Always beginning

In June 2009 I attended a poetry reading in the storied Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. The featured reader was Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021), one of Ireland’s most beloved poets. As I was waiting for the event to start, I chatted with the Irishwoman sitting next to me, noting that Kennelly enjoyed widespread popularity as well as a high standing in the Irish literary community. “Ach,” she replied, “half the women in Ireland are in love with Brendan Kennelly.”

When the poet took the podium a few minutes later, it was easy to see why. A handsome man in his early seventies, whose professorial demeanor seemed incongruous with his boyish face, he emanated a gentle charm. And though his serious manner was leavened by understated humor, he also conveyed an impression of a sensitive temperament chastened by harsh experience. Decades earlier, his marriage had ended in divorce—a casualty, he believed, of his excessive drinking. A few years later, he had undergone heart bypass surgery, which had left him vulnerable and frail.

In a voice at once tender and resonant, Kennelly recited, often by heart, a rich variety of his lyric poems, whose wide range of subjects included a pig-slaughtering in rural Ireland, Oliver Cromwell’s reign of terror, “a singing girl who is easy in her skill,” and the losses attendant to old age, as exemplified by his father. By turns lyrical and satirical, his explorations of time, love, history, the mysteries of religion, and other traditional themes were darkened by a tragic view of life but brightened by their vernacular diction, their spirit of freshness, and their capacity to make the ordinary an object of wonder. Ironically but aptly, Kennelly ended his reading with one of his most celebrated poems, simply titled “Begin.”:

            Begin again to the summoning birds

            to the sight of the light at the window

            begin to the roar of morning traffic

            all along Pembroke Road.

In these opening lines, whose nuanced music is heightened by internal rhyme (“begin / again”; “sight / light”), Kennelly evokes the experience of awakening in the city. The pleasant sound of birds mingles with the sound of traffic on one of Dublin’s busier thoroughfares. Both are greeted with an attitude of openness and acceptance.

A similarly inclusive tone colors the next few lines, which pair the imagery of morning and beginning with their natural opposites:

            Every beginning is a promise

            born in light and dying in dark

            determination and exaltation of springtime

            flowering the way to work.

Just as the previous lines included both birdsong and the noise of urban traffic, these encompass a full spectrum of human experience and feeling. Beginnings and endings, light and darkness, promises and their outcomes, the pleasures of early morning and the daily grind of work—all are welcomed into the narrator’s non-judgmental awareness. And in the lines that follow, Kennelly widens his generous vision to include Dublin City itself:

            Begin to the pageant of queuing girls

            the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal

            bridges linking the past and future

            old friends passing though with us still.

In a balanced sentence inflected by assonantal and slant rhyme (“girls / future,” “girls / canal / still”), Kennelly envisions the spectacle of girls waiting for the bus as a pageant and the bridges over the river Liffey as links between the past and future, the living and the dead. And a moment later, his poem takes another surprising turn:

            Begin to the loneliness that cannot end

            since it perhaps is what makes us begin,

            begin to wonder at unknown faces

            at crying birds in the sudden rain . . .

These arresting lines posit a possible motive behind the continuing will to begin. They suggest that a solitary’s longing for human connection may underlie the drive to return to the external world in all its multiplicity and to view its everyday realities in a spirit of awe. And they also prepare us for the poem’s eloquent close:

            Though we live in a world that dreams of ending

            that always seems about to give in

            something that will not acknowledge conclusion

            insists that we forever begin.

Reflecting on the art of poetry, Kennelly once remarked that “the more familiar we become with certain poems, the stranger they are. This is also true of certain people, streets, rooms, voices, cliffs, cats, dogs, roads, hills, beaches. True, in fact, of almost everything to which one pays attention. Not to pay attention is to let familiarity become boredom, to stifle the innate strangeness of people and things.”

The attitude expressed in that reflection bears a strong resemblance to what the Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki famously called “beginner’s mind.” “In the beginner’s mind,” wrote Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. . . . The most difficult thing is always to keep our beginner’s mind.” Although he was not a Zen practitioner, Brendan Kennelly demonstrated a rare ability to do just that. Little wonder that the memory of his delightful, profoundly affecting reading has stayed with me to this day.

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To watch and listen to Brendan Kennelly reading “Begin” and other poems, visit https://vimeo.com/5091398.