Interview with Poet, Peadar O'Donoghue

Continuing my repostings of interviews for January, here's Peadar O'Donoghue whose first collection, Jewel was published by Salmon and whose magazine The Poetry Bus goes from strength to strength.

 Peadar O'Donoghue is a poet, well-connected blogger and now editor of the Poetry Bus.

Hi Peadar, thanks for agreeing to this interview. How did you first get into poetry?

I had never been into poetry and never read much of it at all. But I had written some words a bit like poetry, purely awful stuff as a teenager and beyond. I've always felt drawn to writing (if not reading) but was never encouraged, particularly at school where I was either ignored or savagely criticized for bad handwriting etc etc..In fact the only two things that school taught me was

1. I was stupid and
2. That I didn't belong.

It's taken a lifetime (so far) to try and address maybe even unlearn those lessons. Paradoxically they make great ingredients for a poet - even a rubbish one like me, so thanks school!

Anyways I moved back to Ireland and was staying with my cousin in Bray. I learned that there was a poetry group that met in a bar so I went along 2 or 3 times and drank and sang a lot and some eager beaver enquired where they could send their poetry for publication and Poetry Ireland Review was mentioned, I'd never heard of it (or any poetry mags) but later got the address and sent some poems off and they were swiftly (and rightly) rejected. I sent some more a good bit later to the newly installed editor Maurice Harmon, who must indeed be a kindly man, he took the shortest one and squeezed it in and that made me think maybe I could be a poet.

Tell us about the Poetry Bus.

It's just brilliant! Wonderful, marvelous, I love it! It's a magazine of contemporary poetry and illustration and now the latest issue comes with a FREE audio CD of 42 poems and two songs one from living legend Martin Egan and one from on the up band The Souterrain.

Image copyright Adam Neate and courtesy of Elms Lesters Gallery.
You don't even have to like poetry to love it! See here to buy a copy.

Where did the idea to start it as a magazine come from?

On my quest to be the worlds greatest poet/photographer/spaceman, I started a blog called totalfeckineejit and I dedicated a LOT of time and effort to it, in some ways it's some of my best writing (in parts!) and I got a few followers many of whom were interested in poetry. I happened on an experimental idea that we (all the bloggers) should sit down at the same time across the world on a given date and time and write a poem to see if their were any similarities in the writing, anything in the zeitgeist as it were.

There wasn't really, but I liked the exercise and thought it might be nice to repeat the task regularly, every Monday in fact to try to brighten up the worst day of the week. Some of the poems over the months that followed were really good and a lot of the poets had never been published. I believed they deserved to be published and so the idea of the magazine was born. With the bloggers all being so diverse and 'getting aboard' every week put me in mind of a bus and so The Poetry Bus was born.

How did you go about it and how did it go?

I trawled through all the material and chose the poems I liked best, I didn't want this to be a catch-all anthology, there had to be some merit or style otherwise it would be pointless. I invited other established poets to contribute and a few artists and the mag took shape. I had no money but amazingly people from around the world sent me some via a paypal donate button on the blog. I got enough to pay for the first tiny print run and sales of the first print run paid for the second print run and a magazine was born!

What lessons did you learn and what did you differently for Poetry Bus 2?

The only lesson I really learned, Kate, was that artists and poets and bloggers are amazingly supportive and kind. Despite what we are bombarded with in the media, most people in general, and creative people in particular, are good and kind and want to help. There are exceptions of course, but they don't interest me, I try to focus on the positive, a rising tide lifts all boats  (and buses) and I am genuinely delighted by the good will and kindness that has been shown to The Bus.

The magazine itself is evolving, finding it's feet, it's got a slightly more cutting edge and contemporary design this time. I really wanted the artwork to be spectacular, and it is! Among others we feature the work of one of the best street/conceptual artists in the world - Adam Neate, who let us use his illustrations for free. In fact everyone did everything for free. Which brings up another thorny issue, I believe artist/writers should be paid for their work at all times but paradoxically worry that this could ruin things?

I've changed the dimensions of the mag  from A5 size to A4. As for the poetry I've opened it up to the world and anyone can submit. The hardest part has been doing rejections, I don't know if I'll ever get use to doing them. The hardest part has been doing rejections, I don't know if I'll ever get use to doing them.

And as I couldn't get any official funding I tried fundit.ie and was accepted onto the scheme. Basically it is crowd funding where you pick a financial target for your project and get people to pledge money in return for various rewards (in our case a free magazine.) If you hit the target you get the money (minus some fundit administration costs.) If you miss the target you get nothing! Which makes it very exciting and a great incentive for people pledging. I found it a stress and hassle free way of getting the printing costs of the magazine. The fundit team are friendly, helpful and very very good at what they do. I can't recommend them highly enough. (A special thanks here to Martin McNicholl who guided and helped all the way through) In fact I will be submitting again for the next issue, PB3.

Congratulations on your upcoming first collection. Tell us about it and how that came about?

Thanks Kate! My first collection is called Jewel and will be published by Salmon and launched at The Cuirt International Literary Festival April 2012. And it's a pure miracle.The best and most amazing thing that has ever happened to me apart from the day I got married and the day my son was born ! I still can't quite believe it.

