Hello,

I am a poet, though what that means as a personal description I’m not sure. It means, at least, that I have had five collections of poetry published, and a CD. Their titles are here, and four are available to buy. So I write poetry. To call oneself a poet is also to say, I think, that one is highly sensitive to certain aspects of life and how these aspects can be communicated through the music of language. ‘Music’ and ‘language’ must be yoked together when we are in the realm of poetry. A poem is a piece of writing whose structure and linguistic content mirrors closely the experience it seeks to convey.

But being in the world, having a body and a consciousness born of that body, is the first reality. After that, there’s what you do. Some people find it remarkably easy to say ‘what’ they are in terms of their occupation, as if that were the prime fact. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a sensing organism which projects its nature by doing certain things. The simplest epithets I can use here are ‘human’, ‘female’, ‘poet’ and ‘writer’. I have done, you might say ‘been’, many other things. The writing came before I could properly write, when I doodled meaninglessly. The poetry is deeper, and is more in the attitude of mind, which is body. That brings me to performance, and I’m chiefly known as a performance poet. So I’m a performer too. That doesn’t mean I’m a slam poet. I can’t abide slams. For me, being a performance poet means that I recite or sing my poetry, and that many of my poems are inherently dramatic.

As well as poetry, I’ve written three novels and the first in a planned four-volume story for children. My fiction leans towards the organic, like my poetry, and the worlds my stories inhabit tend to be symbolic. I also write non-fiction, and have just had a book of dialogues and pensées on solitude accepted for publication by Dedalus Press. This book, Savage Solitude, uses a structure that conveys its purpose, which is to explore the mind of a reluctant loner, a person who would say, like Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares: ‘ Solitude torments me; company oppresses me.’ I suppose that’s something else I am.

Máighréad Medbh