"Something Deep in Me Was Watchful" Poet Agnes Walsh in conversation with Beth Follett

Agnes Walsh's Oderin (Pedlar Press) is the first collection in over ten years from the Newfoundland poet. It's writing that is worth the wait - the collection is a set of powerful, beautiful poems steeped in the Newfoundland atmosphere that informs them (including providing the title, taken from an island in Walsh's hometown of Placentia Bay). 

The three-section collection is written for, to, and about Walsh's mother, in language that is both rich and direct, as demonstrated in lines like "It’s your tongue too was dipped/ in the blue ink, and do go leaking iambics/ all the day long." 

We're thrilled to have Agnes Walsh on Open Book today courtesy of Pedlar Press' Beth Follett, who interviewed Agnes about her writing life, from literary pilgrimages to bookish friendships. Agnes tells Beth about the book that made her cry (in a good way), getting energy from writing, and the writing advice she would give her younger self. 

Beth Follett for Open Book:

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

Agnes Walsh:

I did not set out to specifically go to these places in order to make a literary pilgrimage but once in the area I made it a point to go where certain writers had hung out or where they were laid to rest.

1. The first place was when I left home at seventeen, in 1967. I headed straight to Greenwich Village, the East Village, to see if any of the Beats were around, to try and catch sight of and hear them, or Bob Dylan, etc.

2. Then while I lived in the southern United States I visited Faulkner’s grave in Oxford, Mississippi, and Eudora Welty’s birthplace of Jackson, Mississippi. I have a good friend from Long Beach, Mississippi so it was convenient. I adore Welty’s writing especially.

3. Went to Elizabeth Bishop’s gravesite in Worchester, Massachusetts, and to the house where she spent her very early years, in Great Village, Nova Scotia.

4. In Ireland, I happened to be in Sligo so I went to Yeats’s grave. His headstone is so plain but there’s this great quote: Cast a cold eye on life on death, horsemen pass by.

5. I went and sat in John Millington Synge’s chair, an outdoor stone crop overlooking Galway Bay, on Inis Maan, in the Aran Islands. And went to the cottage where he lived when Yeats sent him there to listen to how the people spoke Hiberno-English and to learn Irish. I went to Inis Maan in 2005 to watch Druid Theatre perform all of Synge’s plays there. That was a definite pilgrimage. I went to the Abby Theatre. To the banks of the river Liffey that Joyce wrote about. To the Great Blasket Island where the likes of the great Peig Seyers, Tomas O’Crohan and Maurice O’Sullivan grew up and wrote about. Also to Gougane Barra to hunt down where The Tailor and Ansty lived since reading about them reminded me so much of old Newfoundland.

I can’t get out of Ireland before I mention going to hear Seamus Heaney read in Derry. But I heard him here in St. John’s before that.

6. Ok, I’ll go on to Portugal where I went to the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, and I went looking for something honouring Jose Saramago but could not find at the time. There is a museum now.

7. Iceland, I went to Hallador Laxness’s house and read a poem I wrote to him but he was dead by then, just his house there. I remember remarking how his maid had her own private library in the house.

This isn’t a pilgrimage but in the 70s I worked for a while in the Westminster Hotel when Milton Acorn lived there. I had a sort of eye pilgrimage because I watched him every day climb the stairs to his room with bundles of newspapers and books under his arm.

BF:

What is the first book that made you cry?

AW:

I think it was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I think they were happy tears though, because I think I saw myself for the first time in someone else. I can’t remember a thing about it but I did write a poem about how it moved me. Very sentimental.

BF:

Does writing energize or exhaust you?

AW:

Energize. Because if it gets as far as out of my head and onto the paper then I’m flying. Of course I trip up and fall when I re-read, because that’s when the work starts or the despair/relief when it gets trashed. I’ve been writing for so long and depending on it for a sense of life for so long that to not write makes me feel like I’m walking around lost and wondering where everybody has got to. I go to nature for nurture, and nature always gives.

BF:

Which other authors are you friends with and how do they help you as a writer?