After you've had a few poems published inevitably you start dreaming about having a collection, your own book.I had started buying a few poetry books (about time!) and had become drawn towards Salt in England and Salmon Poetry here in Ireland, both seemed very accessible and friendly and different. I liked their poets and their book covers and their alternative attitude.I thought if I was ever going to try to get published it would be with one of these. That was my dream. I abstractly started to feel Salt, though great and interesting , were too big ,too many books, too many poets and were diversifying into other genres. So Salmon had become my number one choice but I thought my poetry was nowhere near good enough and that I wasn't ready, so I didn't even submit.Then completely out of the blue Jessie Lendennie sent me an email asking if I had ever considered publishing a collection. I nearly fell off the chair!

Apart from me, which poets, websites, events  and publications do you recommend?

All the poets in The Poetry Bus are fablo! The Glór Sessions is great every Monday night in The International Bar Wicklow Street in Dubland I went to a Nighthawks gig once and that was cool too. Seven Towers and Wurm Im Apfel are always working hard and putting on great (and often free) events. The SHOp is a truly wonderful magazine, greater than the sum of its parts and its parts are always exquisite, so that is some mighty magic, I love it! I think The Stinging Fly is a fine magazine (particularly for the short stories) and really great value, I really like the cut of Revival's jib too.

What other poetry plans have you got coming up?

Well as soon as PB2 is out It's full steam ahead with PB3! I'd love to get a real Double Decker Bus for events, festivals, tours etc, but that's still in the dream cupboard...for now!

Thanks a lot for agreeing to do this.

See here to buy a copy of Poetry Bus 2.

Interview with writer and blogger Nuala Ni Chonchor

This interview first published on writing.ie

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Nuala Ni Chonchor whose flash fiction collection Of Dublin and Other Fictions has just been published by Arlan House.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a full-time fiction writer and poet. She has published three collections of short fiction, the most recent being Nude by Salt Publishing and three poetry collections, including the bi-lingual Tattoo: Tatu by Arlen House, and most recently one novel, You published by New Island.

Welcome to emergingwriter. Could you introduce yourself to the readers please?
I’m a full-time writer from Dublin living in County Galway. I write both fiction and poetry but my heart lies in fiction really. I have three kids and ten hours a week to write so I stuff a lot into those precious ten hours. At the moment I am writing a novel and am at the ‘enjoying it’ stage of that.

How did you get into writing?

I’ve been writing since I was a child, it grew from my love of reading. I came second in a national poetry competition when I was ten and that gave me a boost and a special interest in writing. Michael Hartnett was the judge of that comp and I remember my mother’s awe and reverence when we met him; it rubbed off.

What do you consider the highlights so far?

Winning the Francis MacManus Award in 2003 was brilliant – the money was great and it was just an all round positive experience. My first novel You coming out last year with New Island, after 5 years of schlepping it around publishers, was also a highlight.

Which came first, poetry or fiction?
Poetry came first for me, but I fell in love with short fiction after taking a course with Mike McCormack in Galway Arts Centre in the mid nineties. I still love short stories, as both reader and writer.

How do you change from one form to another? Do you feel the poetry helps the fiction and vice versa?

I write everything at the same time, I don’t totally neglect one form for another. So even though I am in the thick of a novel, if a poem or short story occurs to me, I will abandon the novel to write that.

I think poetry and fiction complement each other. Poets pay very close attention to language and individual word choices – that then becomes important in the fiction.

What have you got coming up?
My third full poetry collection The Juno Charm is due out from Salmon Poetry in November, so I am putting the finishing touches to the manuscript at the moment.

Which Irish poets, living or dead, do you recommend people search out and read?

Too many to mention but here are a few: Patrick Cotter, Mary O’Donnell, Cherry Smyth, Paul Durcan, Matthew Sweeney, Grace Wells.

You can find out more about Nuala at ·http://www.nualanichonchuir.com/·and her lovely blog http://womenrulewriter.blogspot.com

Interview with poet, Alice Lyons

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Alice Lyons

Thanks very much for agreeing to this interview. Could you introduce yourself to the readers please? 

I was born in Paterson New Jersey in 1960 into an Irish-American family and grew up in the United States. I studied for degrees in European Intellectual History (BA Connecticut College), Sociolinguistics (M.Sc. University of Pennsylvania) and Fine Art (MFA, Boston University)and have taught English literature and language and art&design at third level for most of my career. I love teaching, especially across disciplines. My writing wanders in an out of all these fields as well as into the fields and hedgerows I now live among.
I moved to Ireland in 1998 because I felt it would be good for my work to be here. It was an intuitive leap, and I'm glad I jumped. After being in academia for most of my twenties and early thirties, I removed myself and just worked; it was a process of absorbing all the valuable material I had studied (and lived) and casting off what was of no use to me. That's when the work started to coalesce and take on a life of its own. To talk back.
I make my living by working part-time as a curator of contemporary art and teaching poetry and visual art. I live with my twelve-year-old daughter and soon-to-be husband, filmmaker Colin McKeown.

How did you get into poetry? 

