John McNamee: A legend in his own lunchtime

Being There: A familiar sight around Dublin, the poet has lived a life that is as rich as his poems

This article about John McNamee, who died on Saturday, June 29, 2019, originally appeared in 2008 

"You can be very lucky with a £20 pound treble," says Dublin poet John McNamee, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette outside a Dublin café.

"That bet might get you a grand and that grand is like a Christmas bonus if you worked in an office. So good luck does happen. Yes, I have a bet from time to time. Let's put it this way, I don't think Patrick Kavanagh would be ashamed of me, whatever about my sister in Foxrock."

He cackles loudly then, a laugh you come to crave as you spend time with one of the last characters in a town that used to be over populated with characters. It's a staccato giggle that lights up his weather-beaten features, an eruption of incredulous joy. He tells the £20 treble story to illustrate the vagaries of life as a journeyman poet, troubadour and man about town in a hat. He tells it because he has lived life on the edge and he has survived - and luck has played a big part in that. "I was born under a lucky star," he says, shoulder twitching. But he does not laugh.

IF YOU LIVE in Dublin, you might recognise him on his daily strolls through the city, sometimes with the hat, sometimes without. He has sheltered in the city's doorways, drank in the pubs, hidden from the landlords, walked the factory floors, washed dishes in restaurants, taken his chances abroad, scrubbed the decks of tankers, kept body and soul together against all the odds. His dues, he says, are pretty well paid up.

You might have seen him around. In the bookies or in Eamon Doran's over late night pints. Bringing his writing into Beck and Call on Abbey Street to be typed up, chatting with the man who runs the The Typewriter Shop on Dorset Street. Drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes outside the Metro café where every so often a passer-by raises a hand to greet him, part of the furniture, walking reminder of a Dublin that is not quite dead. Not yet.

When he was 11 and sick in hospital, he cadged a pen off a nurse and tried to write a poem about her on the bed sheets. He has been "trying" to write poems ever since. (He always says "trying", but has several books of poetry and stories under his belt - you can find them in the National Library, under "John McNamee born 1946". They include A Man With A Hatand A Station Called Heavenand his latest, an allegoric fairytale called The King of Faisham.) "It was a gut feeling," the poet says of his instinct to carve out a literary life. "At that age you don't know what you are doing, but somewhere inside me was the feeling that this is what I should be doing."

He chose a different road to most of his peers. "A lot of people I went to school with would have spent 40 years in the civil service, but I know that would have killed me," he says. "In my teenage years, I spent a lot of time going to places like Howth Head and the Phoenix Park and taking a bit of paper with me and stringing words together and looking for a little space in my head to call my own. And I found it. I suppose I did find it through those poems and writings, so that's a happy story. It won't make the front pages."

The young poet grew his hair long and travelled away from his home in Drumcondra. He went to Reykjavik, spent a year writing poetry in an artist's garret by candlelight while he waited for work in a fish factory or on a cod boat.

He was in New York's Greenwich Village and in San Francisco, where he was inspired by the beat poets and the civil rights movement. He has been homeless in Dublin and London, where he became friends with the late Anton Wallich-Clifford, who founded the Simon Community. He lived in Banff, Canada, high in the Rocky Mountains, among a community of artists.

Along the way, he bumped into Tennessee Williams and Louis Armstrong.

McNAMEE TELLS about the time in the late 1960s when he lived for a couple of months on the beach at Las Palomas. He got a job on a German tanker to get a bit of money. "That seemed like a good idea," he says. Up the Orinoco River, down to Venezuela and then the cabin fever got him and he jumped ship in New Haven in Connecticut. "I hitched from New Haven to Biloxi, Mississippi, where a lady gave me a lift heading towards New Orleans. A cop did her for speeding and then made some serious enquiries about me," he says. After 17 days in New Orleans parish prison, a segregated jail which Time Magazinesaid at the time was the second-worst in the US. "I got voluntary deportation back to Dublin," he says. He cut his hair, got a variety of jobs but kept his mind on the real job. "The poet's work is to elevate people, to lift them up," he says.

