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Here’s what that means for you—and why I hope you’ll join me.

Why Substack?

I know Substack, like all platforms has pros and cons, and has had its share of conttroversy. But I've looked closely at its genesis, its goals, and its moderation policies and am happy that they align enough for me to be there (having deserted Meta and Twitter for ethical reasons).

Substack lets me connect directly with my readers and other writers in a focused space dedicated to my kind of reading and discussion. It’s perfect for the kind of writing and sharing I want to do.

What’s coming:

– The poems and stories – the heart of my creative work – that I share with members here.

– Monthly Book Club reads – a new feature. I'll be bringing it to members here also. A chapter and poem read aloud by me, with behind-the-scenes thoughts on writing and publishing, and how the month’s events have shaped my creative choices.

Monthly Salon – live discussion and Q&A, diving into the Book Club reads and anything readers and other writers want to ask.

Why subscribe?

Subscribing ensures you never miss out. You’ll also get exclusive access to discussions, insights, and a community of readers and writers engaging with my work.

Is there a cost?

Like here, there will be a mix of free and subscriber-only but my main focus will be on my subscribers and making great work for them will be at the heart of my creative month.

I'm a reader member already. Should I move?

If you want to join other readers and writers in community and a book club, then yes. If you prefer a quieter, email only experience, stay here. I'll be feeding both kinds of reader.

How to join:
It’s simple—just click here: https://substack.com/@ornaross

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Chosen byThe Guardian as ‘one of the five best poetry podcasts' online, Ammar Kalia, the Guardian's global music critic,  describe perfectly describes the appeal of the show:

Mixing interviews with contemporary poets on their writing with his own exploration of classic works from the likes of Chaucer, Emily Dickinson and DH Lawrence, McGuinness doesn’t shy away from textual analysis but rather explains concepts to listeners to unfold myriad meanings from the page.

Mark gives poems what they most need, and what poetry lovers most crave: space. Space to breathe, space to be heard, space to resonate.

The occasion for the interview was the publication of my poem ‘Recalling Brigid’ in Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts. I read the poem and then Mark gently drew out the stories behind it.

We spoke about myth and memory, about the women who held the world together quietly (and those who still do), about the threads that bind Irish poetry to its oldest roots, about Norman Conquest, religious takeovers, and the female power that withstands it all.

You can listen in here.

click to listen

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Buy Poet Town Now

If you’d like to explore the anthology that welcomed the poem, do check out Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts — a project that has done so much to amplify the voices of poets along my stretch of sea.

That handsome volume would make a great Christmas gift for any lover of words.

As you can see from ‘Recalling Brigid,' the poetry within stretches far beyond Hastings, as well as including classic poetry section with plum offerings from the likes of Keats, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and both Rosettis, Gabriel and Christina. Lizzie Siddal too.

Poet Town was the brainchild of its editor, Richard Newham-Sullivan. With a foreword by Salena Godden, it brings together the best classic, modern and spoken word poets linked to this uniquely creative coastal town.

‘Poet Town is a book where some truth is shared, some magical inspiration is found and all the weather is weathered. These poems are from here, they are deep and salty, they are lurking in the crash of sea water around the legs of the pier, as much as they are wafting in the salt and vinegar on your fish and chips.' Salena Godden, from the foreword

The anthology includes Godden, Henry Normal, Iain Sinclair, Brian Moses, AK Benedict, Tim Rice and many other great contemporary poets, including Richard who is himself a fine poet, writing as Richard Evans.  You can purchase the book here

A Mouthful of Air: W.B. Yeats's Spiritual Marriage to Maud Gonne

As the author of A Life Before and A Crowd of Stars, I also have to give a nod to the name of Mark's podcast, and its source, the W.B. short lyric ‘He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved,' in which the poet makes a strong statement against Dublin gossip about his beloved and very public muse, Maud Gonne.

He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved
Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,
And dream about the great and their pride;
They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weigh this song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children’s children shall say they have lied.

The poem was first published in the May 1898 issue of The Dome, together with a second offering from Yeats, ‘He Hears the Cry of the Sedge,’ in which he writes of the pain of his spiritual marriage to Gonne.

He Hears the Cry of the Sedge
I wander by the edge
Of this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge:
Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round,
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and West,
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep.

Yeatsian critics have often cast the famed spiritual marriage as a tactical manipulation by Gonne to keep her poet interested, while not delivering the sexual goods. Yet it was likely Yeats who proposed the arrangement: in matters spiritual he led her, just as in Irish politics she led him.

And spiritual marriage was not uncommon in the occult circles in which Yeats and Gonne moved in the 1890s.