It got into me early...it has always seemed to be the sort of language that feels most familiar. A home. I wrote poems as a child, wrote the usual intense stuff as a teenager. When I visited Connecticut College as a prospective student in 1978, I was lucky to be plopped into William Meredith's poetry seminar in the basement of Harkness Chapel. The students were slumped on shabby sofas and armchairs and Meredith read a couple of poems, which they discussed. The casual atmosphere was alluring. It was my first exposure to a 'live' poet, to 'live' poetry. I was hooked from the get-go. Meredith was wonderful. Erudite, but warm, wise and exceedingly generous. I took all the classes with him I could during the four years I was at Connecticut.

I'll be looking up William Meredith now.
What do you consider your highlights so far?

Winning the Patrick Kavanagh Award was completely unexpected and a very nice thing. I had entered at the last minute, didn't give it a thought, submitted stuff I'd written very quickly and hadn't shown to anyone. An award like that, for a person who knew no one in the literary community here, who hadn't published much before that, helped me to keep sitting at my desk with the notebook open and the pen moving.

Congratulations on that. Can you explain how it works when you are involved in a collaborative art project such as the The Polish Language film?

Films can be a variant of a poetry reading. They can capture the rhythm and sound of words; they can, of course, give the poem a visual dimension. I loved the idea of using film to extend a poem, not illustrate it. I started trying to make poetry films with really limited software that I learned to use on my Mac laptop (iMovie mostly). It was fun, but I felt ham-fisted with the animation.

A friend who teaches animation knew Orla Mc Hardy as she was in his class and making a film based on an Ivor Cutler poem. He thought we would like each other and introduced us. We've completed two films together and are working on a third, all based on poems I've written. Orla is a visual/animation svengali. She always has either an exceedingly elegant or completely random visual idea. I trust this. She has a poet's approach to film making. We laugh a lot and work really hard, always dissecting the text, trying to stretch it, trying to amaze ourselves. These projects have been supported by grants from the Irish Film Board and the Arts Council. They are interested in cross-disciplinary work, so our projects have fit their bill. Our film "The Polish Language" has won a number of Best Animation awards and has been selected for competition is over 30 film festivals world wide.I'm just back from Ukraine, where the film screened as part of the Krok International Festival of Animation, which takes place aboard a river cruiser that travels from Kiev to Odessa over 10 days. It was an amazing trip, and I saw so many interesting films.

There are loads of ways that writers can collaborate in cross-disciplinary ways. I think the best way is to think about people whose work you admire in other disciplines and imagine ways that you might do something together. At first, it might seem like 'merely' playing, but I think play is an extremely under-rated activity for adults, and you never know what kind of serious stuff can come from it!

The films are well worth seeing and are at www.alicelyons.ie and www.thepolishlanguage.com
What are you working on now?

My book Staircase Poems is available from www.alicelyons.ie and Amazon and fine bookshops around Ireland. I'm working on a new collection of poems, which is called The Breadbasket of Europe, and I am writing it in my capacity as a doctoral candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's in Belfast.

Three new poems and a Q & A with me will appear in the December issue of POETRY (Chicago).
Orla Mc Hardy and I are in the final stages of working on our third poetry film, Developers, which has been funded by a Film Project Award from the Arts Council. It will be out early next year.

Congratulations again on the film project award. I look forward to seeing it. Thanks for telling us about your poetry and films.

Thank you Kate. Best of luck in all your work.

Interview with Poet, Eoghan Walls

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Eoghan Walls whose collection The Salt Harvest was shortlisted for the Strong Award for first collection

Hi Eoghan and welcome to emerging writer. How did you first get into poetry?

I wanted to write from about three, when I was mainly into Bananaman.  Over the years, I got into horror - great cheap pulp titles generally, with titles like Slugs! and Scorpions! - and then studied English at University. I loved the way literature could open a new world for the reader - or briefly refresh this world - and at University, I saw how this could be done in poetry, with Hopkins in particular.  He jarred me awake.  Prose always has its great exciting moments, but often has to string them together with what my younger self would have called "the boring bits". This is not always the case.  But with Hopkins - and Williams, and Eliot, and Muldoon - I saw writers not wasting time writing the boring bits, getting straight to the words where the world could refresh itself.

Have you found Bananaman and Slugs! have had any influence on your poetry?

Heh - I guess I asked for that.  But - well - I would like to say they are becoming more of an influence.  For years, I have been drawn to poems that play at the boundary of high and low culture.  On this side of the Atlantic, I guess I mean poets like Paul Farley or Simon Armitage, but the Americans have more - like with "Attack of the Crab Monster" by Lawrence Raab.  The poem is playful, frames itself as a B-movie - and yet it covers a very powerful and moving love-story at its core.  Gorgeous stuff.  

For years as a young poet I immersed myself in the big dramas - death, sex and sacramental life - but the heavy-handed sincerity of young men does lack the richness such poems achieve. I still think poetry must concern itself regularly with the visceral ends of life, but am only now becoming capable, in my 30s, to approach these with both humour and gravitas.  At least, I hope I am.  

How did your collection with Seren come about?

I have been working on my collection for years - since my Eric Gregory award in 2006 - and it was never quite right.  I kept fiddling about with poems that should have really been abandoned as juvenilia.  I got it into shape - finally, you might say - two years ago, and decided to send it off to a few publishers.  We are warned against simultaneous submissions, but publishing houses have no duties to the aspiring writer, and so I think it is wise, if your collection is ready, to send it to more than one at a time.  Thankfully, a few houses were interested, and I liked what the poetry editor, Amy Wack has been doing at Seren - for a relatively small press, they have been winning a lot of the big prizes recently, and getting nominated for many more.  I was delighted to go with them.

