“The Child is father of the Man”, Wordsworth told us more than two centuries ago, and in Pádraig Ó Tuama’s case the Romantic poet’s idea that the joys of youth may persist well into maturity seems entirely borne out.
As a youngster growing up in Cork, Ó Tuama looked forward to poetry classes in school with such excitement that he had frequently learned pieces off by heart well in advance. The third of six siblings, he remembers his older sister reciting Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners and being enthralled; at school, he pushed at the edges of the curriculum, always wanting to go beyond the classroom business of deciphering what a poem meant in a strictly literal sense. When I suggest that he must have been a gift to the staff, as he talks to me from his home in New York City, he humorously recalls also testing his English teacher’s patience when, as a teenager, he expressed disdain for Patrick Kavanagh.
“I remember complaining to Mrs Corcoran: if he hated the place, why did he write about it so much? And she told me to shut up. But in a certain sense, I look back now and think that there was something that I’m still a little bit proud of in saying that, to recognise the intrinsic irony of his hate, and that hate is a passion as much as love is. If he was ambivalent about it, he wouldn’t have written about it.” (Kavanagh fans need not worry; when Ó Tuama moved to Australia at the age of 24, he took a copy of his Selected Poems on the plane, and became a convert.)
There were also some extraordinary moments. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was poet in residence at University College Cork when he was beginning secondary school, “and our Irish teacher knew her. And so she came into our class and recited poems as Gaeilge. I thought she was magnificent. And I had never even imagined that such a thing as a living poet could exist, really. I was 13, and I just loved the intricacy of how she talked about things.”
‘Conflict, religion and poetry are the three energies that I hold together, and they’re all about language’
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This is by way of explaining that Ó Tuama’s deep connection to poetry started young and continued strong, even as it was joined by his work as both a theologian and in the field of conflict resolution – areas that he sees as logically coexisting. “Conflict, religion and poetry are the three energies that I hold together, and they’re all about language”, he says. “That’s the thing. And so in some ways, for me, they’re all manifestations of language’s attempt to have some kind of relationship with power.”
In art, as well as in life, we’re looking for the freedom for spontaneity
They are also about connection. The beginning of this year, in which he will also turn 50, sees Ó Tuama publish two books, a collection of his own poems entitled Kitchen Hymns, and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other, the second anthology to proceed from his immensely popular podcast Poetry Unbound. But “anthology” slightly undersells 44 Poems. It is indeed Ó Tuama’s selection of pieces by a wide range of poets exploring romantic, familial and social relationships, communication and misunderstanding, love and estrangement, birth, death and everything in between. But it also contains much of his voice, with each poem preceded by an autobiographical vignette and followed by a rigorous yet also relaxed analysis of the work.
For the book’s epigraph, Ó Tuama chose what might seem like a dispiriting observation from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: “The very foundation of interhuman discourse is misunderstanding.” To Ó Tuama, it’s the opposite of pessimistic: “I love that, because it diminishes the anxiety about misunderstanding each other and about misunderstanding a poem as well. It basically says, to be caught up in misunderstanding is part of the human project, it’s entirely recognisable. Let there be no embarrassment, and instead, let there be attention to the very stuff of misunderstanding. And there might be a poem inside there as a result of that.”
[ What are words worth: do poets and philosophers speak the same language?Opens in new window ]
I mention a poem I particularly enjoyed, I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party by Chen Chen, in which the narrator anxiously presides over a meeting between his parents and his boyfriend, a piece by turns comical and stressfully claustrophobic. Ó Tuama immediately supplies a thought-provoking commentary as we talk, noting how the narrator’s desire to orchestrate a smooth and happy occasion ends up suppressing the participants’ ability to act naturally and spontaneously.
“In many ways, actually, he’s being a mini-dictator. But it’s totally understandable, because he loves them, and he wants to be loved back by them.” He expands on the theme: “I worked in conflict resolution for a long time in Belfast. And so often what you’re looking for as an intervention into escalating conflict is the possibility of a surprise, something unexpected, and something spontaneous. Because typically, in conflict resolution, you’re anticipating, they’ll say this, and I’ll say this, and then they’ll say this and I’ll say this. If you could predict the way a poem is going to go, it becomes a very boring poem; you’d say, that’s not very satisfactory, because from the first stanza, I could guess where it would end. And so in art, as well as in life, we’re looking for the freedom for spontaneity.”
Ó Tuama arrived in Belfast in 2002, quickly became involved in the dialogue between Catholic and Protestant communities, and developed a specialism in group conflict resolution. “For years, I worked with groups of people who had been bereaved through murder, or people who had been affected by sectarianism in all kinds of shapes. I worked with loads of school groups doing, in a certain sense, pre-emptive work; technically, it’s called mediative discourse, to build up the capacity such that things don’t escalate to a level where you’re going to need formal intervention.”
He also worked alongside clergy “who had expressed a very public concern about the presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people in public life. I’m a gay man myself, and so I had an interest in seeing how it was that my interest in theology and in conflict resolution could lead us into the possibility of mediative discourse that could make things easier for LGBT people in public and our private lives too”.
He continues to work in this area in a part-time role at New York’s Columbia University, spending several months of each year in the States, but returning home to Belfast and to see his family in Cork. In New York, he lives in Hell’s Kitchen, in the west of Midtown Manhattan, and is delighted that he’s only a stone’s throw from the Hudson river: “Sometimes in the middle of a huge city, I do get overwhelmed. It feels like the noise makes its way in.”
Like all self-employed artists – his description of his multipronged interests and activities – he is adept at keeping several plates spinning, even if preparing for this year’s double publication did make him feel “a little bit like the top of my head was being blown off, and not in a good way”. But it’s clear that a belief in the connection that words can forge is his driving force. I ask him whether he believes that poetry can make a difference in the world.
He considers the question carefully. “There’s two approaches to that, the first of which is to step back from the question as to whether it can or it can’t, and to look simply at the phenomenology of poetry. It has arisen in every single human culture, and poetry, from the earliest days of its occurrence, has always concerned itself with matters of life, whether its beginning or its continuation. Birth, death, war, tragedy – poetry has centred around those things and sought to do what Shakespeare says, which is to give sorrow words. So I’m always interested in making sure that we’re not just thinking that art is there for a purpose. Art is there, and it occurs in these circumstances. It doesn’t have to be instrumental. Before the question as to what value it has, it is to say that it is, and that it has arisen everywhere, and as such, it is therefore a powerful human experience to pay attention to.”
And yet Ó Tuama can also point to the clear effects that poetry has – from listeners to his podcast, for example, who write to tell him of the comfort they have taken from poems and their discussion in extreme circumstances. Here, again, as he talks of the woman who returns to the sestinas that she and her husband wrote together before his death, or the instances of people listening to his show as they’re gathered around a sickbed, is a very strong sense of art’s spiritual dimension.
I ask him whether he thinks of himself as a metaphysical poet. He laughs: “I’ve tried to get away from it, but I can’t. I genuinely have tried to say, I’m not going to write poems about God. And then I started to write a sequence called, ‘Do you believe in God?’” But like the great metaphysical poets, he is keenly aware of the mundane, the physical, the tangible; the here and now as well as the hereafter. “Of course, death is a matter of life, and life is a matter of death, and we need language that’s good enough to concern itself with that.”
Kitchen Hymns is published by Cheerio Publishing. 44 Poems on Being with Each Other is published by Canongate Books. Pádraig Ó Tuama will launch it in Books Upstairs, Dublin, on February 11th at 6.30pm.
