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Tributaries: Paul Moorehead + Green

Paul Moorehead’s sharp, inquisitive debut poetry collection, Green (Breakwater Books) explores a central question: how does wonder transform us? Today, Paul reflects on how sharing his work changed his idea of poetry and tells us the personal story behind his poem “Boys and Giants.”

A photo of Paul Moorehead and an inset image of his book Green. There is text on the photo reading "Tributaries, National Poetry Month on All Lit Up." Paul is a light-skin-toned man with grey hair and short facial hair. He is wearing a blue button-up shirt under a grey suit jacket and smiles into the camera.

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Tributaries, National Poetry Month on All Lit Up

Read “Boys and Giants”
from Green (Breakwater Books)



Boys and Giants

Give us the future.

                  We’ve had enough of your past.

– Michael Collins

It’s a tamed green here, less grand

than the evergreen titans I know.

An army truck knocks down

the road, soldiers in the back dancing

sombrely with their machine gun partners.

My parents mustn’t like me too well,

sending me to Belfast in ’78. I’m seven,

a meagre seven, and army men seem cool.

I don’t know about Parnell or Collins,

centuries of cold pharaonic business.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, my parents gape

at the boy king’s treasures, on display

for the wage-bound. I’d have liked

to see the mummies: did you know the little

ones are cats? That there are organs

in the jars? But Ulster is okay too,

even if I haven’t been to Giant’s Causeway

yet. I will see King Tut someday:

disco beats, jazzy sax, sarcophagus,

Steve Martin dancing wildly.


An interview with Paul Moorehead

All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you come to write “Boys and Giants” and how is it representative of your collection?

The cover of Green by Paul Moorehead

Paul Moorehead: Green started out as poems that I wrote in online poetry workshops (George Murray’s “Walk the Line”) during the pandemic. I’d been writing, although not with any regularity or frequency, for a long time, but the pandemic’s downtime created the space to write with some purpose. I wrote poems for the workshops, and then kept writing after that, and eventually I had enough poems to put a collection together. But I was an almost entirely inexperienced writer, and Green is really a collection of poems that I wrote while I was in the early stages of learning to write.

So Green isn’t a pre-conceived project of a book, but is rather an old-fashioned collection of what I’ve been writing. Still, there are some themes that run through the work: childhood and parenting, change as seen through the lens of science and nature, the Irish diaspora. Those themes led me to the title: green is the colour of inexperience, of life and growth, of Ireland.

“Boys and Giants” is a poem that is really close to my heart. It is the response to a workshop prompt, although I’ve forgotten the prompt. But it’s one of the first things that I wrote about my own childhood. I was trying to capture some very particular feelings from a very particular moment in my life, my first visit to the “old country” in Northern Ireland as a child. What I was writing about that felt a little flat, though, until I wove in some other elements. The ability to place things in apposition in unexpected ways is a powerful tool of poetry. The result is a poem that I think works really well, both as an evocation of my experience and as an invitation to the reader to think about some things that are hiding around the edges of the poem.

   

ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing?

PM: For many years I would secretively write a poem now and then. Nobody but me ever read these poems. So writing poetry was an internal act. Writing poems for a workshop, for the other workshop participants to read, blew the lid off it. Suddenly I was writing to communicate! When someone reads a poem that speaks to them, that’s an amazing moment of connection between the reader and the poet.

ALU: What’s a non-written piece of art (e.g. a song / album, painting, sculpture, or film) that you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection?

PM: Kneecap, the Irish language hip-hop group from Belfast, made a somewhat-true biopic. Kneecap is a story of change, an unapologetic and unsentimental celebration of Irishness, and a fantastic demonstration the power of language. Green might be a very distant sister city to this wonderful film. Go watch Kneecap! (Then read Green right after, please.)


Paul recommends…
“A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould”
from Joelle Barron’s Ritual Lights (Goose Lane Editions)

ALU: Why did you choose Joelle Barron’s poem “A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould” from their collection Ritual Lights? What do you love most about this particular poem?

PM: At its best, poetry does things that other art forms, even other written art forms, can’t do or can’t do in quite the same way. As someone who writes poetry, this is crucial for me to try to understand.

Joelle Barron’s “A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould” is a story, but it’s not the story told the way it would be told in short fiction or in biographic anecdote. That “Might” in the title announces the possibility of this poem: something like this might have happened, it might not have, it doesn’t really matter which. There are characters—the narrator, Gould, a few others—described with poetic economy and obliquity. There are events, but not really. There is some manner of arc for the narrator, but this arc doesn’t land the way it would in a prose narrative.

Which is all to say that this is a poem, not a story.