What specifically appealed to you about Seren?

They are a small press, but they are consistently nominated for the big prizes.  Over the last few years, Kathryn Simmonds and Hilary Menos - both Seren poets - snagged the Forward Prize for the best first collection.  Both books were excellent, with high production values and a great variety in the work.  But even this year, two of the six shortlisted were from Seren.  They get a lot of attention.  As an Irish poet, I am aware of the need to be read in Britain as well as Ireland, and so I wanted to get one of the high profile presses.  Amy Wack - their poetry editor - is a great woman - she has a sharp critical ear.  

What advice would you have for new writers?

Stick at it.  Read all you can of your chosen genre.  There is a common debate on whether or not poetry should aim to be popular - to compete with apps, films and novels - or should it be happy with its relatively niche status.  Of course, the market is probably bigger in numbers but not percentage-of-the-population wise, so it is hard to know, but when one does see that they made Big Momma's House 3, it is hard not to get jealous of more lucrative forms of culture.  But a good poet and friend Alex Wylie said to me, in the middle of one argument over pints,

It is not our duty to sell poetry to everyone; it is our duty to try to be better than Dante.  

A tall order, no doubt with snobbish undercurrents, but if we are writing poetry, isn't it because we respect and love the form?  I came to poetry not because it was shinier or gorier than films or comics, but because it could concentrate power in a different way.  So I guess that would be it.  Read a lot, and try to be better than Dante.

Me, I’m trying to be better than Wendy Cope. What have you got coming up?

I guess mainly the book, The Salt Harvest, available from www.serenbooks.com or Amazon.  Also I’m in, The Best British Poetry 2011, available from Salt publishing.  No readings coming up in the near future I can think of, but I am sure some will come along.  Thanks for everything.

Here's a link to Eoghan reading provided by Seren.

Interview with poet Eleanor Hooker

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Eleanor Hooker whose first collection The Shadow Owner's Companion was shortlisted for the dlr Shine/Strong Award.
 
Eleanor Hooker lives in NorthTipperary. She has a BA (Hons 1st) from the Open University, an MA (Hons.) in Cultural History from the University of Northumbria, and an MPhil in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Trinity College, Dublin. She was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2011. Her poetry has been published in journals in Ireland and the UK. She is a founding member, Vice-Chairperson and PRO for the Dromineer Literary Festival. She is a helm and Press Officer for the Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as a nurse and midwife. The Shadow Owner’s Companion is her debut collection of poem.

I met Eleanor Hooker at the Harbourmaster pub in the IFSC over a lovely chowder and dark brown bread.

Hello Eleanor and welcome to emergingwriter. How did you first get into poetry?

By discovering that poetry was an even better, safer depository for tender things, that it could even restrain shadows. I’ve always told stories. I grew up in South Tipperary, a landlocked county. When I was a child we used to drive to the sea at Spanish Point. It took forever. Dad got me to tell stories to keep my brothers and sisters entertained on the car journey, but by the time we got there, no one would get in to swim! My Mother says that when I was small, if I didn’t have a word for something, I made one up.
I used to send stories out, but got so many rejections. Some were encouraging and kind, but many more were careless and disinterested. I abandoned writing stories when one rejection letter was addressed to a ridiculous version of my name. You think, well if they couldn’t be bothered to get my name right… That was when I began writing poems in earnest. In the last two years I have returned to prose.

Do you use made up words in your poems?

Made up words are powerful when you get them right. The only thing is, they make Spellchecker go mad! I like magical thinking. I like my poems to veer off and sometimes you need made up words for that.

Tell us about the Creative Writing MPhil you did at Trinity College Dublin. What did you learn?

For me, acceptance on the course was a sort of validation and was a huge source of confidence. We had fantastic lecturers, Gerald Dawe, Deirdre Madden Carlo Gebler, Molly McCloskey, Jonathan Williams and Richard Ford, and a whole host of visiting writers. On the MPhil in Creative Writing a certain proficiency in your writing is assumed at the outset, and they use the workshop environment to help improve your writing through critical examination of new pieces every week. It was incredibly enjoyable, but required hard work and total commitment. I stayed in a hotel in Dublin one night a week and travelled up and down from Tipperary on the other days, it was worth it.

How do you start a poem?

I keep a notebook in which I write down all sorts of things. I sometimes record dreams and use surreal elements from them in my work. Typically, poems begin as an idea, rarely with a word or phrase and never with a preformed line. Some ideas become poems and others become short stories. On occasion I will take it on a long walk and allow an idea to season. Of course, there is a danger than the idea will go off the boil. Some poems have an urgency and need to be put down immediately, while others mature with time like a fine wine.
When I’ve written a poem, I read it aloud. If there’s no musicality or if it stutters along, it’s not working. I’ve thrown a lot of stuff away, though that’s rarely a good idea. It’s better to put it in a folder and you can go back to it later.

Where do you write?

In the kitchen mostly. Something creative has to go on there as I certainly can’t cook! The picture on the cover of my book The Shadow Owner's Companion hangs on the wall behind me. It’s by Clare Hartigan, a good friend and fabulous artist with whose work I feel I can really connect.
‘Nightmare’ was written in the hairdressers. It needed to be written straight away. I asked for a pen and some paper and the poem has remained largely untouched since then.

