Eleanor Hooker discusses her three poems in Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd and reads ‘Dancing as Fast as I Can’.

The poems ‘Dancing as Fast as I Can’, ‘Honey Analogue’ and ‘The Girl with Bees in her Eye’ published in the latest edition of The Lonely Crowd are three poems from my sequence of eight poems entitled Legion. I wrote this and another sequence, traces, in 2020 during the first pandemic lockdown, both of which are published in my third collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press)

Legion is a sequence of origin poems using the honeybee as a metaphor for the poet and a sting in childhood as the impetus to write. Michael Hartnett’s poem ‘A Necklace of Wrens’ is perhaps one of the best known origin poems by an Irish poet. The wrens settle on the young child in a feather necklet, marking him as a poet.  This anointment caused the wrens to injure the young poet – Their talons left on me / scars not healed yet. Without subscribing to the notion of the tortured artist in this poem, Hartnett acknowledges, unsentimentally, that his craft arrived from an early wound. In his elegy to Yeats, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Auden wrote Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry/ Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still. The idea of writing from a wound or a place of sorrow is not new and although disparaged as cliché, it resonates as a reality for many poets and writers, and to deny this fact is a form of silencing.‘Dancing as Fast as I Can’ is a poem that looks at the symbiotic relationship between the artist, their advocates and the ‘establishment’. It questions what these associations might entail for an artist and their artistic independence. The poem acknowledges that while most artists would like their work to be selected and advanced, not all are chosen, and perhaps a negative consequence of being absorbed into the hive is that the artist becomes managed, and looses their ability to produce beyond the constraints of that environment.

Many years ago, Colin Knight, Johnny Hoare and I launched our local RNLI lifeboat to rescue people caught out in a severe storm. The people on board the vessel were frightened, and some had sustained injuries. One woman was particularly distressed and I made her laugh by telling her that all was well, that she was being rescued by a ‘Knight, a Hoare and a Hooker’. The humour helped calm her and enabled her to comply with our instructions to keep her safe on the route home. Many years later as my family and I were being seated for an occasion, we overheard ourselves being referred to as the ‘whore family’. Whereas the lifeboat humour came from a place of goodwill and kindness, the other was an act of malice, and there is an ocean of difference between them. ‘Honey Analogue’ was written many years after the banquet and is a mischievous, angry poem.

Poems arrive from the strangest places. In 2019 my husband, who is a medical doctor, read an article to me about a woman who had four tiny sweat bees removed alive from one of her tear ducts. This particular bee species need salt and were feasting on her tears. It was such a bizarre story and so resonant of Eleanor Wilner’s surreal poem ‘The Girl with Bees in her Hair’ that I wrote ‘The Girl with Bees in her Eye: after Eleanor Wilner’.

I made these poems when the human world was tipped off its axis by the global pandemic and the natural world continued to spring and to bloom and even benefit from the quietening of human industry. The existential threat brought about by the plague made us reassess our lives and this wound on the world became, for me, a time of frenetic writing.

Eleanor Hooker’s third poetry collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) and her chapbook Legion (Bonnefant Press, Holland) were published in 2021. A recipient of the Markievicz Award in 2021, her poetry book Where Memory Lies (Ponc Press) is due for publication later this year. Eleanor is working on a novel. Eleanor holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA (Hons) in Cultural History from the University of Northumbria, and a BA (Hons 1st) from the Open University, UK. Eleanor is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (FLS). She’s a helm and Press Officer for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as an Intensive Care Nurse and trained as a midwife at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin. eleanorhooker.com

Listen to more readings from Eleanor here. You can purchase Issue 13 here.

Banner photo by Eleanor Hooker. Issue 13 cover by Jo Mazelis.