John Montague

John Montague. Courtesy Goodreads.

John Montague
Born	February 28 1929 (1929-02-28) Brooklyn, New York, United States
Occupation	Poet
Literary movement	Modernism
Influences Patrick Kavanagh, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Kinsella
Influenced Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney

John Montague (February 28, 1929 - 10 December 2016) was an American-born Irish poet, short story writer, and academic. He ranked among the best-known Irish contemporary poets.

Life

Family, youth, education

John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York City. His father, James Montague, an Ulster Catholic from co. Tyrone, had gone to America in 1925 to join his brother John. Both were sons of John Montague, who had been a Justice of the Peace, combining his legal duties with being a schoolmaster, farmer, postmaster and director of several firms. John continued as postmaster but James became involved in the turbulent Irish Republican scene in the years after 1916, particularly complicated in areas like Fermanagh and Tyrone, on the borders of the newly divided island.

Molly (Carney) Montague joined her husband James in America in 1928, with their 2 elder sons. Their son John, the poet, was born in St. Catherine’s Hospital, Bushwisk Avenue.

He spent his earliest years playing with his brothers in the streets of Brooklyn, putting nickels on the trolley lines, playing on a tenement roof, seeing early Mickey Mouse movies.

Although Uncle John ran a speakeasy, where he employed his brother, James Montague did not find life in New York easy during the Depression years. So the 3 boys were shipped back to Ireland in 1933; the 2 eldest went to their maternal grandmother’s house in Fintona, co. Tyrone, where they had been born, but John was sent to his father’s ancestral home at Garvaghey, then maintained by 2 spinster aunts, Brigid and Freda, who welcomed the boy of 4.

From New York to a farm on the edge of the Clogher Valley in co. Tyrone was a significant step backwards in time. John did all the usual farming chores. He became a normal Ulster farm child, though haunted by the disparity between what the house in Garvaghey had been, in the days of his grandfather and namesake, and the reduced present.

John went to Garvaghey School and then to Glencull, 3 miles away, where he was coached by a young and ardent master. Scholarships brought him to St. Patrick's College, Armagh, the junior Diocesan Seminary and the place where his Jesuit uncle, Thomas Montague, had gone.

The teacher he remembers most from Armagh was Sean O Boyle, a leading expert on Ulster folksong and Irish poetry. From him John imbibed, almost against his will, a strong sense of the long tradition of Irish poetry.

John studied at University College Dublin in 1946. He found an extraordinary contrast between the Ulster of the War Years and post-war Dublin, where the atmosphere was introverted and melancholy. Stirred by the example of other student poets (including Thomas Kinsella) he began to publish poetry in The Dublin Magazine, Envoy, and The Bell, edited by Peadar O’Donnell. But the atmosphere in Dublin was still constrained and Montague left for Yale on a Fullbright Fellowship in 1953.

John had already met Saul Bellow at the Sazburg Seminar in American Studies and now he worked with Robert Penn Warren as well as auditing the classes of several Yale critics, like Rene Wellek and W. K. Wimsatt. He extended his sense of contemporary American literature, attending Indiana Summer School of Letters where he heard Richard Wilbur, Leslie Fiedler, and John Crowe Ransom (who like the Irish poet Austin Clarke, encouraged Montague, finding him a job at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1954-55).

1950s and 1960s

File:Samuel Beckett.jpg

Portrait from life of Samuel Beckett by Reginald Gray.Paris.1961.

From Iowa to Berkeley, a year of graduate school convinced Montague that he should return to Ireland. He sailed back to France that summer, to marry his first wife, Madeleine, whom he had met in Iowa, where she was also on a Fullbright; they settled in Herbert Street, Dublin, a few doors down from Brendan Behan. Working by day at the Irish Tourist Office, Montague at last gathered his first book of poems, Poisoned Lands (1961).

That year he also moved to Paris, to a small studio a block away from Samuel Beckett, with whom he slowly became on good drinking terms. There, he also met another neighbor, French poet Claude Esteban, with whom he became friends — Montague recently translated into English and published some of his poems. A regular rhythm of publication saw his earliest book of stories, Death of a Chieftain (1964) after which the musical group The Chieftains were named, his second book of poems, A Chosen Light (1967), Tides (1970), the latter both also published by Swallow in the U.S.

All during the 1960s, Montague continued to work on his long poem, The Rough Field, a task that coincided with the outbreak of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. A Patriotic Suite appeared in 1966, Hymn to the New Omagh Road and The Bread God in 1968, and A New Siege, dedicated to Bernadette Devlin which he read outside Armagh Jail in 1970. In 1972, the long poem was finally published by Dolmen/Oxford and Montague returned to Ireland, to live and teach in University College Cork, at the request of his friend, the composer Seán Ó Riada, where he inspired an impressive field of young writers including Gregory O'Donoghue, Sean Dunne, Thomas McCarthy, William Wall, Maurice Riordan, Gerry Murphy, Greg Delanty and Theo Dorgan. In a birthday tribute for his 80th, William Wall wrote: "It would be impossible to overestimate his influence on the young writers who went to UCC (University College Cork) at that time." The Rough Field (1972) was slowly recognized as a major achievement.

1974 - 2016

Settled in Cork with his 2nd wife, Evelyn Robson, Montague published an anthology, The Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974) with a book of lyrics, A Slow Dance (1975). A Guggenheim in 1979-80 enabled Montague to complete his Selected Poems (1982) and his 2nd long poem, The Dead Kingdom (1984) both co-published by Dolmen (Ireland), Oxford (England), Wake Forest University Press (U.S.) and Exile Editions (Canada).

