Knowing

By Pat Mullan

Biographies & Memoirs

Poetry

Language: English Not Rated (NR)

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Ken Bruen says " Smart, erudite, moving, funny, sad, compassionate - especially loved Splashes ...Mullan is the Celtic Garrison Keillor"

And here's what E.M. SCHORB says about KNOWING :

" I find in Knowing one of the best prose poems I have ever read, called “Blackout.” I don’t know when I read it last, but it took me for a lover then and renewed and increased its appeal with every reading. With every reading I say this is my own experience and I wish I had written it myself. Is it possible to be benevolently jealous? When I read “Blackout” I sense in myself that peculiar state of mind. A thousand transits should have yielded me that poem. But I am grateful to you for getting it on paper, for making it available to the reader I am, with its simple and touching refrain. The music of your direct prose is beautiful and I have come to see that each section is internally rhymed, something not noticeable at first reading. No wonder it lilts! Aside from “Blackout,” this small book is packed with wonders, right up to “Korea” and your autobiographical sketch, “48 Dollars and a Battered Suitcase.”

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This is not a poetry collection.

Yes, there are poems here. And other writing too: Sicilian Odyssey, a long ‘travelogue’ that sets out to capture my visit to Sicily; in ‘$48 dollars and a battered suitcase’ I get personal, capturing glimpses of my youthful escapade as an Irish emigrant to Canada and the USA.

As I stated in the foreword to my last collection of poems, Awakening, I get most enjoyment from listening to a poet talk about the written work and the work in progress: why a poem was written, the spark that ignited the vision, the snatch of overheard conversation, the incident that retrieves a past memory, the choice of words and imagery, the simple scene transformed, the need to be a witness. I have separated this work into those categories.

I don’t think that any of my poems need an introduction. My work is simple, accessible, and unencumbered with intellectual reference; you won’t need a degree in English literature to enable you to comprehend it. Galway Kinnell, whose Selected Poems won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, takes issue with what he regards as two major misconceptions about poetry first, that it is unread, and second, that in order to be good, poetry should be unreadable: “After the appearance of the great modernists, Eliot and Pound, when you really had to study poetry in graduate school to understand it, the audience for poetry was cut drastically, so when I started writing in the 50’s, poetry did have a small, specialized following. Since then there has been a dramatic change …”

Even though this is not a collection of poems, I hope that you find that everything here has a good, hard sense of poetry.