User:Mairead clare byrne/Mairéad Byrne

Mairéad Byrne (born July 22, 1957 in Holles Street, Dublin) is a contemporary Irish poet, all of whose collections have been published since she emigrated to the United States in 1994. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry + Poetics at Rhode Island School of Design.

Education

The fifth of eight children, Byrne started school at Corpus Christi in Drumcondra just before her fourth birthday, when her mother was already four months pregnant with her last child. At seven, she was transferred by her father, an inveterate fine-tuner of educational opportunity for his children--to St. Vincent's in Marino, to which she cycled daily on a specially procured used red bike. She attended the Holy Faith Convent in Glasnevin for five years, matriculating to University College Dublin when she was seventeen. She graduated with a B.A. (Hons) in English Language & Literature in 1977, having studied with Alan Bliss, Bo Almqvist, and Denis Donoghue. Even then, Roddy Doyle made her laugh. She completed one year of an M. Phil. in Medieval Irish and English at University College Dublin, 1978-1979.

Her real education happened on the streets of Dublin, day and night, 1978-1984, when she worked as a freelance journalist for In Dublin magazine, at a time when the magazine was starting up and flooded with talent and opportunity. Syd Bluett opened the door and she worked closely with editors David McKenna, Colm Tóibín and Ferdia MacAnna at In Dublin and other magazines and daily newspapers. Works produced at this time include Joyce--A Clew (Bluett & Co,1982),The Golden Hair (Project Arts Centre 1982), directed by David McKenna, with actors including Robert Byrne, Mannix Flynn, Olwen Fouéré, Jack Lynch and Donal O'Kelly, and music by Davy Spillane and Dónal Lunny; and Safe Home (Project Arts Centre 1985), produced by Donal O'Kelly. During this time she lived in Ormond Quay, Henrietta Street, and Kenilworth Square; the books Eithne Jordan (Gandon Editions 1994) and Michael Mulcahy (Gandon Editions 1995), and the collaboration "The Pillarfish," with Michael Cullen, were outcomes of these joyful crucial years living with and visiting the studios of Irish painters.

In 1994, in her mid-thirties, Byrne returned to college, with the intention of preparing for a career, outside journalism, theatre, and arts administration, which would better accommodate her responsibilities as a parent, her desire to write poetry, and her preference for reclusiveness. She was awarded a Higher Diploma in Education (First Place and First Class Honours) from Trinity College, Dublin in 1994, and then emigrated to America, with her seven year old daughter Marina, earning a Masters in American Literature and Poetry (Purdue University 1994) and a PhD in Theory and Cultural Studies (Purdue University 2001). Her dissertation, "Full Figures: How Metaphor, Example, and Childbirth Make Culture," applied contemporary metaphor theory as exemplified by George Lakoff and his collaborators to construct narratives for the metaphors The Poem Is a Child, with particular reference to English language poetry about childbirth, and The Nation Is a Mother, using the examples of Ireland and Kosovo, demonstrating that metaphors, in time, will reverse; in fact that may be their cognitive load, or function. The dissertation also presented a taxonomy of metaphorical conventions of childbirth poetry in English, and examined the relationship between metaphor and example, presenting example as constitutive rather than illustrative of the principle or rule. While writing her dissertation, she taught part-time at Ithaca College, and benefited from the library resources afforded by a Regional Visiting Fellowship to the Institute of European Studies at Cornell University, 1999-2001. She was an Assistant Professor of English, teaching in the MFA Program, then newly endowed by John Grisham, at the University of Mississippi, before moving to Providence in 2002, to begin work at Rhode Island School of Design.

Poetry

Byrne arrived at poetry by a process of elimination, or rather, she was prepared to produce it only as a last recourse. She was a freelance journalist for nine years, contributing to all major newspapers and magazines in Dublin, also to local publications when she lived elsewhere, e.g., the Northern Standard, Provincetown Advocate, and the Village Voice, concluding that her interest in writing was in language not story and that the constrained word count of journalism could never be constrained enough. Her first play The Golden Hair (Project Arts Centre, Dublin 1982) was studded with poems, mostly by others, and she came to regard her first book, Joyce--A Clew (Bluett & Co., 1982) a collaboration with Henry Sharpe, as poetry written in prose. As Eavan Boland has described, there were few public models of the woman poet in Ireland of the 1970s.

