The Lyric Feature returns to the airwaves on RTÉ lyric fm on Sunday 8th of October at 6 pm.
The opening episode, Writing Yourself Home, is presented by the Irish-born but Manchester-based poet Vona Groarke. Through a series of conversations with four fellow Irish poets, Vona muses on the complex relationship between national identity and writing - listen above.
Below, Vona introduces Writing Yourself Home:
'The language in which we are speaking was his before it was mine', thinks Stephen Dedalus of the English Dean of Studies in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Irish people now living in Britain, that relationship might be complicated by their having brought with them an English that has been Irished; that might be said to think, sound and mean differently, to a greater or lesser extent.
For Irish writers who have moved to Britain and who write in English, that relationship with language might be even more complex. For poets (whose relationship with language is always knotty) might it, in fact, be problematic?
I have lived in Manchester for seventeen years, and in this documentary four of my fellow poets from different parts of Ireland – Martina Evans from Cork, Conor O’Callaghan from Dundalk, Sinéad Morrissey from Belfast, and John McAuliffe from Listowel – who all live in England, talk with me about what brought them there and how living there has (or maybe hasn’t) changed how and what they think about Ireland, and how and what they write.
Apart from the homes they have made in Britain, is language for them also a home; a way of belonging? Or might it be a way of maintaining difference: are they always writing themselves back home?
In this candid and probing documentary we ask important questions about being Irish in England, especially post-Brexit, as well as questions about language and identity, and about how an environment might shape the words we use, and how we think in them.
Writing Yourself Home, presented by Vona Groarke, is the first Lyric Feature of the new season on Sunday 8th October, 2023 at 6 pm on RTÉ lyric fm. It will be available after broadcast as a Lyric Feature podcast - listen to more from the Lyric Feature here.
