubles; and I was a poor man’s son in a secondary school, a place I had no right to be, as I was often reminded.
So the poetry went on. I had published another bad piece of verse in the Irish Weekly Independent and got a guinea for it. This brought me some small recognition in the town, as a few people there read that paper.
As the Dublin literati never really appreciate a poet unless the Observer or Sunday Times mention him, so the people of Newcastle West would not believe I was a poet unless they saw it “down in black and white” in a Dublin newspaper.
I left home in 1961 and went to London, out of pure instinct. I worked as a teaboy in a factory there, every scrap of poetry melting away.
Then the coincidences began. I met a friend from home. He introduced me to his uncle, who was working on the Sunday Review; he read some of the poetry I had brought with me and liked it. Shortly afterwards my photograph appeared in the Sunday Review, captioned with an awful pun, "The Teaboy of the Western World."
A short article said I was a poet. The Sunday Reviewhad a good circulation in Newcastle West; I had achieved my myth.
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