Your first collection,The Shadow Owner's Companion, is coming out soon with Dedalus Press. The launch is on 1st February at 7pm in The Irish Writers Centre. (Available to purchases here) Tell us about that.

I met Pat Doran of Dedalus Press at a workshop about five years ago. He talked about our work at the end of the workshop and asked if I would like to send some more. My poetry at that stage simply wasn’t ready. Nevertheless, Pat was incredibly supportive from the start. After I completed the MPhil at Trinity I sent him a lot of poems. He is an attentive, meticulous and thoughtful editor. To my surprise, some of the poems I had the most doubts about were ones he felt worked well. The oldest poem in my collection is ‘Granddad’, written after he died. I was fourteen.
The ‘Shadow Owner’s Companion’ is made entirely from the workings inside my head. With a book, you issue an open invitation to take a look out at the world from the inside of your head, and while they’re in there, you hope the reader has enough room the to interpret or understand each poem from his or her own perspective.

Does your family read your poems?

My sons have been known to say - Another freaky number, Mum! My husband sometimes gets concerned over some of the darker poems. He is a kind man and my best friend in the world.
It’s pointless to self-censor, so I stopped doing that a long time ago. There’s no advantage to a poem to change it so that it’s palatable to people who are close to you. The best solution is not to show something I’m working on, because a negative reaction will seep into my head and affect my own view and I could lose confidence in it.

Which poets do you admire?

I subscribe to poetry journals and I love to read new writing as it comes out. I regularly read the poetry of Paula Meehan, Mary Oliver, Kerry Hardie, Sylvia Plath, Sinead Morrissey, Colette Bryce and Kay Ryan. I enjoy the works of Charles Simic, Pat Boran, Derek Mahon, Billy Collins, Paul Celan, Tony Curtis and Michael Harnett. Hartnett in particular has such honesty in his poetry; his books are always kept within easy reach.

What advice do you have for a new poet?

I’m no oracle, but for what it’s worth, this is what I’ve learned.

• Don’t get dejected by rejections.
• Find your own voice; you shouldn’t try to mimic or be dictated to by other people’s sounds.
• Allow the reader or the listener room to infer, it does not have to writ large.
• Passion and truth (even if it is a lie) is essential. A poem that is beautifully constructed and pings like cut crystal when you touch it, but is hollow at its core, adds nothing, it is beautiful cold thing.
• If you spend a lot of your time monitoring what other people are doing, you’re not writing yourself. Turn off the social network sites!

Thanks very much Eleanor

Interview with poet, Noel Duffy

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Noel Duffy

Noel Duffy's first collection, In the Library of Lost Objects published by Ward Wood, is nominated for the Strong Award alongside

• Nerys Williams, Sound Archive, Seren
• Eoghan Walls, The Salt Harvest, Seren
• Ailbhe Darcy, Imaginary Menagerie, Bloodaxe

The winner will be announced this weekend at the Poetry Now Festival. Kingston Hotel, Sunday 9th September at 4pm. Entry €5.

Hello Noel and welcome my blog. How did you first get into poetry?

When I was in first year in secondary school, our English teacher asked us to write a poem. (He was probably after an easy afternoon!) I wrote something called 'In the City at Night' which was a bleak portrait of Dublin in the small hours. Other kids wrote poems about hating cabbage and the like. My teacher liked my piece so much he put it in the school magazine. I remember the sense of excitement and my hope that a friend's sister might see it. I don't know if she ever did but it was the first spark of excitement about what you could do with language broken up into lines. (I saw it again recently and I have to say it was pretty good for a 13 year old).

I enjoyed poetry in school after that, but couldn't reproduce the magic of writing poems. Much later, in my final year we studied Thomas Kinsella's 'Mirror in February' and it really had a powerful impact. It was a poem written by a poet who was still alive (the only one of the syllabus at the time) and again I was struck by how much you could say – and convey emotionally - in such a short space.

Despite this interest, in the end, I choose to study Natural Sciences at university, majoring in Experimental Physics. I still kept up an interest in poetry though, reading almost exclusively 20th Century poetry (recommended by friends in English) such as e.e. cummins, Wallace Stevens, Eliot and so on. At this point, I still assumed my future was in physics and I graduated with a first and looked into doing PhDs at various colleges in the UK. I decided though to take a year out and we all know that that can be fatal to your future studies! In truth, I didn't particularly like lab work and it precipitated something of a crisis and the way I found to deal with that was to try write poetry. This was around late 1993. My first stuff was all flow of consciousness, impressionistic musings and pretty awful to boot - thankfully now lost - but I remember encountering Seamus Heaney's collection Seeing Things around that time and decided to try write 'a bit like him'. 

I went to Bewley's Cafe on Grafton Street with the sole purpose of writing a more formal type of poem. I managed to write a piece called 'Mama's Dance' (which was a play on Theodore Roethke's 'Papa's Waltz') and recognised that something had clicked in my writing. I started doing it with more intent after this breakthrough and published my first poem in Poetry Ireland Review about 18 months later in autumn 1995. So I guess the first poem I wrote in school was a seed and that evening in Bewley's was a turning point.

