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Home › New Releases › Poem of the Week: “The Exact Moment I Became a Poet” by Paula M...
Wake: Up to Poetry
Poem of the week: “the exact moment i became a poet” by paula meehan.
Paula’s Meehan’s “The Exact Moment I Became a Poet” recounts the injurious, if inspiring, tale of when the poet as a child first understood the emotional gravity that words contain. First printed in Meehan’s fifth volume Dharmakaya , the poem is reprinted in Meehan’s most new selected poems, As If By Magic. The collection, encompassing Meehan’s works over the past three decades, illuminates Meehan’s compelling talent and artistic legacy within contemporary Irish poetry. Meehan has held the esteemed position of the Ireland Chair of Poetry for her uniquely feminist voice and poetry capturing working-class Ireland.
The Exact Moment I Became a Poet
for Kay Foran
was in 1963 when Miss Shannon rapping the duster on the easel’s peg half obscured by a cloud of chalk
said Attend to your books, girls, or mark my words, you’ll end up in the sewing factory.
It wasn’t just that some of the girls’ mothers worked in the sewing factory or even that my own aunt did,
and many neighbours, but that those words ‘end up’ robbed the labour of its dignity.
Not that I knew it then, not in those words—labour, dignity. That’s all back construction,
making sense; allowing also the teacher was right and no one knows it like I do myself.
But: I saw them: mothers, aunts and neighbours trussed like chickens on a conveyor belt,
getting sewn up the way my granny sewed the sage and onion stuffing in the birds.
Words could pluck you, leave you naked, your lovely shiny feathers all gone.
– Paula Meehan , from As If By Magic: Selected Poems (2021)
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Established in 1975 by Professor Dillon Johnston, with the support of Provost Edwin Wilson and the university administration, Wake Forest University Press is the premier publisher of Irish poetry in North America.
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