A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett

Abstract

A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett Theo Dorgan (bio) From The Poets and Poetry of Munster: One Hundred Years of Poetry from South Western Ireland, ed. Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Stephanie Schwerter (December 2022/January 2023). By permission of the editors. all poets are singular, in the sense that we are all singular, bearing the burden of one life and one life only, but also in the sense that no poet can be comfortably placed in a definite lineage, presented to us as a manifestation in one particular line of tradition. Michael Hartnett was more singular than most. He was of Munster, and he acknowledged Munster forebears, but if this was the place he started from, he was unpredictable and cosmopolitan in his tastes and in the company he would keep; nothing in his background could have predicted or predetermined the poetry he would make, the arc his life would take. 1. Birth and a people He was born in 1941, in Croom, County Limerick; he grew up in Newcastle West, in a time of close horizons, small expectations, and apparently narrow minds. In those days, for the children of the poor, the prospects were few; the best hope was emigration, offering what the country could not—work and a living, however diminished. For the waywardly gifted, however, there is always the opportunity to carve out one’s own niche, albeit at the sacrifice of comfort and social place as generally understood. The State was barely thirty years old and had already abandoned the revolutionary promise to cherish its children equally when Michael Hartnett stepped outside the boundaries of class and predestiny to discover himself a poet. He published his first work in a local paper at the age of thirteen, his first poem in the Irish Times when he was still a schoolboy. From the day he left school, he thought of himself first and always as a poet. [End Page 18] 2. A poet of and from a particular place In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Hartnett says: “I’m the only ‘recognized’ living Irish poet who was born in Croom, County Limerick, which was the seat of one of the last courts of poetry in Munster: Seán Ó Tuama and Aindrias Mac Craith. When I was quite young I became very conscious of these poets, and, so, read them very closely indeed.”1 In small places, folk memory runs deep, and a certain cachet endured in the title “poet,” with connotations of “other,” “different,” “gifted,” and “dangerous.” With the niche already prepared, so to speak, one sees the attraction for a curious young mind, already verbally adept and quick: poetry offered place, ancestry, a degree of acceptance for the chosen path, and open horizons for a young man who had already discovered the power of words. It is hardly uncommon, in a young poet, that she or he would first begin to grow in the shelter of some chosen poet mentor, whose sensibility, or technique, or more usually some amalgam of both opened a road forward in the craft. When Hartnett first sought such a precursor he looked at his immediate local context, and backward into another time and another language. What he found there would make no discernible impact on his craft (he never translated the totem figures, Mac Craith or Ó Tuama) but furnished him with a particular kind of warrant—he could and did think of himself as the favored inheritor of a tradition, and also as one obliged to be loyal to that tradition. This sense of obligation would become the sign and signature of his work. Few Irish poets writing in English would own fealty to the tradition of Irish-language poetry in the way that Hartnett did; his contemporaries and near contemporaries chose figures who were perhaps as close to home but were certainly nearer in time, in language, and in their themes and subjects. His Irish at the time was meager, mostly acquired through overhearing Bridget Halpin, his grandmother, speak at late-night firesides when the child had been safely put to bed. Much of his childhood was spent in her Camas cottage. He would later...