Byrne started to publish poems after the birth of her first daughter, born like Byrne herself, in the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street, Dublin. The loss of privacy entailed in that process, its trauma and jubilation, amounted to the publication of her body, and freed her to publish poetry, a form of publication now less acute. She won a place in the National Writers Workshop in 1989 when John McGahern was director; he thought her poems "almost as good as prose" and submitted them, with her permission, to Krino magazine, edited by Gerald Dawe. Dawe accepted the poems, and many subsequent submissions to Krino, and also published Byrne's work in the anthologies The New Younger Irish Poets (Blackstaff Press, 1991) and Krino: the Review, 1986–1996, an anthology of modern Irish writing, which he edited with Jonathan Williams (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1996). In 1994, realizing the gusto of her poetics, Byrne left Ireland for the country of Whitman--and everyone. As this departure coincided with the opening of the Internet to the public, she was able to reconnect tellingly, with Randolph Healy, whose Wild Honey Press in Bray, Co. Wicklow, published her first collection Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (2003), and the chapbooks The Pillar (2000) and Vivas (2007); and with Trevor Joyce's SoundEye Festival of the Arts of the Word, in which she has been a regular participant since 2003, bringing back home her movable feast couscous, a diverse community poetry/performance event ongoing in Providence since 2008, and at SoundEye also since 2008. Just as the Internet facilitated a kind of looping back to Ireland, a ludic spirit in relation to idea and word and form, endemic to Irish culture perhaps, as described in Vivian Mercier's The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1962), governs Byrne's collections Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007), and The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius 2010). Poetry continues to be a publication of the body and the voice for her, and she understands language as physical material--an ancient, though not Catholic, Irish attitude--while still being striated by the mixed legacy of post-colonialism to the extent where she must welcome it.

Biography

Byrne is the fifth child and fifth daughter in a family of eight children. Suffice to say that when the sixth child was born thirteen months later, a neighbor climbed a lamp-post to shout The Byrnes have a boy! Her father John Byrne (1920-1975) was a meteorologist, born near Crossmaglen in Co. Armagh on what became the border between north and south in the partition of Ireland the following year. He was the only child of Owen and Mary Ann Byrne (née McCreesh), both landless. His father left the family to go to America in January 1921. He subsequently sued for divorce and to contest that Mary Ann traveled to Los Angeles in 1928. Her objection was eventually unsuccessful and, unable to return to Ireland as a divorced woman, she remained in Los Angeles, working there until her death in 1970. She left her son in the care of her brothers and saw him only once again, when she visited Ireland in 1958; she also sent weekly letters, and books, and packages. He was educated in St. Patrick's College in Armagh, a boarding school, and Queen's University Belfast, from which he graduated with a degree in Mathematics. Initially a teacher, he joined the Irish Meteorological Service in 1945, where he had a long career, principally based in Dublin but traveling to all weather stations in the country during the summers. He was a fluent Irish speaker, writer, book collector, educator, and lover of poetry. Byrne's mother, Clare Quinn (1923-), youngest child of James Quinn and Elizabeth (Carville) Quinn, was born in Drumacon, Co. Monaghan, just south of the newly-established border. Before her marriage, she worked in the office of Castleblayney Shoe Factory. Mother of eight children, she kept the family together and raised the younger ones alone, after the death of her husband in 1975.

Work

Byrne began summer work in the fabric department of Boyer's in North Earl Street when she was thirteen years old. She worked part-time as a domestic in Dublin hospitals over the next twenty years. Other part-time work included checking bags for bombs in the Queen's Court in London, processing vegetables in a frozen food plant in Grevenbroich, Germany, selling Libération on the streets of Paris, selling carpets in Istanbul, commercial painting in Dublin and cleaning houses in Eindhoven, London, and New York. She managed the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny Castle, 1989-90, and was Director of the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick, 1990-1992. From 1992-1994, she taught part-time at Newpark Comprehensive in Blackrock, Co. Dublin.

Emigration

In 1994, Byrne left Ireland with her then seven year old daughter in order to pursue graduate studies in poetry at Purdue University. With the exception of one visit after six months, they did not return to Ireland for five years. In 2006, when Marina was eighteen, they both became American citizens.

Byrne has been married twice, to Irish sculptor and writer Martin Folan (1984-1990), with whom she lived in Maggie's Cottage at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Newbliss, Co, Monaghan, for one year before traveling with him to New York, where he had a year-long fellowship at PS1 in Long Island City, 1986-1987, and then to Provincetown, where he was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, 1987-1988; and to American poet Gabriel Gudding (2002-2003). She has a daughter from each marriage, Marina (B.A. Mathematics and Economics, Brown University 2009; M.Ed.Sci. University of Pennsylvania, 2011), now teaching Mathematics at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, and Clio, now entering Classical High School in Providence. Both daughters, like Byrne, are dual citizens of Ireland and the United States.