With the density of a good poem, Barron covers more thematic ground than the endless drive across the North side of Lake Superior. And there’s feeling in every line. Much of Barron’s work is characterized by explosive imagery, and while that’s dialled back a bit in this poem, the language is still supercharged.

Perhaps what most attracts me to this poem is that it’s not mine. Poetry is so personal and sometimes it feels like the poems that I connect with tend to be those that come from a place of some similarity. (I like Seamus Heaney, unsurprisingly.) But to find connection with a poem by a non-binary writer from rural Ontario about an imagined unrequited love for a famously weird piano player?—now that’s art!

A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould

We meet under the four-tonne goose. April, I wear a parka, slush
underfoot. He’s humming, tongue knocking Bach against
hard palate; I feel it knock against me. They only just
built it
, I tell him, it’s 1966, my seventeen knocks against his
thirty-four. Why do they call you Wawa, he asks, as if
I am the town. I eye the statue, It means

goose. He eats breakfast at the Kinniwabi Pines, sometimes
brings his typewriter, wipes the rim of his mug pre-sip. I waitress,
bring infinite eggs, read over his shoulder, The Idea of North. Men
from MacLeod Mine call him funny for not shaking hands, fur hat
in the middle of May. My father, no wife to shush him, hurls
Yer a nutter! from the corner booth, diagnosis

unnoticed by the pianist at the counter. June and still wearing
his wool coat indoors, kids outside in shorts, throwing
old snow around. I hear he has a place on Superior, disappears
nightly over that cold ocean. Disappears, I hear, up Highway 17,
Top 40 on the radio, someone tells him Wawa isn’t nothing
of North; his Toronto is showing. Hides it across Superior’s

forehead: Nipigon, Red Rock, Thunder Bay to Kenora, reels of tape
holding voices who came to be or were born into it, this Northern
life. I graduate; wait through July to hear him on the CBC, that small
body thrusting into piano, eyes shut or else locked
on the work of hurried fingers. In the bath, I learn to look at my own
body, its possibilities. Soft underwater, butt-end

cozied to the removable shower head. Too poor for a piano but my father
and I listen to the Met on Saturday mornings. August,
the pianist is back, scrambled eggs and fingers scrambling
over typewriter keys. I worry he can smell me when I sweat through
my uniform, find myself trying to find him outside, sometimes
near the port in Michipicoten or Queens Park under

the goose. This Queen’s park against Toronto’s, caroming
behind his eyes, fingers bouncing Goldberg Variations on his thigh; to be under
those fingers. September, some of my friends
move to Toronto but I’m here, pianist at the counter, running
a fever. My father in the corner booth, displeasure
blooming like wild irises as he watches me lay a cool palm on the pianist’s

forehead, my palm the weather here. He leans in, asks to interview
me, We could meet under the goose, okay? After work, I’m smeared with lipstick
that was my mother’s, eighty degrees under that goose
and he has long sleeves on. Clicks the tape recorder, Do you like
Bob Dylan? You’re a real-live Girl from the North Country
. Tell him about pike
fishing, my father, the mine. My mother was a white-passing

Métis woman. She died when I was born. He asks, Will you ever leave
this place? Maybe
, I say, knowing I won’t. After, he gives me a ride,
windows down, Streisand rattling out of the old radio. Home, wild
irises from my father in a vase. Next day, pianist at the counter, his usual,
no more words than that for me. October, cold air sniffing
at my ankles, and he’s gone. Back East, I hear, to finish

his work. I wander in the shortening days, whistle Little Fugue. Weeks
later, my father and I listening to the CBC, my baby’s famous. Wait to hear
my voice and when it never comes, pat on the shoulder and left
alone. As if none of it happened. I shut my eyes, think of coming
snow. Gentle snoring from my father’s room. November, all the leaves
nearly fallen, frost on grass in the morning.

* * *

A photo of author Paul Moorehead. He is a light-skin-toned man with grey hair and short facial hair. He is wearing a blue button-up shirt under a grey suit jacket and smiles into the camera.

Paul Moorehead is an emerging writer in St. John’s, Newfoundland where he lives with his partner, their two daughters, and a cat who loves snacks. When not writing, he is a pediatrician. His poems have appeared in Riddle Fence, Pinhole Poetry, and Turnstyle: The SABR Journal of Baseball Arts. He has an MA in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of Gloucestershire. 

* * *

Thanks to Paul for answering our questions, and to Breakwater Books for the text of “Boys and Giants” from Green, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). Thanks also to Goose Lane Editions for the text of A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould” from Joelle Barron’s Ritual Lights.

Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.