🎧 The ‘poet laureate of Irish-in-America’ on identity, difference

Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, in partnership with Vermont Public. 

Greg Delanty has been writing poetry since he was a teenager. He was born in Cork City, Ireland in 1958, and he moved to Burlington about 40 years ago. Fellow writer Colum McCann dubbed Delanty the “poet laureate of Irish-in-America.”

My mother was also born in Cork City and like Delanty she came to the U.S. in her early twenties. I talked with Delanty about what it’s like to be an Irish immigrant in the U.S., and how his experiences show up in his poetry.

Greg Delanty: “In the Land of the Eagle”

Our first night here we pubcrawled
the Bronx, still too new
for us not to be enthralled
by the street life and brew
of all-night watering holes
with names like The Shamrock
or Galway Shawl, full of legals
and illegals longing to go back,
lowering pint after pint
of their staggering Irishness,
sláinte-ing the Dubs’ winning point,
cursing American Guinness.
After that country for old men
abandoned them like the gannet
abandons its fledgling,
not all of them make it.
Those that do are more
like the wren who flew high
off the eagle of folklore,
prevailing in the contentious sky.

I consider myself Greg. I don’t know what I consider myself, really. I consider myself… I don’t consider myself as much as possible, actually. It’s not a good idea.

No, I don’t consider myself as American. But I am, I suppose, a part of me. I mean, half of me was here for longer than the other half. So which half is me?

It’s like when I’m walking the streets of Cork, I’m walking into myself again. Here I’m at one removed a little bit from myself. I’m sure your mother will understand that.

To be an immigrant is different. It is to inhabit a world that, in the place you came from you were at home. Like, it was inside in you. Whereas being here, you’re always outside.

I am what I am. I read every day. I study. It’s all that training and all that reading and all that writing. And I bring everything in the past that I already am in my molecules and in my being. And that enters the poem, in some way, in the ink – it enters the ink somehow.

People are always afraid of something that seems different. Skin of difference, and so even… we were trained a long time ago to be afraid of anything that was different. Like a lion is coming up, he’s different, so you better get up the [expletive] tree because the lion will kill you. And that’s still remained in our genes. And that’s the reaction to somebody that looks different to you. You’re a bit wary of them. They come from somewhere else. And to see through that skin of difference, to see that we’re more the same than less. That’s what people should do. That’s what poetry does.

I break the skin of difference when I’m reading the ink. So I’ve learned how to, through poetry, I’ve learned how to shape change in and out of the ink. To become other beings, other people and other animals, and plants, trees. I’ll be talking to trees later on.

Other people categorize – I don’t like being categorized in any way, actually. I don’t even like being categorized as a human being. I’m an animal, you know what I mean? Because we’ve separated ourselves from the natural world. Well, we can’t. And we’re part of it. And I’ve lived that in my life for sure.

I just consider myself what I am, you know what I mean? Great Greg, or sometimes maybe “idiot,” or sometimes… oh dear. You know, I mean I – just a being.

_{Music in this story is “Celtic” by Crowander, Vanlig by Jahzzar and Lark in the Morning. The Atholl Highlanders by Sláinte from Free Music Archive. Sound effects are from Freesound by lwdickens (snow falling on leaves), FreqMan (whoosh), egomassive (caw), klankbeeld (farmland pool) and Aisselles (NYC bar).}