AW:

Writers are a strange click (clique), a strange crew. Mostly we’re not overly friendly, or don’t go around looking for friends. Now, I’m projecting here, most likely, but that’s all I can do, is stretch my own ways into other writers. We see each other on the street and nod, and if we’re on the same sidewalk we never ask what the other is writing. Usually we ask each other the most awkward personal questions, because we are so awkward unless we’re writing or at home reading. We live so much in our own heads that to ask the other something like... Have you written a will? Or... What are you putting on your headstone?, is kind of normal. Well, if you’re my age. I have found great support over the years from writers like Bernice Morgan. Bernice would probably ask about my headstone. Andy Jones is always so personable that whenever I meet him on the street I tell him my life story again and he always smiles and laughs even though he has heard it since 1975. I like Joel Thomas Hynes because he reminds me of a male version of who I imagined myself to be when I was eighteen. And he writes Newfoundland speech so smack on and he gives my books to Sue Kent who I also admire. Pamela Morgan, for her songwriting and for anything she writes because she is so smart. Pam doesn’t seem to mind my glum talk about money worries and confusion about living in the modern world. I can tell her about how much the gruesome ballad Tam Lyn moves me and she won’t think I’m morbid.

BF:

Do you want each book to stand on its own or are you trying to build a body of work between each book? 

AW:

I never had a plan. I find that I have so many reoccurring thoughts that go unanswered in my head that I must be rehashing the same ol’ same ol’. The mystery of family intrigues me. The unique separateness of this island intrigues me. Any island intrigues me, because of how the people on islands love where we live so much and we love to get off them too. I appreciate it when love/hate of anything comes into the picture and wants to be addressed. Half of me writes in order to find something out and the other half to appreciate what is already in front of me. You look at a delicate little wild orchid in the midst of so much of last years dried up grass and wonder how it managed to push through, to get there right in front of you. How can you not marvel! One time I was talking to a therapist and I was full of anxiety about how I cannot just look at a snowfall on a roof, I can’t just let it be. although it is perfectly fine on its own. I have to write about it. He prescribed a pill but I didn’t take it. I suppose I was hoping he’s say that’s normal or shut the fuck up and go home and write, you whiner. So, I don’t know what I want in terms of a body of work. Perhaps you see something in my work that leads you to this question, something I don’t see? 

BF:

If you could tell your younger writing self anything what would it be?

AW:

You are right. Fitting in never mattered greatly, in fact it went against the grain of yourself. Something deep in me was watchful. Being too eager sometimes for friendships, or say… Girl Guides let me know eventually that it might just be a temporary insecurity, because the minute I was into a group I wanted to get out. Out and back home to my book, my blank sheet of paper, my meadow, where I could lie on my back and look into the infinite. Really, I thrived on it. I always loved pencils, erasers, notebooks, anything pertaining to a possible poem. The whole set up of it on the flat surface of a table was a world I moved to in order to get down what was in my head. I wasn’t exceptional by any means, rather dull, a wallflower. Unless there was a good song on the jukebox, because I love to dance, or if someone wanted to talk about ideas. I liked my younger self, because I found the beauty in nature and the beauty of words. Some years later, in my twenties it was, I remember handing over a bunch of my poems to Des Walsh in the back of a taxi on our way to a house party, and he read them in the dull glow of the taxi light. He never said anything but I saw an emotion choking in his face so I hugged myself. If he’d had looked bored or mannerly I would have stopped writing then and there, but no, he stuttered something and stuffed the papers into his jacket pocket and published them some months later in Breakwater’s 31 Newfoundland Poets. My younger self was much more secure in writing than my nowadays self.

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Agnes Walsh was born in Placentia, Newfoundland. She is a poet and a playwright. She has published two collections of poetry, In the Old Country of My Heart (Killick Press) and Going Around With Bachelors (Brick Books). She is the artistic director and founder for The Tramore Theatre Troupe and in 2005 she founded the Bere Island Theatre Troupe in Ireland.