How do you think your Science background influences your writing? Both subject matter and the way you write?

Well, that first published poem was called 'Apple' and was a piece about Isaac Newton so from the beginning I was drawing on science. I should say, I was a very dedicated physics student and loved the subject - and science in general - so it seemed natural to try write about that, among other things. As well as Newton, I wrote pieces about Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter and a dramatic monologue by an unnamed woman (in my mind, a housekeeper) about Einstein as a child ('Einstein's Compass'). 

The strange thing, though, is that I moved away from physics as subject matter and started a series of poems about insects (bees, wasps, ants and so on) as well as geology, palaeontology, anthropology and even mathematics. There were also, of course, poems about more emotionally direct material such as family, lovers and loss etc. It wasn't really clear at this point what I was trying to do, but as the poems accumulated, I recognised that a pattern was emerging with the science poems acting as a kind of grand backdrop to the smaller, more personal human dramas. In a sense, the book was like life played out against the epic scale and timeframe of nature and the fleeting nature of life positioned beside or, perhaps, against this. 

As to how my background in science affects the way I write, that is a harder question to answer. Someone asked me recently why as a 'physicist' (I pointed out a very much lapsed one!) I wasn't more interested in a more formal poetics. By this they meant, I think, why I didn't writing in fixed forms such as sonnets, villanelles, sestinas and so on; they thought that would appeal to someone with a mathematical slant. To be honest, I've never been terribly interested in these forms. To go back to the evening in Bewley's, I think I realised that 'form' wasn't the same thing as conformity or whatever other notions I was carrying around with me. So, let's say, shape and some kind of formal design entered my work then.  

At the same time, I'm not that interested in language as a puzzle game in the way that certain writers approach it (I'm thinking of someone like Paul Muldoon who does that brilliantly). Perhaps, having studied the biggest 'puzzle-game' we know in science, I sought out poetry to sustain a part of me that also needed to express experience and emotion and not to be locked down by too many rules. So there is - I think at least - a formal quality in what I write which perhaps reflects my background in science, but I'm not what you'd call a formalist per se. It's as the poem requires! That said, I really do admire those poets who write in fixed forms and make them seem organic.

Your first book was two novellas. Tell me about that.

I had my novellas The Return Journey & Our Friends Electric accepted for publication with Bluechrome but they went bust just before they published it. I was disappointed at the time but in retrospect, if they’d gone bust after publication, it would have been worse. Adele Ward who published with Bluechrome then joined forces with Mike Fortune-Wood (who had previously managed the Cinnamon Press) and together they started Ward Wood in summer 2010. 

So I sent them my novellas in September 2010 and they were published in February 2011. I noticed that they also publish poetry so I sent them my collection, In the Library of Lost Objects and that was published in June 2011.

Why did you choose Ward Wood?

Well, it’s hard to get a publisher to begin with and while I had one offer by then, I would’ve had to have waited over 2 years for publication. I heard about Ward Wood at this point and they seemed like a fresh new press. They took the collection on straight away. Also as I was only the 3^rd person on their list so I felt our relationship was more personal. That’s since proved to be the case.

How did you get your first collection ready for publication?

I had been working towards that collection for some time. The sensibility of the book was formed in 2001 when I was 30. I did a Masters in Creative Writing in Galway with the idea of finishing. In 2005, I thought I had the manuscript ready and I sent it out. In hindsight, I sent out too soon.

So I started culling poems. I became ruthless. The more I cut, the better the reception from publishers, although I was still getting rejections. But now they were saying, “Come back in a year.”

I went back to a folder of poems that I hadn’t quite managed to finish and realised most needed to be just edited back. Some important poems came out of that process, which I added to the 30 poems that remained, so these 40 pieces were my finished collection. By this time, I had been honing the book for a long time, but I realised then that it was finished – which was a massive relief! My editor later did a close edit of the poems. She’s a very good close reader of material and helped with nuance and detail in several pieces, as well as punctuation and occasional lapses into prose. But the initial list of 40 she saw, were the final 40. She now has some readers who you can send work-in-progress to and get feedback at important moments. That’s been very helpful with the collection I’m currently working on.

Do they give different responses?

Sometimes the advice converges, sometimes it diverges completely. And I’m there thinking, which way do I go? I have made changes based on some comments, but not all. Sometimes I changed things and then just changed them back. I have more confidence now with one book published and sometimes you’ve got to trust your own ear and instincts!

The period when I was getting rejection letters for the first collection was very difficult. You begin to wonder if the collection will ever come out. And then even getting a publisher isn’t the end. Beyond that, it’s how people respond. Another thing I hadn’t expected was how it affected people who don’t read poetry, how it found its way to them. I was trying to create a narrative with the ordering of the poems but many people told me they dipped in and out rather than reading the whole thing from start to finish. You have to accept that people will cherry pick poems, which is fine, but I did spend a lot of time sequencing the book to create a kind of emotional arc through the collection. I hope some people, at least, have noticed that!

You had some good reviews

The Poetry Book Society review was a great start and drew some magazine editor’s eyes to the book, particularly in the UK. There were also reviews in Poetry Ireland Review, Orbis and in Magma. One response talked about how one piece (‘Baltic Amber’) pulled a lot of threads together to give the book cohesion. I wouldn’t have recognised it in those terms – as being so central to the collection, I mean - but I did place it near the end of the book and poems there are intended to complete the narrative I mentioned. Even doing things like this interview make you think it through more. Speaking about the poems can be sometimes harder than writing them, but it’s very useful I find. It’s like holding the work up to a mirror and sometimes being surprised by it and how others see it.

