One of the interesting and great things about being a human being is that we adapt and we can get used to almost anything. That is also one of the most terrifying things about it. I lived in Belfast between 1969 and 1986; there was a lot going on. I worked in the centre of Belfast for many years on the 12th or 13th floor of an office block and I spent a lot of time running up and down stairs during bomb scares, of which there were many. Because the majority of my experience in the city was during a very particular era, even now when I see a car parked on the street, I think to myself: is that car going to blow up?
I remember as a child being very conscious of the Orange Order and very aware of Orange triumphalism. We were in the parish of Loughgall in Co Armagh, which was where the Orange Order was founded. They would play the Lambeg drums – well, I don’t know about play; they would beat the Lambeg drums from miles away. My family was a nationalist family and I think it would be fair to say they were anti-violence or un-pro-violence.
I was one of three siblings growing up; one of them is no longer with us. We were fairly close. We lived in a small house so we were on top of each other most of the time. We played together and had a lot of fun. I’d say we had a very adventurous childhood, a childhood full of imaginative play. I don’t want to be talking nonsense about the old days, but I’d like to think that modern kids are going to get fed up with simply being the victims of entertainment and instead of having their heads stuck in their phones, they might start doing things like pretending to be pirates, which we did.
I feel almost as if I never left Ireland because there’s a terrific sense of continuity, of connectedness
My mother was well educated; she’d gone to teacher training in Belfast. But my dad, a market gardener, was a guy who could barely write his own name. He had gone out as a 12- or 13-year-old to be hired as a servant boy at a hiring fair; it was a kind of peasant life working with horses. They worked well together as a couple. The only time I ever really saw them getting upset with each other was when they tried to wallpaper a ceiling. For some reason my mother got it into her head to do it; it was probably the fashionable thing to do. She was on one side of the room and my dad was on the other with his hands in the air and the wallpaper falling down around them.
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I moved to the United States in 1987. My then girlfriend, now my wife [author Jean Hanff Korelitz], was American so we decided to go. Anyone in Ireland who had a television or went to the movies was familiar with America and I had cousins who worked there and came back every couple of years so the idea of it was not strange. I travel to Ireland what seems like every few weeks now to do one kind of event or another. In the past, when people left they actually left. That’s the big difference in the modern world.
The first poems of mine that appeared in print were in Irish. At that point, my Irish was quite good, in many ways better than my English. That’s no longer the case so I occasionally go back to the Gaeltacht to do a refresher course. I’m very interested in literature in Irish. I still try out a bit of translation from old Irish and I still translate other poets, or try to. It’s a part of who I am and I’m sure it contributes more to what I do in English than might be obvious, possibly in the style of some of the poems, maybe even in some cases the line length and rhyme schemes. You wouldn’t necessarily know how these things show themselves, but they probably do. Writers themselves don’t always recognise what they’re up to. One of the things they don’t recognise is whether they’re good, bad or indifferent.
While I’m delighted to have won a Pulitzer Prize, I’m not too sure what it means. There are lots of really good writers. One who comes to mind is a fellah called James Joyce. I’m not too sure how many prizes James Joyce won, possibly none. There are very good writers who are not even read, never mind recognised and I’m pretty sure there are many prizes that don’t recognise the best of what’s happening in a given moment. We have to put these things in context. The big question is, is the next thing you write going to be of any interest to anybody other than yourself?
I feel almost as if I never left Ireland because there’s a terrific sense of continuity, of connectedness. It’s partly because I’m spending more time here at the moment – I have a three-year appointment called Ireland Professor of Poetry which involves being attached to Queen’s University, Trinity and UCD – but it was there before that.
My children are both connected to Ireland too. They’ve spent a certain amount of time here over the years and would think of themselves as being Irish, among other things. They’re both interested in the arts in a broader sense and would have read a few bits of my work, though I doubt they stay up at night reading my poems and I’m sure that’s very healthy.
In conversation with Marie Kelly. This interview, part of a series, has been edited for clarity and length. Paul Muldoon will appear with fiddle player Caoimhín Ó'Raghallaigh and accordionist Brendan Begley at the Leaves festival of Writing and Music on Saturday November 9th, St. Peter’s Church of Ireland, Laois. See leavesfestival.ie
