We’re in Conversation with Poet Anne Casey, who hails from Ireland, lives in Australia, and is revered worldwide! To read Anne Casey is to fall in love—with her of course but also with poetry generally, Irish poetry particularly, and with the awesome power of words to celebrate “the sacred in the every day.” We are delighted to interview her here at Occhi.
You have been a speechwriter, business journalist, legal author/editor, magazine editor, and media communications specialist. Then, a few years ago, you became a poet too! What made you begin writing poetry?
My first poem came to me when I was eight years old. When I say ‘came to me,’ that is exactly what I mean. It occurred as a rush of thoughts that I somehow felt compelled to capture in words on a page. Over the decades since, this impulse has continued to seize me. In odd moments, seemingly out of nowhere, there will be this compelling idea that will not stop ricocheting inside my brain until I spill it onto the page.
Through my teens, those compulsions often turned to social justice and humanitarian issues— almost certainly driven out of my community and educational environment in a small, rural, Catholic community in the west of Ireland. Most of those scribblings idled in long-lost notebooks, but a few were published in youth magazines.
Later, as a young journalist in Dublin, I was known to discharge the odd fiery satire onto the back of a beermat or scrap of paper after interviewing some politician or bigwig. A global adventure in my mid-twenties saw the trend continue in a series of tag-eared notepads. All of those poems have since vanished into the slipstream of many house moves and my emigration to Australia.
As you mentioned, I’ve earned my crust through writing and publishing for the past 30 years, but my first poem as an adult was published in The Irish Times in 2016, In Memoriam II: The draper. For years, poetry had slipped by the wayside of a hectic career and then the first rush of motherhood. That first poem was a tribute to my late mother. It had been her untimely death to cancer in 2007 that drove me back to poetry. For the first few years, the emotions around her passing had been too raw, and I was busy mothering two young children. By 2015, those old impulses broke through the surface and poured out onto the pages—as I tried to fathom what was left of all the life and love we had shared, as I scrabbled to come to terms with the loss.
I was totally unprepared for the groundswell of response to The Draper from around the world. The newspaper comments piled up, and my social media and website were inundated with messages. I had unwittingly struck a chord—not just with the embodiment of grief, but in capturing the guilt of the immigrant and a snapshot of life in a rural Irish town in the 1970s. That is what prodded me to write my first collection, where the lost things go (Salmon Poetry 2017)—that drive to gather all the ‘lost things.’
How is the act of writing poetry different from the other writing you do?
With poetry, my writing habits tend to be completely haphazard and ‘on the fly’… which might seem like an aberration as, with my other writing personae, I tend to be highly focused. As a journalist and a legal author, for example, I will research, set up interviews, map out the structure, and sit down with a tsunami of notes to write. My approach to writing lifestyle essays is probably a fusion between that more business-oriented writing style and how I write poetry.
When it comes to writing poetry, I am still very much that eight-year-old who is suddenly swept away by an idea. It most often comes like a bolt out of the blue – a word, a phrase, a memory— a beacon summoning me to the page. Given that life takes the form of happy chaos most days, I may be in the shower, cooking, racing to meet a deadline, walking the dog, or on the school run when this occurs. (It strikes as no small irony that I am jumping up and down to pop things in and out of the oven as I say this!)
As a result, most of my poems start life on my phone. I will jot down a word, an idea, or a line as it occurs and continue chopping carrots. When I can grab a few spare minutes, I will patter out the rest of the poem and come back to it as I can to add or delete it. By the time the poem reaches my laptop, it is usually pretty much fully formed. This is what happened with Between ebb and flow, for example. One day I was seized by this powerfully vivid memory from a few days before my mother’s death and the poem just rushed out onto my phone during my sons’ swimming lesson.
That said, I’ve come to realise the genesis of the poem isn’t entirely as random as it seems. Without exception, my poems are on topics that matter deeply to me. I think what happens is that as I go about my day-to-day business, a part of my brain is marinating some little morsel, and when it’s ready, it slides it across to the service hatch. Also, I am occasionally commissioned or sometimes respond to a call-out, to write to a specific theme.
My ecopoem ‘Recipe for a Giant Pickle’ is an example. I wrote it in response to a call-out from Anne Elvey, Managing Editor of Plumwood Mountain ecopoetry journal, for poems of resistance against a proposed coal-mine in Queensland, Australia. There were, and still are, quite complex and very specific ecological issues at play and I needed to absorb and understand those before the poetry distillery could get to work. This process and material weren’t unfamiliar to me as in one of my past lives, I was an environment journalist and author.
The product was a protest poem in the form of a recipe, which was published in the resulting anthology, hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani. That ecopoem has since had many lives— including being reproduced in an environment-related art exhibition, in my second poetry collection (out of emptied cups) (Salmon Poetry 2019), as a limited edition poster by Garden Lounge creative space, in readings and podcasts, and performed by international climate activists, The Climate Guardians.