Things have been more settled these past years. So is there an average day in the life of John McNamee who for the past few years has lived in council accommodation enjoying "security of tenure" for the first time in years? "Average doesn't come into it," he says. "In Dublin, sometimes it feels as though everyone is in IT and everyone lives in apartments." (He pronounces it carefully, "apuhrtments", he says, all the better to get his point across.) "But people like me are relevant too, we have a place . . . this is the creative life, there has been no great material rewards but there is a poetic buzz. If you come up with a great line, that can be a shot in the arm," he says.

"That's the way of life on the road, there are a lot of pitfalls, drink and drugs and a lot of good ones get washed away too, but you survive, you learn. Sometimes you have to think a bit quicker than other people, sometimes it just comes down to that," he says.

A YELLOWING Charles Bukowski novel in hand, battered hat on his head, the poet stands and his voice booms around the Writers' Centre in Dublin's Parnell Square.

"Poetry is the crumbs of the arts," he tells me earlier. "If you get 15 people in to listen to a reading, you are doing well. Anything more is a bonus."

There are slightly more than that number gathered here to listen to lunchtime poetry. John has been organising the Out to Lunchseries for almost 10 years. When the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre closed down a couple of years ago, it moved here. He persuaded Longley to read for the series and Heaney. "We've had everybody of note."

The poet Ted Dappe has just finished his reading. It's an edifying way to spend your lunch hour. When he has finished, the man with the hat stands and raises his voice as though addressing a crowded bar in Brooklyn or a San Francisco beat club or a stinking cabin full of sailors on a cod boat bound for the Yukon. He has a Dublin drawl, with a laconic rhythm that hints of late nights and super-sized cigarettes and sheltering in doorways and landlords rapping fists on the door wanting their rent. Bang, bang, bang. Mr McNamee, I want to see you, now if you don't mind, Mr McNamee, now!

"Ladies and gentlemen, don't Ted Dappe's poems have the most calming, sanitising effect?" he says and this is exactly the effect of the poems, but you only realise it when John McNamee suggests it to you in that booming voice. Outside, the sun is shining. As we walk, he says that calming, sanitising poetry is just what you need when you are "winding your way through city, halfway between suicide and hell". He knows, because he's been there, but he has a different way of putting it. "I've been through the tunnel of love, and I came out the other side. I might be slightly shell-shocked but I'm still here," he says. That cackle erupts again, infectious and always a surprise.

We go across the road to the Garden of Remembrance so he can get his photo taken. He chose the spot himself. "At a certain age you start reminiscing. When you are in your almost autumn like me, you start remembering so this garden is a place I have great affection for."

Remembrance. The heyday of his youth, San Francisco in 1969 and trying to get it down right on the paper in Iceland. The idyllic moments of a life lived outside the comfort zone. "I had a lot of them. I remember in Spain, walking through the Pyrenees with a rucksack in my back and a pencil in my pocket, a lump of cheese and a jar of coffee in a bag. Those were some of the happiest times of my life," he says. "Just freedom, being on the open road with no idea of what is in store or where you are going to end up."

Leaning on a stone wall in front of the Children of Lir monument, he talks about the rewards of being a writer, even now when the poems are harder to write, although he does have a few "on the backburner".

"Some of the experiences you have might register with people and then you realise you are doing something right, that it's not such an isolated business this life, that you are living in the same world as an awful lot of people."

THE POET HAS been through the tunnel of love and he's come out the other side, shell-shocked, shoulder twitching, back from the edge. "A benevolent oddity, you could say that," he smiles. Before he goes, the poet says you need a bit of love in everything you write. "If you don't have that, you've nothing." Maybe this is what he means:

Here I live in a poet's way, trying to salvage crumbs of love
From the leaking drainpipe of those in the gutter,
I've seen the blessed, ragged poor hung out to dry on the clothesline of neglect,
Looking for a gentle breeze of justice.
Brass monkeys in search of a daily cure of methadone,
Dypsos drinking from a holy well.
Poverty has its own science where the oppressed become beautiful,
So sainted by the love that they have for each other.
They fall on the slippery ice of the heart,
So they can see Jesus in the dark,
And hitch a lift to Heaven in Noah's Ark.

(From Nicholas Streetby John McNamee)

Out to Lunchtakes place every second Friday in the Irish Writers' Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin 1. The next event takes place on Aug 1 and features Galway poet Gerry Hanberry