And then you were nominated for the Strong Award for a first collection.

Yes. It’s great. These awards help draw attention to your work. Ward Wood is a London-based publisher and the book is in some shops there. Hodges & Figges and Dubray Books both took it on the basis of the nomination. That was very lucky. There are fewer bookshops now that stock debut collections. But credit should also go to Book Upstairs who carried the book from the beginning and are great champions of new Irish writing.

How far along is your second collection?

It’s called On Light And Carbon and again I’ve been combining science poems and personal poems. I’ve been playing with the different meanings of light and carbon. It’s nearly there in a rough draft. I’ve been editing seriously for the last couple of months. It’s coming together more quickly than I expected. It was written in a much more contracted time frame than the first collection;I was also lucky enough to get an arts council grant so I could devote a lot more time to writing this year.

I’ve also used a slightly different approach with this one by trying to write a first draft of each poem as quickly as possible to try maintain the movement of intent and emotion. That said, I’ve probably only used every other poem I’ve written for the book. The general idea for this collection is to explore the physics of light and waves, both as literal ideas and as metaphors.

There’s your Physics background coming through

Even though I didn’t go on in physics, I have a passion for it and science in general so it informs how I see the world. I try to make such poems both readable and intelligible for non-scientists. You don’t have to be a scientist to write about science, or I should add, to understand them. For example, in a poem called Harmonic Resonance, I try to explain the concept within the poem, rather than adding it as a footnote. But there has to be more to the poem. The physics was a starting point but it turned into an elegy to my friend’s father, who was a very fine pianist. In the end, I think a poem has to be more than an idea.

Is your first collection available in ebook format?

Yes, it’s coming out on Kindle. It’s much harder to layout poetry in this form due to line breaks and stanza patterns and so on but my publisher has found a way to do it and we have to cover that base. E-books look like they are now beginning to outsell paper books. And poetry books are sold in fewer and fewer places now so maybe it will help to make the work more available.

Ward Wood also encourage their authors to have a good online presence. Facebook, in particular, is a nice way of meeting poets. I’ve met some in real life who I first encountered online. I’ve also put some of my poems in various places on the web. The conundrum is if lots of the poems are available, then large chunks of the collection may have been read already. So there’s less reason to buy the book. It’s a balance really.

Do you have any advice for new writers?

In every creative writing class I’ve taught, there was at least one student with great talent. So talent isn’t as rare as you’d think. What’s really important is how hard you work after that. You should also read and learn as much as you can to refine your knowledge of the form.  I’d also say, don’t be afraid to write badly, just write. Some poems will come out better than others and that’s fine. I’ve been writing for nearly twenty years and that’s still true. Some of the poems in my second collection were orphaned from the first, and others – in revised form – go back to my first year’s writing. The difference now is that I can make more of them with experience. Don’t be too precious about it either, nor think that rewriting is cheating as some new writers feel. Also, don’t always wait for lightening to strike. Meet the muse halfway! And one final word – and perhaps the most important – enjoy it.

Thanks very much Noel and good luck with the Strong Award

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971 and studied Experimental Physics at Trinity College, Dublin, before turning his hand to writing. He co-edited (with Theo Dorgan) Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland, 1999) and was the winner in 2003 of the START Chapbook Prize for his collection, The Silence After.

His work has been published widely in Ireland and abroad, including Poetry Ireland Review, The Dublin Review, The Cuirt Journal and De Brakke Hond: Special Irish Issue (Belgium). His collection of two novellas The Return Journey & Our Friends Electric was published by Ward Wood in early 2011, followed by his debut poetry collection In the Library of Lost Objects, again published by Ward Wood. It been shortlisted for the 2012 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish author.

Interview with poet, Stephen James Smith

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's the legend that is Stephen James Smith

Poet and writer Kate Dempsey speaks to the legend that is Stephen James Smith about his journey to poetry and the importance of spoken word.

Stephen James Smith is a Dublin poet. He has a collection called 'Pretending to be Happy?' coming out this year with Maverick Press. His poetry is included on an American University Syllabus and he runs workshops in schools. He is best known as a spoken word champion, winning the Cúirt Literary Grand Slam Champion 2009 and others. Stephen reads at many events and festivals and runs the hugely popular Glór Sessions.

Hello Stephen, welcome to writing.ie. Could you introduce yourself to the readers please?

Hello Writing.ie / Kate, thanks for asking me to take part! I am not sure why, or what I can offer the reader but sure here goes…

As for introducing myself, well I guess or hope I am a relatively simple man. I am from Dublin was born in ’82, I have an interest in poetry and it takes up part of my life on a daily basis. I wrote much more here but just deleted it as it sounded like I was writing something for a dating site….

 How did you get into poetry?
Largely by accident, I didn’t have the same affection for it in school as I do now. Basically I was learning guitar and I wrote a few songs, played them at an open mic; then I ended up writing a poem for a friend of mine. I read it out one night at this open mic session in Slattery’s Rathmines - it seemed to have an effect on the crowd there.  Then I heard of a poetry night, I expected it to be full of weirdoes, it was (!) but it was good fun and they interested me and they were very encouraging.