Golden Dawn papers describe partners sitting face-to-face in a darkened temple, sometimes naked, matching breath rhythms until the nādīs ‘ignite with liquid fire,’ sealing the creative and receptive magnetism.’ In this fusion, the object was not orgasm but sublimation until erotic tension, held just below the threshold of consummation, would rise up the spine and explode in clairvoyance or inspired speech.

Spiritual spouses testified that the resulting intimacy—sharing visionary landscapes, experiencing synchronous heartbeats, hearing each other’s thoughts—felt more naked and more connecting than physical love.

Yeats may have instigated it, but the spiritual marriage was hellish for him. In the first draft of his autobiography, completed by the beginning of 1917, he wrote of this time,

I was tortured by sexual desire and disappointed love. Often as I walked in the woods at Coole, it would have been a relief to have screamed aloud. [It was the most miserable time of my life.] When desire became an unendurable torture, I would masturbate and that, no matter how moderate I was, would make me ill. (Au, p165)

Gonne read both poems on a boat-and-train trip from Dublin to London. In a letter she tells him how she ‘read over & over again your poem until I didn’t need the book to read it, it is so beautiful.’ She doesn’t say which of the two poems she means, but surely it was the ‘Cry of the Sedge’?

Gonne would have considered the noble pain it stylizes, even sanctifies, to have been a beautiful thing, whereas she tended to breezily wave away references to the scandal that swirled around her.

In ‘He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Against His Beloved,' which gives Mark's podcast its name, Yeats addresses that scandal directly for the first time, scorning those who have spoken against his beloved muse and offering his poems as her protection.

This is the other side of the spiritual marriage, in which he casts himself as guardian and defender, repelling the slander that surrounded her with prophetic certainty. His words will, in time, outweigh any public censure. Time will avenge her because of his song, made out of ‘a mouthful of air.’

She never asked him to do this and what make this poem so poignant for Yeatsians is what he was shortly to learn about his beloved. While we, ‘their children's children,' must admit that our ancestors' did indeed lie in their gossip about Maud Gonne (one rumour Yeats had heard was that she had had aborted a child of which he was the father), not everything they said was untrue.

As Yeats would discover when she made advances to him in December 1898, his virgin-queen, whom he had helped to position as Ireland's Joan of Arc, was actually a mother of two, one deceased, and living in Paris with their father, her longtime lover, a French right-wing orator and politician, Lucien Millevoye.

The spiritual marriage inspired their work–hers as well as his–but simultaneously deepened their psychic wounds and reinforced their emotional avoidance. While it actually suited them both to channel their complex feelings into rituals and avoid real intimacy, at this time in their relationship, the unresolved tensions were rising. It would all to come to a head, shortly. Meantime, the beautiful poems of pain remain to tell the tale and inspire further books and podcasts.

• You can hear Mark read the poem and his detailed and fascinating exposition here.
• I hope you enjoy the conversation and that it encourages you to explore more poetry from A Mouthful of Air and, indeed, more poetry from Poet Town.

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For years I've written fiction at great (some might say ridiculous) length. The drafts of the Gonne-Yeats series that I'm currently working on, run to over a million words.

Big, multi-layer novels are what I most love reading and writing. To make them work, I have always written to length, then cut back.

For my fiction reader members, I provide extracts from these works-in-progress but I've always known this to be an incomplete reading experience–enjoyable enough, as far as it goes, but not the full fiction effect.

A novel chapter or extract is not the same as a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end, with all the echoes, surprises, and emotional pay‑offs in proper place.

Now, inspired by some of the good folks at Irish flash fiction journal, Splonk, (check it out, though it's currently on hiatus), and given the way this novel series is turning out, I've found a way to turn some individual chapters into short stories–some even into the super-short shorts of flash fiction.

And it's my intention to now provide an audio reading also.

I'm really happy about this, as it will offer my fiction members the same sort of complete reading experience that poetry members already enjoy.

And I'm also hoping that it might yield a less tortuous way of writing long novels. Perhaps not, and  there is no other for me than expand and chop–but it can't hurt to try a new way, using shorts as building blocks.

Your support will help me make it.

See you next week for the first story, in which W.B. Yeats meets his first love and muse, Laura Armstrong, the young woman his father referred to ‘a most fascinating little vixen.'

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I’m writing this on the train home, and all abuzz. On that big, bright stage, lyric, narrative, experimental and performance work sat side by side and all were equally welcomed–an echo of the open diversity of the anthology itself and of the whole Washing Windows project.

What moved me most about the evening was the sense it gave me of being part of a long, powerful stream of Irish women’s poetry. The evening felt almost like stepping into a living archive.