You received cherished advice from your colleague, Dublin journalist Barry McCall, years back. Please share his words of wisdom.
Barry was a bit of a legend to me when I started out in journalism in Dublin thirty years ago. He was the president of the National Union of Journalists and his byline was in all the big newspapers. I’d see him hammering away at the keyboard with a cigarette stub permanently fused to his lower lip. He seemed to churn out stories like they were hot cross buns.
One grey day while struggling to focus on a particularly mind-numbing interview unspooling through my headphones, I summoned the courage to ask Barry how he did it. “Just remember—the blank page is the enemy! Fill it up. Fill it with everything you know that’s relevant. Once you have the bones, go back and tighten it up.”
It was was like that moment when the final puzzle piece slots into place. After finishing my degree, I studied journalistic writing. I knew what to do. During my law degree, I had plenty of practice researching tricky topics and assembling my thinking. But this was it; you weren’t going to get anywhere until you launched an assault on that empty page. I’m so grateful to Barry that he gave me that gem at the outset of my writing career. It has saved me a lot of time and needless procrastination.
Maybe this explains why I write poetry the way that I do too. Once the thought crystallises, I just want to get it down. That’s not to say that I know exactly where a poem is going when I begin. I think every poem is a little bit of a magical mystery tour for me, and that’s part of its allure.
You were born in Ireland and lived half your life to date there and the other half in Australia. Does that make you an Irish or Australian poet?
That’s an interesting question, and one I’m sure many diaspora writers ponder from time to time. Despite having one foot in each camp, I think my writing voice is quite distinctively Irish. It has been observed that my poetry is lyrical and also liminal. I feel that both aspects come from my Irish cultural heritage. I grew up in the wilds of west Clare in the 1970s, in a community rich with ritual, surrounded by crumbling stone relics dating back to ancient Celtic and neo-Christian times, and the omnipotent presence of the Catholic Church.
Faith, a belief in the existence of the soul, and a sense of the spirit world around us were part and parcel of my youth. Losing people close to me from a young age strengthened this bond with the ethereal, as did the many legends surrounding us. I captured some of these in my poem Credos from my first collection.
My hometown of Miltown Malbay was the site of Ireland’s largest and longest-running traditional music summer school and festival. My growing-up years were infused with the pulse and beat, the haunting and lilting tones of Irish music. I was bilingual, in an English-speaking family, but also speaking Irish (‘Gaeilge’) from a young age. Meanwhile, my father ran a trawler off the west coast, so I was on and off boats; I developed ‘sea legs’ as I was learning to walk, so I think the rhythm of the waves also permeated my blood. All of those elements, I feel, come together in my poetry – in its essence, its cadence, syntax, vocabulary, imagery and resonances —if i were to tell you springs to mind here, and also Come and find me.
Having lived in Australia for as long as I lived in Ireland, of course, I have found my pace and inspirations here too. Every day, I walk in the natural reserve behind our home – amongst soaring Eucalypts and Angophoras, giant tree ferns and sandstone outcrops. The bush is alive with extraordinary bird and animal life, the scents and sounds that often pervade my poetry. All the beautiful outcasts, published recently in Westerly Magazine, is an example of this while also expressing some of my ongoing ecopolitical concerns.
I love the ocean here too; every year, we try to take our sons to the Great Barrier Reef to do some snorkeling, something my husband and I have been doing for the past two decades. My poem where once she danced embodies some of the truly astonishing diversity of sea-life there, while also voicing my fears for the ongoing threats to this fragile ecosystem. This poem was originally written for Planet in Peril, which was published by Fly on the Wall Press in aid of the World Wildlife Fund, and has just been shortlisted for Best Anthology in the Saboteur Awards in the UK. Sometimes, of course, my two worlds collide in one poem. All Souls, from which my second collection derives its title, is one of those.
Irish poets have long been associated with political resistance. Do some of your poems veer in that direction?
Is the pope a Catholic?! I come from a fairly political household in a very political county in a reasonably political country, so it was probably inevitable that politics would leach into my writing. Although I lived in the Republic of Ireland, political violence and debate was everywhere in west Clare in the 1970s. There were regular incursions into our area by terrorist sympathisers and retaliatory raids by the authorities seeking out arms caches. While studying and working in Dublin from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, bomb scares were commonplace.
I grew up knowing that poetry had been used since ancient times in Ireland in the political context. In the time of the Ancient Celts around 1,000 AD, Ard Filí (or High Poets) were greatly revered for their language skills. In the event of inter-clan conflicts, the Ard Filí were sent in first to attempt peaceful resolution through negotiation. Failing that, they were to come back with enemy intel!
