The Plough and the Stars by Sean Thomas Dougherty
In “The Plough and the Stars,” Sean Thomas Dougherty demonstrates the powerful effect a keen ear can have on one’s writing. Using the structure of a single unbroken paragraph, Dougherty catapults the reader back through time and space in his lyrical flash-length essay, allowing his audience to assume the role of fly-on-the-wall in a Cambridge, Massachusetts bar decades ago. It’s the same role Dougherty-as-narrator played: the unassuming observer privy to a snapshot of working-class life. The bar was where he “learned to listen,” he writes in his author’s note: “What is affirmed is a love of language and speech, not just in the speaker, but in the men at the bar.”
Dougherty details his approach to writing this piece. “Language as much as place was to be its focus,” he states. To understand language, not necessarily its literal meaning but its nuance and intonation, the writer must be a close listener. Instead of directly quoting the men he encountered at the bar, he captures their tone, voice, and the rhythm of their language. Small, seemingly offhand details become of great importance: talk of the Red Sox and bygone basketball players, “the way a certain baker made the best bread,” or laments on public transportation. These are coupled with weightier details—Irish politics (“No one talked about the Troubles,”) or reminiscences of a patron’s deceased wife—to build a tender portrait of Massachusetts’s Irish immigrants and their descendants.
Dougherty’s writing is chameleonic in a way, in one breath inhabiting his own voice, and in the next swiftly shifting to the tongues of the older men he is so captivated by. “These are mostly working men, and yet they are far from uncultured,” Dougherty mentions in his author’s note. Discussions of sport, classes taught, and plays attended all blend together harmoniously, exemplifying language’s power to expose the core and essence of its speaker. With “The Plough and the Stars,” Dougherty proves the value of listening and how it leads to understanding, at levels both anthropological and spiritual. Poetry exists everywhere, Dougherty shows us, especially in conversations held over pints of beer. —CRAFT
What did I know of being a man, back in another century, as I sat in that bar off Massachusetts Avenue, with the older men talking about the Red Sox, and so-and-so’s wife passed on, the saint she was, and the way their kids were hanging on, or what about the weather? I didn’t listen to what I should have back then. No one talked about the Troubles, which only the much older men called it, as the young talked about jobs and girls. But everyone knew a man who knew a man, even across an ocean, and even the man I worked for in the factory in New Hampshire was heard to have run guns or money, or money and guns, though looking back probably both was the correct answer. It was a time of secrets not said at bars. Instead the men spoke of baseball, or a play they saw, or a class they taught, or a place they worked, these men from many different jobs. Some taught at the Catholic schools, some were electricians, or worked for the city in the Works departments. And always the weather, the weather every day, it might rain, or it rained, or it might snow, or it was going to snow, or I hate walking in the snow, and how slow the T was, or worse some racial thing, though that was rare and squarely silenced, as these were men I suspect helped to make things better, even if sometimes they were worse. Half of them were grandsons of immigrants, and half the sons of immigrants, and some immigrants themselves straight off a plane from Limerick, Tipperary, or Cork. And me I drank, and I guess I listened more, writing down a word here and there, and drinking more than writing, and the older men talked, then donned their hats and went home wherever home was at a more than proper time, leaving us to close, the ones who didn’t know better, the young and searching, or the men who simply sat and drank till close. And still to this day I don’t know what I did learn back then, if anything. If I had listened more would it have helped? I was a poor excuse of a man, temperamental, quick to anger, self-absorbed, in love with language and little else, laboring with my hands loading trucks but wanting something else I could not name. Looking back I can hear them clear, those older men in collared shirts or uniforms, who sipped a pint and lingered. How in the banter one would turn and say, “Did you ever notice…” or “I was just thinking…” And never talked of movie stars or gossip, more likely what the alderman was doing, or the mayor was on the take, or the trains, they never ran on time. Or the way a certain baker made the best bread. Or a book—about a book one read or an Irish actor they had once seen perform so brilliantly it left them dazed, “how easily he spoke a man’s life, like in O’Casey’s plays.” Or a batting average, or how “Larry Bird is great, but not as good as Cousy or Russell.” “And you there Borstal Boy,” they’d named me for the tough look of my quiet face. “You should learn a trade. Ronnie can get you into the Train Yard.” Then they’d laugh as he pinched my skinny arm. “Leave the man alone,” another would say, though I was barely a man. “He’s dreaming of a girl, a girl who can cook sausages.” “My wife makes the best sausages.” “Ah, your wife does make them better.” “Son, you see—to quote The Great Bard—in love and life it be the ordinary simplest things.”
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY’s most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. His awards include The Lydia McCain Established Artist Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. He has new essays in Brevity, Common Ground Review, Midway Journal, and Talking River Review. A longtime disability worker, he works the third shift as a Medtech and Carer along Lake Erie, and teaches part-time for the MFA Program in creative writing at Western Connecticut State University.
Featured image by Alan Jiang, courtesy of Unsplash.
