Jamie O’Halloran is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Corona Connemara & Half a Crown. She has published widely in Irish, UK and US publications, including Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, Banshee, Crannóg, One Hand Clapping, The Night Heron Barks, and Prairie Schooner. Her poetry reviews appear, or are forthcoming, in Tupelo Quarterly, The Lit Pub, The Laurel Review, and Tinderbox. She lives in Connemara in the West of Ireland.
You can read Lunch Note in the January 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
Gladly. ‘Lunch Note’ belongs to ‘The Visible Woman’, a chapbook mss. This is the third poem in a sequence of 18. At this point in the sequence, the woman is invisible.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
Theodore Roethke’s collected poems is always close at hand. He did it all, brilliantly.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I’d sing a song or paint a picture.
How do you revise your work?
One of my oldest forms of revision, and laziest, is the incubation method whereby I ignore the poem for months to let it settle. With the distance of time I can look at the poem with fresh eyes, re-vision it. I also rely upon trusted readers and mentors to tell me what they have read in what I’ve written. That leads me to clarifying more than anything else.
What are you working on now?
My immediate poetry goals are to complete a villanelle in honour of a dear poet friend who passed away last spring and a sequence of poems inspired by listening to Yo Yo Ma’s recordings of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. I also have a packet of poems that require surgical revision.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
An image I’ve seen in nature or art, or a line I’ve read in a novel, poem or headline.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I welcome poems in to my inbox to get a daily dose of poems by poets that are new to me. My favourites are Poetry Wales on Mondays and The Paris Review every day. I try to read a poetry magazine or collection every day. I have been on and off involved with writing prompt groups. When life is normal, I will sit with my notebook or laptop in the evening and scroll through pages for rewriting if I haven’t been struck by an image or bit of text for something new.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
Annemarie Ní Churreáin has been working on incorporating archival material from Irish workhouses and mother and baby homes in her poems. In her chapbook Ghost Girl, Ní Churreáin, uses folkdance instructions as a scaffold to tell the story of a teenage girl’s journey from a village dance into a mother and baby home. I am fascinated and in awe of how a poet can breathe life and contemporary recognition into a clerk’s entry in a ledger. She mines the same vein in her collection The Poison Glen.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
Often! For the sequence that ‘Lunch Note’ is part of, a mentor suggested changing the p.o.v. from 3rd to 1st person. That advice gives the poems emotional depth.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
Yes. The current group began on Zoom with the pandemic. We continue to meet every other week. I have been in other groups over the years. I like to take the occasional master class or workshop.