Next I heard of Rite & Recite which Gerry McNamara ran and I found friendship with guys the same age as me who were into the same things - and poetry wasn’t frowned upon the way it might have been if I chatted to other mates about it. So that was where it started for me, and thankfully I continued as it has brought me strange places and to meet interesting people. Poetry really does make folk act differently to you I find, it is not something I always feel comfortable with, but I can’t complain either.

What do you consider have been the highlights so far?
Poetry has taken me to Slovenia, Poland, all across Ireland and I have just recently been invited to go to New York, so the travel is really cool. I even have had 2 poems included on an American University syllabus, which I find very bizarre - I only agreed to this though as it wasn’t going to be beaten into them in the same way we might have had ‘Soundings’ beaten into us.
The making of new and brilliant friends is a real highlight  -  I have been inspired constantly. Knowing these incredible people (many of whom you know) enriches my life no end. I have won a couple of things too, the Poetry Slam at Cúirt and I won the first Writing for All Slam at The Central Hotel last year. The best thing is the meeting and sharing with others (God this must be exactly what you were expecting! But it is true)

Tell us a bit about the Glór Sessions and how did you get involved?
I have always had an affection for The International Bar (given I had my first pint down there when I was 14.) A friend of mine Jacqueline Tuck used to run an open mic evening  there on a Monday for musicians, for around 7 years. Before Jacqueline, Dave Murphy ran the night. Many famous musicians used to play there like Glen Hansard, Damien Dempsey and Damien Rice to name a few.



So there is a great history to The International Bar nights, and upstairs many Irish comedy greats (and many from abroad) have graced the stage.

So despite some of the madness that is part of The International, great things happen here. Anyway I was waffling there… I took over after Miss. Tuck around two years ago and decided as I was interested in poetry and the spoken word that it should feature on the night too. Thankfully many people with big reputations and egos have popped in along with some fine folks trying it out for the first time.

I decided for want of a better term to brand the night The Glór Sessions http://www.facebook.com/TheGlorSessions, so they could become identifiable and I could take them beyond the confines of The International if needs be. Thus far The Glór Sessions (which means voice, sound or noise) has featured as part of The Electric Picnic, The Dublin Writers’ Festival, The Festival of World Cultures and a few others too - it gives me the chance to showcase some of Dublin’s best spoken word to a different audience.  You can tune in here every Monday at about 9pm Irish time: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/stephenjsmith. People all over the world do so and it is great to have that extra interactive element to the proceedings.  Here is a link to some past performances too: http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=654E6AC196FD6E23

Unfortunately it  remains the only regular weekly night in the capital city where you can find a space for poetry; I hope this changes soon. There are some other great nights that are monthly, like The Brown Bread Mixtape, Nighthawks, Seven Towers and Tongue Box -  you should head along to these too! All the nights have a different energy to them.

What do you think about the perceived split in poetry for the stage and for the page?
I think it is a bit of a myth, poetry is an oral art form - the printing press may have changed things or added to it, but for me a poem should be heard. The magic happens where the lilt of the reader’s voice brings the words to life, this is what excites me.

Some people say I am a performance poet. I find this strange as I never set out to do this, I just wrote poems and recited them in my own way. It may be true that I have my own voice in my head now when I’m writing, and I’m a bit more comfortable in my own skin with my style; I still need to develop massively but I think I am doing ok so far. I don’t care though if someone wants to pigeon hole me like that, once I have their ears in the first place; just as I don’t care what style someone else has with their poetry. At the end of the day any poet or person worth their salt should know when something of worth is being shared; they should have respect for others be they old, young, man or woman. I have heard poems that have brought smiles to my face and tears to my eyes. Therein lies the truth of poetry - not someone being branded a performance poets as they are shouting, or someone a page poet as they read, poets united I say!

What have you got coming up?
I will be reciting or ‘performing’ at a few festivals this summer, I have a CD coming out with old Irish poetry put to music with my friend Enda Reilly. Here is a sample of that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx7SE5d7Ajk

I will continue with The Glór Sessions and am working on a book, a play and I will be hitting the Big Apple’s  Nuyorican Poets Café. I have also started a monthly night in Cork at The Roundy, on the first Friday of the month -  it will feature musicians and poets. It’s called Mutant Cabaret and is in association with Mutant Space: http://www.mutantspace.ie/

I am excited about the future, but I need to get some new poems together too - I think that is the joy and pain of most writers existence, where is the next piece coming from, at least the next piece that is of some use!

Here are some videos of my poems:
The Gardener:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_CpTjuyHg4
Signing Your Life Away: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DKc7GigiA4
Prozac Positivity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJyKUWgT8cY

Other links:
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/mrstephenjamessmith
Twitter: http://twitter.com/StephenJSPoet
Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/stephenjsmith
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheGlorSessions
MySpace:  http://www.myspace.com/mrstephenjamessmith

I am working on a website that will be lovely and shiny and sexy very soon! But if you must see it in the current state, go to: www.StephenJamesSmith.com

Thanks for agreeing to do this.
Thanks for having me; I hope I offered the reader some food for thought. All the best now, and be good. SJS