An Irish Poet on the Train

We both ordered coffee from the snack cart--my head was pounding after being stuck inside Harry Potter for an hour until I started getting seasick. It took all my will power to close the book, tilt my head back and close my eyes. The coffee definitely seemed to be helping though.

The man across the aisle drinking his coffee had a halo of long white hair, a grizzled face and old, torn clothes. His dress was original-hippie-esque: loose fitting shirt, black suede vest (torn), beaded necklace and bracelets, sandals through which his gnarled, horny toes emerged. I snuck a couple glimpses of this strange character as he wrote slowly and intently in a notebook with a fountain pen.

We started talking about this and that; I don't know how the conversation started, how these things go. He had a new book of poetry coming out--he showed me an extra cover he was writing on the back of. I'm Out Here by Pat Ingoldsby. There he was on the cover, looking windblown.



He was on his way to the Islands to recover from a chaotic weekend with a family torn apart by his old friend's suicide. I asked him if he ever read any Richard Brautigan. He had--he loves In Watermelon Sugar. Me too! He asked me if he was still alive. No, I said, he committed suicide in the '80s.

Ingoldsby prides himself on being listed along with Richard Brautigan, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway and others as a famous person who has received electric shock therapy. See list on ect.org. They want to keep people on an even keel, he said. Use words like "straighten out your thoughts." "Stabilize."

He told me to Google his name and see the list for myself--as someone who appears not to use the internet at all, he was incredibly proud that I could potentially find his name online. Not only that, but I discovered that he has a Wikipedia entry of his own--not too shabby!

Ken Kesey, I said.

Cuckoo's Nest, he said, brightening. I went into a pub and Cuckoo's Nest was playing on the TV and I saw there what had happened to me, how my body had convulsed. For the first time I saw it. I knew what they had done to me. I had no memory of any of it. I went straight to the toilet and threw up.

I told him the story I had read that Kesey set up an electric chair in his backyard and administered shock therapy to himself so he would know how it felt when writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

He showed me photos of his books for sale on the streets of Dublin. Literally--he spreads out a blanket on the sidewalk and arranges the books on it. His wife's new book of poems, his many books, there in the sunshine on the pavement. And the police chasing him away for not having a license.

I've got a poetic license, he always tells them. He said they never get the joke.

Cops. How can selling poetry without a license be hurting anyone? How on earth can it be wrong to peddle your own books which you have published yourself? He avoids publishers and bookstores--too mainstream, too establishment. Even in Dublin.

He seems to think that not a publisher would dare touch his work--or perhaps he worries they would manhandle it. But he seems happy to be self-publishing. I wouldn't do it any other way, he said. It gives me total freedom to say whatever I want.

He said one thing he loves about books is that you can choose your own teachers--for instance he was reading some of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and after reading those, wrote some of his best poems. Here was Leonardo da Vinci, telling me how to see, how to make art, he said. That's amazing. That's a poem in itself, I said.