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| Burnfort Bar circa 1970s Photo credit: Richard Cotter |
When I put my selected poems TheWindows of Graceland together this year for Carcanet, even I – the culprit – was struck afresh at how many poems have sprung from the village of Burnfort. And since I submitted the final manuscript last December, at least twenty new draft poems have grown from the same seemingly inexhaustible ground. After twenty-seven years of writing poems, I have the strangest feeling that only now with this book published, can I get seriously started as a poet.
My home was a bar, a shop with one BP petrol pump. A typical Irish crossroads commercial establishment – the long low house featured many signs from the ‘Double Diamond Works Wonders’ yellow and red ashtrays to the blue ‘Players’ on the shop window and the green and white lighted sign in the shape of a ‘Major’ cigarette packet that lit up the pages of the books I illicitly read long past by bedtime. The signs appear again in the poem ‘Burnfort with Las Vegas’.
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| Me next to my brother Tom's MG circa 1975 |
There was one sign that dominated all the others – the large yellow and green BP sign which swung on a towering pole, creaking in the wind. When I first saw Sergio Leone’s Once upon A Time in The West – one of the inspirations for my prose poem Petrol (2012) – the opening scene with its mixture of watchfulness and boredom, creaking wind turbines, unshaven unpredictable customers somehow reminded me of Burnfort Bar. The squeaking chalk on the blackboard, coupled with a sense of violence about to explode conjured the Master of Burnfort National School fifty yards up the road. A version of the Master turns up in Petrol and he makes several appearances in The Windows of Graceland.
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| Early 1960s - from the bag and case in the photo, my brother Michael must have been about to go back to boarding school |
My sister Bernadette used to call out, ‘Stranger in town!’ as we looked out over our elaborate arrangement of tins and boxes and bananas under the Players sign in the shop window when a non-local came into view. Maybe that’s what started me seeing Burnfort in terms of a Western. And especially that overriding sense of waiting for something to happen. And the excruciatingly exaggerated waiting in the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West references the Miller gang’s vigil at the beginning of High Noon. Along with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, High Noon found its way into my poem ‘Cowboys’ – a poem about waiting all day to see the gift of a horse emerge from a horse box only to find out that it’s a tiny Dexter cow. It ends with what I imagined as a Sergio Leone close-up of my father and me – ‘our murderous faces’.
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| Me as a toddler circa 1963 |
My time in Burnfort was a time of waiting. I remember interminable evenings in the bar when it was so quiet our one faithful customer Tom Twomey could be heard sucking on his pipe. And I was not supposed to have my head in a book, ignoring him. From an early age, it was drummed into us that we were there to entertain the customers. Drama and my seriously dramatic mother were at the heart of Burnfort too and perhaps that’s why there are so many dramatic monologues in my poetry. When I wrote the fictionalised dramatic monologues of Petrol at the end of 2009 in an intense rush of inspiration, the BP sign creaked all the way through it. Surely now, I thought, this will rinse the last of Burnfort out of me. Not so. I still can’t separate my poems from my early experiences growing up in Burnfort, Burnfort from some kind of Western film, and the Westerns explicitly or implicitly from getting into my poems.
I find the best poetry not only in verse, but in prose, in everyday speech, in songs and often in film. I especially love the films that honour the vernacular of the American West, the best terse nuggets from Budd Boetticher’s B movies, Monte Hellman’s acid Westerns and especially the films of John Ford. It is widely agreed that Ford is a poet among directors, his many admirers include Lindsay Anderson, Orson Welles and John Milius who describes John Ford’s style in terms of the Japanese idea of “conservation of line”, saying Ford can do with a couple of “brush strokes” what it takes others six or eight to do.
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| Still from John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) |
I’ve written about Ford’s My Darling Clementine in a poem of the same name. The poem is about my father but I was thinking of Ford’s roots too. Born as John Martin Feeney, Ford was the son of an Irish saloon keeper in Maine. My poem centres on a scene in a bar between Henry Fonda and Victor Mature that feels intensely real and true to my own memories of Irish bar life. And I couldn’t help stealing bartender Max’s answer to Fonda’s question if he’d ever been in love: “No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.”
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| Victor Mature (left) in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) |
In Stagecoach, we meet at least four different bartenders, every one of them a real character. They speak volumes in the way they stand and look. I love the last one, a particularly dressy solemn-faced saloon keeper wearing a ruffled shirt. I missed him the first time because he’s in the background when the guns come out in Lordsburg. While the Plummer boys are getting ready to shoot, the saloon keeper signs to his assistant and they quickly lift the ornate mirror down from the wall to safety. One can’t help thinking that Ford’s gift for fine ensemble staging came out of his experiences in that saloon in Maine. The bartender sees and hears it all from the sidelines – from the perfect body language in Ford’s heart-breaking compositions which need no words at all to Thomas Mitchell’s garrulous alcoholic doctor in Stagecoach quoting Marlowe. And surely he is related to the drunken thespian who runs out of steam halfway through his Hamlet soliloquy in My Darling Clementine and almost gets his toes shot off by the Clanton gang. Is he based on one of his father’s customers? I feel they must be. I feel I’ve met them all in Burnfort too.
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| Henry Fonda (Bottom left) in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) |
Yet John Ford’s admirers are not confined to the denizens of Irish bars. A huge international influence, he is a particular inspiration for another favourite of mine, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa who incidentally also admired Shakespeare as much as Ford must have done. Even the philistine Clanton gang know about Yorick. Ford loved to pretend to be a philistine too.
Ford’s fans like Shakespeare’s appear in the most unlikely places. When I was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University in Mile End, I had a hard time trying to help a Korean film student who was trying to hide the fact that his film essay was plagiarised. Uncomfortable under my probing, he burst out angrily, “But I am passionate about the films of John Ford!” The essay in question had nothing to do with John Ford but when he realised that I was equally passionate about John Ford, we bonded and he confessed, promising to go straight in future. I think of him often and his desperation trying to express in an alien language his love for an art that speaks an international language.
Great art speaks directly to each receiver, shadowed through the lens of his or her past. My first loves were the tattered old school primers and anthologies I found in an upstairs cupboard in Burnfort Bar. I found there the treasures of a life-time, poems about spraying potatoes, stealing plums from the icebox, dishonourably throwing a log at a snake and the special one which inspired me to write ‘Desperate Men’ because I never could shake off the feeling that the horseman knocking so late on the moonlit door in ‘The Listeners’ could only be desperate for one thing – an alcoholic drink.
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