Continuity
John McAuliffe, Bryn Mawr March 24th 2010
At the end of December police in Chicago arrested the so-called Christmas Day bomber. We were warned our flight from Manchester would be lengthily delayed: we spent our allotted three airport hours being frisked and moved along between security queues, but we left on time and arrived, early, in Philadelphia, which was bright and cold, sun shining off the residual snow from heavy falls over Christmas. I would start teaching at Villanova University in early January, an appointment which offered more time for writing than teaching. Time, and a new setting, to revise and complete, without the usual distractions, poems begun in Manchester.
The university, in Bryn Mawr on the Main Line in suburban Philly, has offered a productive home to Irish writers for more than a decade: Derek Mahon, Sebastian Barry, Peter Fallon, Claire Keegan and others have lived in and sometimes written about the house we arrived to, which backed onto the football stadium on the campus. Auden lived and worked nearby at Swarthmore, Temple and Bryn Mawr itself while writing The Sea and the Mirror, while Thomas Kinsella had taught at Temple for decades and, as we discovered, still lives downtown.
I planned to finish one set of poems for Peter and Ann Sansom at Smith/Doorstop, but soon the weather intervened. Philly had three storms, and an accumulated snowfall of around 5 feet, which froze over. The first time, we took photos and enjoyed digging ourselves out. Third time around, I broke the snow shovel. The neighbourhood has no footpaths and the roads were blocked. Classes were cancelled. I had time to write new poems as well as revising: we discussed, via the web, how to integrate new poems into the pamphlet, whose name and shape kept changing. Rather than splitting the poems by theme or place or form, we ran the different tones together, then talked about how many or how few poems make up a pamphlet. A Midgie emerged.
Around the same time as the final proofs came through, two and a half months of snow came to an end. Friends put me in touch with Philly-resident writers. We were all, it turned out, trying not to write poems about snow; everyone talked about Obama’s turbulent start to 2010 and whether (and how) differently the US stacks the deck for its citizens and visitors. The productive, generative strangeness of the snowstorms gave way to a sunny mid-March. Healthcare receded, the New York Times ran stories about the Vatican in Ireland and the rise of the Tories in the UK. We started planning a trip to the Southwest before flying back to Manchester. Tonight, muggy and wet, I walked around the football stadium to one of the university’s gleaming new auditoriums, where the head of a London think tank was introduced as a key advisor to ‘Britain’s next prime minister’ before he sketched out a nostalgic vision of local communities, free markets and universal beliefs which he called ‘Red Toryism.’ He spoke in praise of America’s Catholic universities’ promotion of ‘objective good’ which he contrasted with British universities’ ‘teaching of uncertainty’ and ‘engines of sophistry’. Familiar feelings surfaced.
