Poetry defined me or helped me to define myself– the very basic desire to encode what I felt, register what I knew, reflect and discharge complexities I was daunted by, all dictated that poetry became an intrinsic and necessary act.
I was fourteen, infatuated with the notional idea of poet as maudit – that we must suffer determinedly to forge or disclose the deepest truths – as Anthony Cronin noted in his sideways glance to Baudelaire via Mangan. When I think back to that early work it is narrative which is the propulsive driver of the long poems I spent my summers writing and refining, and it is narrative which has remained a constant over the years. Those early long poems were modelled on Keats’ Endymion or Byron’s Don Juan. They were, of course, pathetic in the sense of being marked by melancholy. I was stereotypically in a state of juvenile, neurasthenic enthral ‘to easeful Death’. I didn’t necessarily want or expect to live. That poets like pop stars would show their gold early, like Rimbaud or Morrison, and then extinguish ruggedly in a drug haze in some desert or other, was part of the simple-minded but defining mythos I bought into.
This desire to explore narrative in poetry led me to write The JJ Sequence (Part 1 of The Interior Act/Salmon). These were the first person poems of a child abuser. The final section of that book was called The Xavier Poems, and these were the utterances of an alter self. Persona poems are a route into character and into structured first person narratives. The book of poems following on from The Interior Act was In Daily Accord (Salmon), which was the culmination of a daily writing project conducted over fifteen months. The poems were either haikus or senryus and they were edited down to five hundred or so. Inevitably characters moved into and out of focus over the course of that period and narrative lines meshed to create a story arc of sorts.
My first novel, The Two Women of Aganatz (Wolfhound), arose in part from having spent time working in the neutral zone between Saudi and Kuwait years before American troops would embed there prior to their invasion of Iraq. It was the desert that cried out for a narrative. It was much the same kind of desert as my father had occupied, while on duty in Libya working as a RAF maintenance engineer on Spitfires, during the Second World War. The desert was part of a connective landscape that we shared. It became, in the context of the book, a psychological landscape.
The poems I wrote in the desert didn’t really reflect the world I was privy to, or didn’t seem to formally contain the world I wanted to conjure. The desert was intriguing, spatially rarefied, and I felt a natural alliance with it. I wanted to use it as a landscape canvas for a larger narrative. I began to write prose poems. A character interceded, and the subconscious began to unfold a necessary fiction. It described the journey of a man living in a town on the margins of a great desert, fleeing the complications of an affair, finding himself wandering and lost, eventually being found by a young woman, who brings him back to a vast fortress occupied by herself and her mother. It was a strange, dense, and stylistically poetic book – poetic in the sense of the language being a percussive, sensual, and dynamic element. In wanting a text as dense as the landscape was austere I attempted to syringe poetry into every line.
My latest novel, The Night Game (Salmon), is psychological noir, set in a fog-shrouded New York in late winter. It is told in the third person limited, and in the present tense, which makes it feel like a first person narrative but with greater flexibility. Being a poet, I feel, affects the narrative and stylistic choices you make as a novelist, with poets perhaps preferring first person or multiple first person narratives. Language receives particular attention. Poets as novelists are more likely to be alert to the startling image that vaccumizes time and space.
I’m not sure that poetry and prose can be written at the same time, or at least not as productively as poetry and painting can be conducted at the same time. There is something about the psychic and emotional investment demanded by the novel that militates against the necessary interior or abstract focus demanded by poetry. With the novel you maintain this complex etherised world aloft for years at a time, inevitably there are periods of glorious immersion when you are so invested in the world of the novel that you become semi- truncated and ungrounded yourself, where the subconscious is doing so much work that you are functionally depleted, and without the resources or the space to allow to kinks of poetic perception free rein. We are creatures who crave to define patterns in existence; novels allow us to evince those patterns, and the space to invest them with poetry, if we be poets.
Poetry is reflective of a way of being in the world. The world unlocks differently. There is a kind of attunement to the mystery of reality. The novel on the other hand with its prosaic unities walks the corridors of time and memorises history.
(c) Frank Golden
Frank Golden is a Clare-based poet, novelist, and visual artist. He has published four books of poems, the most recent of which is In Daily Accord (Salmon Publications). His first novel, The Two Women of Aganatz (Wolfhound Press), was well received, described by Carol Coulter in The Irish Times as “uncomfortable, but compellingly and poetically described by a powerful imagination”, and by Vincent Banville as “Indubitably a powerful document, an ambitious and courageous one. The Two Women of Aganatz explores male and especially female sexuality in a manner which is frank, unfettered and totally without restraint”. 2015 has seen his return to the novel form with the publication of The Night Game (Salmon Publications).
He has received bursaries and awards from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Irish Film Board, including a bursary in literature in 2014. In 2012 his film, A Room in Air, filmed in the auxiliary workhouse in Ballyvaughan, was premiered at the Burren College of Art, where Frank teaches the creative writing programme. Born in Dublin Frank has lived in North Clare for over twenty five years.
About The Night Game
The Night Game is in bookshops now or pick up your copy online here!
