Why is poetry important?
Poetry is important because it is a form of universal communication. We all look to the stars and want answers and connection. In the best of poems, the poet reveals their deepest self and perhaps something of the deepest mysteries of humanity. Poetry is a form of healing and healing others. It carries our most powerful messages of pain, hope and love and reminds us we are not alone.
How important is music to your poetry?
I have a complex relationship with music. I didn’t grow up in a musical family, there was very little music in the house, it was always classical and it was rarely played. However, my sister and I were encouraged to study music and we played a couple of instruments and were in choirs. I had no talent whatsoever. I felt I could never understand music and this fascinated me. Music remains a great mystery to me. I listened to a lot of rock and metal in my late teens and early twenties until I discovered opera and it changed my life. I stopped listening to music when I was 30 after being ill. I didn’t listen to any music for about five or six years nor was I writing, they seem interconnected. I write about music in my poetry on occasion (for example, in “A Shorter Flight than Air” I write about meeting music in an abstract sense). Music is important to me because my poetry, not only the lyrical, always starts with a rhythm in my head that I then form words from. It has always been like that even before I ever studied poetry. At first the sound of words seems more important and I have to force myself to really think about their meaning. Perhaps poetry is the only form of music that I have a real connection to.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I am currently reading and rereading the commemorative anthology Hold Open the Door, from The Ireland Chair of Poetry, and Stephen Watts’ Republic of Dogs/Republic of Birds which was recommended by Sasha Dugdale on Twitter.
I would recommend both of these to anybody. Hold Open the Door is an important collection which reflects, as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin put it, “the meaning of influence and originality.” I think it will be of particular interest to emerging poets.
It would be impossible for me to summarise Watts’ book in a few sentences, I will only say that I have never read anything like it and I am in love with every word. I wrote a prose poem for the introduction of my collection that I was thrilled with but, after reading Watts, I am plagued with the best doubts!
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
There are so many. Going way back to the very beginning, I think of Eavan Boland and Samuel Beckett. Eavan Boland was pivotal to my writing because for the first time I became aware of what it really meant to be a woman writer and to explore issues relating to my gender. She was a fierce advocate of women poets, a light-bearer. On a personal level, I always felt a kinship because I grew up abroad (my father was also a diplomat) and that disconnect from a home/homeland and my cultural identity has always been something that I really struggled with. I am also a painter and I have always loved that connection between Eavan and her mother, the painter Frances Kelly. The description of colours and details in her poetry have that connection. I go to Boland for language and connection. However my poems have little of the domestic “dailiness” that marks so much of her work.
Samuel Becket because I am attracted to the experimental, abstract and intellectual nature of his work. I love his poetry as much as his plays. Nearly all of my early poems were abstract and quite avant-garde and I would never have written them without studying Samuel Beckett. I still enjoy playing with allegory and pushing language and form.
She was born in Geneva, Switzerland and, though mainly self-taught, was briefly educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and then at Trinity College Dublin before studying under Irish artist Gill Berry for two years. She formerly exhibited under the name “Georgie Wren” and is the creator and editor of the art and poetry journal Crow of Minerva.
She is currently working on her first collection of poetry, “The Earth that Flaked to Ashes.”
What are you working on?
I have spent the last year and a half working on my first collection of poetry. I think it’s finished but I have applied to a number of programs and mentorships and am open to reworking the collection. I have been studying French poetry more intensely and am hoping to begin my first French collection soon. I am also looking into translating some French poets into English.
