Poem of the Day on UpStart blog
My poem 'Ginsberg in Fingal' was Friday's Poem of the Day on the UpStart blog. As noted there , it's taken from my chapbook Round the Clock , and was composed out of lines from Ginsberg's poem 'America' , written in January 1956. It places the figure of Allen Ginsberg at a specific location (Fingal, a relatively wealthy county in Ireland and home of Dublin airport) and a particular time (late 2000s), and gives this figure a voice. As such it's a straightforward dramatic monologue, or 'persona poem'. But this persona's voice wasn't an invention: at the time of composition correspondences between impressions of contemporary Ireland and 1950s America seen through Ginsberg's poem were too intriguing to ignore.