Later, during and after the English invasion, poems and songs were used by the Irish as a covert way of passing on encoded messages about enemy insurrections and spreading the word about resistance efforts. Poetry was also used as a means of propagating hope in the darkest times of oppression and hardship.
Although my poetry is not political in the party political sense, I do regularly tackle political issues—mainly women’s rights, humanitarian issues and ecopolitics, with the odd satirical piece when I really can’t hold back. I think poetry has an important place in the armoury of resistance, equipped as it is to deliver pithy and pointed messages. My political satire, The emperor’s new nose springs to mind. There is also Welcome to your Life Cruises self-guided tour [Official transcript], which navigates the stormy sounds of women’s rights.
What words best describe your style of poetry?
I’ve mentioned the lyrical, liminal, and political elements of my poetry. One other aspect that is regularly noted by reviewers is form. My poems take many forms – concrete, free verse, sonnets, couplets, and also more experimental expressions. This multiplicity of forms is very important to me. As soon as the poem begins to emerge on the page, I am already playing with its form. To me, the subject and context often direct the form that the poem will take.
My COVID poem—on Monday, I ate three strawberries, a pear, a palmful of sunflower seeds & one nicely ripe banana—which riffs off The Very Hungry Caterpillar children’s book, takes the shape of a cocoon on the page. The very long title forms the stem from which the shell is suspended. This poem recently featured in the Poetry Day Ireland Competition by The Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital (you may need to scroll down a little on the page to view it).
With Darkness (published in Abridged 0-52: Contagion Issue), I spent time manoeuvring the words into an anatomically correct representation of a human heart as it suited my macabre intent. My ecopoem, Thank You For Shopping With Us, which demonstrates the true cost of four beef steaks in planetary terms, is presented in the form of a cash register receipt. Meanwhile, I will arise and go, a Yeats tribute, takes a much more traditional shape on the page —although I held back on giving it a formal rhyming structure. It does have lyrical assonance and irregular rhyming going on, which I felt lent themselves to the theme of the Irish exile yearning for home.
In addition to writing poetry, you have also been writing lyrics for songs and music albums. Is this something you will continue to incorporate into your body of work?
I have collaborations in place with musicians and composers in Ireland, Australia, and the US covering genres including chamber music, classical, choral works, rock, folk, and hip hop music. I’ve written lyrics for over thirty songs, some of which have had radio airplay here in Australia. My work has featured on commercially released music albums and videos and I’ve recently signed a contract with a major global music label. News on that should be coming out sometime in the next few months.
Much to my excitement also, my poem Whisperings was recently selected from international entries to be recorded with specially-composed music by critically acclaimed Australian composer, David Yardley for his forthcoming album featuring the Sydney Chamber Choir, among other leading Australian musicians. Back in Ireland, the very talented singer-songwriter Claire Watts has plans to record the song she has created from my poem Into the West, which I wrote as a lullaby to my mother following her passing.
I definitely hope to continue with various musical collaborations. There are several other artistic alliances in the pipeline at the moment. Hopefully, they will emerge fully formed in the not-too-distant future.
Where does poetry fit into the world we live in? And are there any particular trends you’re seeing?
I come from a country where poetry has long been celebrated as an intrinsic part of the human experience. As I mentioned earlier, poets had an esteemed place in Irish history. Poetry was used not only as a political tool but as a rampart for an oppressed populace under foreign rule. Nowadays, it would be hard to find a part of the country without a regular, lively poetry fixture. When a poet dies, the nation goes into mourning.
As Ireland faced into the COVID crisis, people painted lines of poetry onto sheets and hung them out their windows. Seamus Heaney’s line: “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere” was particularly popular. Even the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, is a poet; one of his collections was published by my book publisher, Salmon Poetry. When I say that poetry is part of the fabric of Irish society, I really mean it; the national airline had lines from Yeats poems woven into the upholstery on their airplanes a few years ago!
In terms of trends, I’m seeing a lot of COVID-related poems at the moment. I think this demonstrates the role that poetry is taking in expressing what is going on for people across the globe in the current crisis. It reminds me of how the Irish people turned to poetry in their darkest hour. On a personal level, it brings me back to my own return to poetry in my grief over my mother’s death. I think people are reaching to poetry for comfort and as a way of processing the unfathomable transformation of the world around us.
For me, poetry is everywhere. It is an essential instrument of the human spirit. It is solace. It is a celebration of the sacred in the everyday. It is resistance. And it is hope. It is the light you don’t realise is needed until that solitary voice rises out of the darkness and you know you are not alone.
How can Occhi readers learn more about your work?
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as: @1annecasey and my website is: anne-casey.com.
Images: Anne Casey photo by David Clare
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