I read two poems: ‘Lost and Found’, a tough narrative piece rooted in a story Alice Walker tells in her book, Overcoming Speechlessness. Then, to shift the energy, and because I thought it was a poem that a room full of poets might appreciate, a lighter poem about being mauled by a critic, ‘A Rhyming Poem about Rhyming.'

The contrast felt right: first an attempt to find words for the worst sort of atrocity that leaves us speechless (‘Lost and Found' has a trigger warning in my own book), then a wink towards the lesser vulnerability of writers, as we offer our work up to the gaze–and the teeth!–of others.

There was no biting or harshness at this anthology launch, far less any violence. Just a generous gathering of Irish women’s voices, at every stage of life and career, writing in every imaginable mode.

Báinne Gear / Spoilt Milk by Colette Nic Aodha

One of the highlights for me was a blazing mallacht (curse poem) by Colette Nic Aodha, a bilingual poet who can curse with cackling wit and righteous fury.

A curse on those who harrassed me at work
on their next bite may they choke,
may their every phone call be a hoax…

and so on, through more than twenty finely honed maledictions, in two languages. You can find the poem, and many another, in Colette's book Báinne Gear / Spoilt Milk (pictured).

Huge thanks to Alan Hayes for his gift of a copy, and of course for the vision and graft that made Washing Windows possible. And mostly, as I said on the night, for being that rare and beautiful thing: a truly feminist man.

Thanks too to the Irish Literary Society particularly Gavin Clarke, and the Irish Cultural Centre for holding the space so beautifully as so many  poets let loose their words.

It was an honour to add my two poems to the mighty chorus.

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I encountered the story told in this poem, a true story which beggars belief, in Overcoming Speechlessness,” a book of important essays by the great poet and womanist, Alice Walker.

I'd had to put the book down halfway through reading it and one story particularly haunted me. Some time later, this poem emerged.

Lost and Found: Poem

Her name? Her name is Generose,
Watch now how her story flows

through the sounds of war anew,
our ruler coming out to say:
‘Bombs! Again! Away!’ Through
minions mincing with faux-regret
at what we need to do, and why
‘And yet… but yet…’
the evil ones must die,
through the soldiers jumping to,
through me, and my kind,
left bereft behind, nowhere to be
except here, hoping to woo
a person like you.

Come with me.
I need us to get to a place far
from here, where four or five million…?
No. Let me begin again…
Let me start here. Today.
Clearing my house. ‘And not before time!’
is what my mother would have said
if she’d seen it. I was making two piles
– to hold or to go? – when I found it:
the book. Lying open, face down,
waiting for me to return.

I shrugged off the me who likes to think
she can think herself safe,
and picked it back up where I’d stopped.
And dropped down again into that wood
where four million people once died.
(Or was it five?) Yes, genocide.

One mother’s name was Generose,
see now how her story goes.

When they’d hear the trucks of the killers
roar in, the villagers would grab the hands
of their children and flee to the trees.
At night, they’d lie down on dead leaves,
knuckling dirt into dreams.
One day Generose and her family
were too slow to go. The soldiers
came in with machete and gun,
hacked her husband to death, then
made her climb up to lie down
on her own kitchen table,
in front of her daughter and son.

‘We’re hungry,’ they said
as they cut off her leg and sliced it
into six pieces, and fried
them up in her own pan.

Yes, name her name, it’s Generose.
Listen. Listen to how it goes.
They ordered her children to partake.
The boy knew how to refuse
and was shot on the spot. The girl,
in terror, attempted to try. I ask you:
can you imagine? Not the family
so much as those soldiers,
the teaching it took to create them.
(Where this happened was already famed
for kings who came from afar to take
what they would. What one liked
to take was the hands of the men
he’d enslaved, the ones who had failed
to bring in their quota of crop.
And chop them off.)
Consumed by the sight of the girl
trying to force her mother
as meat through her mouth, the men
somehow allowed Generose down
from the table to crawl from the house.

And so, somehow, she survived.
And so, she has heard, did her daughter.
And so she believes that some day
she’ll see her again. And she works
every which way for that day.
Why tell you all this?
May I reverse the question,
ask you how you feel when you
hear it? That answer is why
the poet wrote her book,
though to regurgitate that leg
made her sick for weeks after.

The same choices call to us all.
Kings will do what kings do,
soldiers too, and if you don’t
want to know, I won’t keep you.

Let me back to the book that knows
what to own, what should be let go.
Let me wait in the place I’ve come
to call home, with those
who decline to oppose.

Let me hold to my hope that the girl
might be found, enfolded again,
to recollect their dead men,
that we all might recall
what we’ve been taught, so well,
to forget: the long-lasting hold,
the cast iron caress of the mother.

Her name, this time, was Generose,
and that is how the story goes.


* * *

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