A Poet in Motion
Alice Lyons describes a lifelong love affair with writing
Some of us find our path easily: we know who we are, what we want to do in life, and we go straight for it. Fair play. For me, it has been a winding road. That’s why Robert Graves’s poem ‘Flying Crooked’ speaks to me directly. It opens like this:
The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight…
Even my passions aren’t straightforward— I’m drawn equally to the visual and the verbal. I started out young as a painter. My mother would give me a year’s worth of after-school painting lessons as my birthday present when I was a child in New Jersey. I discovered I had an innate fluency for mixing colours. I found poetry when I was in college in Connecticut— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney were the first sparks—and after a semester in Dublin, I started writing in earnest.
But it took stops and starts (flying crooked!) to figure out how to keep up the creative work while trying to make a living. I waitressed, worked with refugees and immigrants, taught EFL, and by my late 20s I was in a steady job that paid the bills, but I felt I was dying inside. My creative energy had no outlet. I tacked up Heaney’s ‘Blackberry Picking’ in my office cubicle as a talisman.
With small steps, I recaptured my creative life. I enrolled in painting classes in the university where I was teaching and re-familiarised myself with the creative process that had come naturally to me as a child. Whether it’s writing a poem, a song or designing a building, an app or a teacup, creative process teaches us how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, with not knowing, with risking, with failure. This is the heart of art-making—of life-making, really.
In 1998, I upped sticks from Portland, Maine and moved to the west of Ireland — savings allowed me to buy a house and time to focus on creative work. Soon after I arrived, I began writing poems again, and my work blossomed as if saying a big
YES to my new home. I continue to teach and administer arts and literary events to support myself. The cultural life, language(s) and beauty of the people and land of this country have been my sustenance—all of it feeds my work.
I recently received a yearlong fellowship at Harvard. I had the gift and privilege to drop deep into my thoughts and have uninterrupted time. I’m now in the final stretch of the book I began writing there. It has gone through so many iterations!
All the seeming ‘false starts’ were necessary to find the right form for writing about the death of my mother when I was a teenager. Creativity demands that we get lost, that we doubt—frequently—in the process of finding our work. Again
‘Flying Crooked’: ‘He lurches here and here by guess/ And God and hope and hopelessness.’
I think a lot about how publication can be reimagined for poetry and how new readers can be reached. Over the last twelve or so years, I’ve worked with hand drawn and digital animation to publish my poems in new ways. Animation is an innately synthetic medium; it allows for movement, colour, rhythm, sound, and visuals inherent in a text to be enriched. My long-time collaborator, Donegal-based animator/artist Orla Mc Hardy, is a magician. Working with her has opened up tome entirely new technical possibilities for what writing can be.
The built environment is also a potential ‘page’ for poems. Public art projects have given me the opportunity to write for particular communities and to devise appropriate installations of the poems in architectural settings. Right now I’m supervising the construction of ‘Amphitheatre for introverts (and others)’ on the shore of Lough Lannagh in Castlebar. The text of one of my poems will be carved into the limestone terraces. I hope the poem will chime with the setting and that the amphitheatre will invite quiet contemplation as well as provide a space forpublic readings and gigs.
I still believe in books and printed matter unreservedly. Digital media have exploded what reading and writing can be and have revolutionised access to literature. But the experience of holding an actual book of exquisite writing published on real paper will never be replaced. One of my deep joys has been accompanying my daughter on her language-learning journey. I loved holding her finger while she touched the words of her storybook as if they were magic objects.
They are! Poetry returns us to that vivid state when language can be felt on the tongue as a substance, a dear birthright, a food we can play with, together.