In 1995, Montague and his 2nd wife, Evelyn, separated, and he formed a partnership with American student Elizabeth Wassell (later to be author of The Honey Plain (1996)).

During this period, Montague served as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence for the New York State Writers Institute during each spring semester, teaching workshops in fiction and poetry and a class in the English Department, University at Albany.

In 1998, Montague was named the inaugural Irish Professor of Poetry, a 3-year appointment to be divided among Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College, Dublin, and University College Dublin. He held this post from 1998 to 2001, when he was succeeded by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

In 2008 Montague published A Ball of Fire, a collection of all his fiction including the short novella The Lost Notebook.

Montague died at the age of 87 in Nice on 10 December 2016 after complications from a recent surgery. He was survived by his wife Elizabeth Wassell, daughters Oonagh and Sibyl and grandchildren Eve and Theo.

Writing

Montague's poems chart boyhood, schooldays, love, and relationships. Family and personal history and Ireland's history are also prominent themes in his poetry.

Montague is noted for his vowel harmonies, his use of assonance and echo, and his handling of the line and line break. Montague believes that a poem appears with its own rhythm and that rhythm and line lengths should be based on living speech.

Recognition

Recognition come to Montague in the late 1970s, with the award of the Irish American Cultural Institute in 1976, the Marten Toonder Award in 1977, and in 1978, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for The Great Cloak, “the best book of poetry in two years” according to the Poetry Society of Great Britain.

In 1987, Montague was awarded an honorary doctor of letters by the State University of New York at Buffalo. The same year, state governor Mario Cuomo presented Montague a citation “for his outstanding literary achievements and his contributions to the people of New York.”

His novella The Last Notebook won the Hughes Award in 1987.

In 1998 he became the inaugural Ireland Professor of Poetry.

In 2000, Montague was awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize.

Montague was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Ulster, Coleraine on 29 June 2009.

In 2010 the government of France made him a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Publications

Poetry

• Forms of Exile. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1958.
• Three Irish Poets (by John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, & Richard Murphy). Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1961.
• All Legendary Obstacles. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966.
• A Chosen Light. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967; Chicago: Swallow Press, 1967.
• Home Again. Belfast: Festival Publications / Queen's University, 1967.
• Poisoned Land, and other poems. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969; Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1977; London: Oxford University Press, 1977.
• The Rough Field: 1961-1971. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1979.
• A Slow Dance. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1975; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1975.
• The Great Cloak. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1978; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1978.
• Selected Poems. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1982; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1982.
• The Dead Kingdom. Portaloise, Ireland: Dolmen Press, 1984; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1984.
• Mount Eagle. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1989; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, Winston Salem, 1989.
• New Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe / Oldcastle, Meath, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1990.
• The Love Poems. Exile Editions, Toronto, 1992; New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1993.
• Time in Armagh (a sequence of poems). Oldcastle, Meath, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1993.
• About Love: Poems. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1993.
• Collected Poems. Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Meath, Ireland, & Liverpool, UK: Gallery Books, 1995; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1995.
• Smashing The Piano. Oldcastle, Meath, Ireland: Gallery Books, 1999; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2001.
• Drunken Sailor. Oldcastle, Meath, Ireland: Gallery Books, 2004; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2005.
• Speech Lessons. Oldcastle, Meath, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2011; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2012.

Short fiction

• Death of a Chieftain, and other stories. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964; Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1977; Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997.
• Tides. Dublin: Dolmen Press / Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979.
• The Lost Notebook (novella; illustrated by John Verling). Cork, Ireland: Mercier Press, 1987.
• An Occasion of Sin (edited by Barry Callaghan & David Lampe). Toronto: Exile Editions, 1992; Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1992.
• A Love Present, and other stories. Dublin: Wolfhound Press / Niwot, CO: Irish American Book Co., 1997.
• A Ball of Fire: Collected stories. Dublin: Liberties Press, 2008.

Non-fiction

• The Figure in the Cave, and other essays. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1989; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989.
• Born in Brooklyn: John Montague's America. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1991.
• Company: A chosen life. London: Duckworth, 2001.
• The Pear Is Ripe: A memoir. Dublin: Liberties Press, 2007.
• The Poet's Chair: The first nine years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry (with Paul Durcan and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill). Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2008.

Edited

• The Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Verse. Dublin: Dolmen Press / Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.
• Faber Book of Irish Verse. London: Faber, 1974.
  • published in U.S. as The Book of Irish Verse: An anthology of Irish poetry from the sixth century to the present. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
• Bitter Harvest: An anthology of contemporary Irish verse. New York: Scribner, 1989.

John Montague at the NYS Writers Institute in 1999

'A Resigned President' John Montague

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of Irish poets

References

• Val Nolan, ‘John Montague: Learning to be Humble’, Southword, Issue 14, pp. 127–132 (Cork: June 2008); Interview with the poet about his life and career
• Thomas McCarthy, 'Poet of Exile And Return', Birthday tribute to John Montague, Irish Times

Fonds

• John Montague fonds at University of Victoria, Special Collections

External links

Poems

• "All Legendary Obstacles"
• 3 poems at the Ireland Chair of Poetry: "Herbert Street Revisited," "Mount Eagle," "A Flowering Absence"
• John Montague b. 1929 at the Poetry Foundation
• John Montague (USA, 1929) at Poetry International (5 poems)
• John Montague at PoemHunter (5 poems)

Books

• John Montague at Amazon.com

About

• Professor John Montague at the Ireland Chair of Poetry.
• John Montagueat Wake Forest University Press
• "Montague's still on fire" at Independent.ie
• "The Emerging Order of the Poem: A critical study of John Montague's poetry, 1958-1999" (abstract)