Between February 2024 and March 2025, the poet Peter Sirr (PS) and I (COR) engaged in a series of written interviews about Peter’s work. The conversation below is centred on his 2004 collection, Nonetheless.

 

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COR: Thereʼs a powerful awareness coursing through this collection of the ultimate ungraspability of experience, coupled with a skepticism of the urge to fix that experience artistically. This paradoxical dynamic inspires a great deal of your work, allowing you to savour the delicious folly and compulsive necessity of “living / in the endless promise // of language”. ʽThe Writerʼs Studioʼ contrasts the project of converting an artistʼs work-space into a museum-piece with the vitality (and volatility) of the existence the artist had actually led. “Two days from the opening / a curator rearranges papers”, it reads, “but still / the disorder comes to order”, while out in the street, “a tree will fall, / or a leaf”, the world continue in its wild unfolding, “and / at last / we will understand you.” Crafting a language supple and accurate enough to contain experience, without wanting that experience diminished by the containment – this sounds like taxing work! 

 

PS: One of the disturbing things about being confronted with questions as analytic and acute as this is that it demands that you look at your own processes or subjects in a way that would never occur to you as you actually write the poems. It can be alarming to see how often the same obsessions keep recurring and of course I recognise your point about the essential ungraspability of experience and the impossibility of trying to counter that with art. But that’s probably true of all art, and it’s what drives all artists to keep trying, and producing. It’s not in itself a new dynamic, but you only get one life and you respond to the drives and pressures within that. And the point is in the trying, the wringing out of experience as much as you can, which can be quite a lot. Language is a powerful instrument even it can’t do the whole job – but what can? Silence doesn’t do it either, or mute reflection. As to your question about “taxing work”, I’d have to say that poetry never feels like work; you’re concentrating on the images and the rhythm and the music and the flow of ideas and it’s all happening in a mad rush, and really does go back that idea of the poet being written as much as writing. After the event, you can worry about whether it all came together, whether you got it right, but even that is a happy experience, you’re on a high because you have something in hand, the engine is running, everything seems full of possibility for as long as the poem is live.

 

‘The Writer’s Studio’ comes out of my many visits to the Francis Bacon Studio in the Hugh Lane Gallery, since I worked beside it. I was fascinated by the meticulous reconstruction of an artist’s consciousness, the near-relentless display of chaos and how it’s presented to an audience converted into voyeurs by the portholes through which we view the constructed studio. So I simply transposed all that to an imagined writer. I was sandwiched for years between the Hugh Lane and the Dublin Writers’ Museum, which tried to evoke writers by their physical paraphernalia – James Joyce’s waistcoat, Brendan Behan’s union membership card, that kind of thing. I had a lot of fun with that poem, playing with the ways in which a writer might be represented, enjoying the essential silliness of the idea which at the same time reflects a very human need to locate ourselves in the lives of writers and artists. It’s a primitive but very powerful fetishism. We want to sniff and gawp and touch the physical remains. I’m just back from Mallorca, where we visited a pretty dismal example of that, the Chopin museum in Valldemossa. He and Georges Sand spent a rainy and unhappy winter there in a couple of cells in a monastery. The locals burnt their furniture when they left in case they’d catch something, so the museum is pretty sparse, lots of death masks, a bockety piano and a guest book whose most notable entry was “Bro, who is Chopin?”

 

For all that, though, the poem, as is the case with all the poems, really began with a couple of lines and then a rhythm, a sort of prosy reportorial tone reflecting the apparent disenchantment of the speaker. I don’t think any decent poems are built of subject matter, and who cares, really, what I or any other poet thinks about this issue or that? You mentioned earlier “the wild unfolding” of the poem and that’s really what you’re after all the time: to be led by the ear to some new or strange or inviting place it wouldn’t have occurred to you to try to get to otherwise.

 

COR: In ʽOffice Hoursʼ, you turn our attention to “the unreported life” of white-collar work: the days and hours spent on bureaucratic tasks, while a somewhat forlorn poetic “language” stays “pressed against a window staring out”. For all the drudgery evoked, thereʼs a gentle comedy to the scene, which I assume was partly based on your routine as director of the Irish Writers Centre over the previous decade. Another poet who wrote in interesting ways about similar subject matter was Dennis OʼDriscoll. Was he a friend over the years? Looking back, are there aspects of your work at the Writers Centre that you remember with affection? 

 

PS: Yes, it was based on the necessary drudgery which is part of working in any sector of the arts, dealing with funding applications and bureaucratic requirements, but it was relieved by being in a beautiful old building and feeling connected with the past, of someone lumbering in “drenched in eighteenth century rain”. It is a very Dennisovian or O’Driscollian sort of poem, probably written with him in mind. I still miss Dennis a lot. It was great to know he was within reach, a twenty-minute walk to Shalimar in South Great George’s Street, where he would eat little and talk much. And he really did eat, sleep and live poetry as if everything else was the merest annoyance or distraction. There was a severity about that, too, a personal formality of manner and dress (he used to inform me regularly that he had never in his life worn denim or appeared tieless), a refusal to entertain trivialities like fiction or cinema. But he was utterly dedicated to poetry and extraordinarily knowledgeable about it; you really did have the impression that he stayed up all night reading books and journals. And I was fond of his work, too, which was very like the man, mordant and sceptical and challenging and not much like anyone else’s. I wrote a series of imaginary conversations with him in The Swerve, because that’s one of the things I greatly miss, his physical, intellectual, conversational presence.

 

I remember lots of things from my time at the Irish Writers’ Centre with affection. I was there at the start of it, the first director, so we had to make up everything as we went along and of course we had no money to speak of. But we threw ourselves into it and it became a very busy place, with lots of events and workshops. I remember the events with visiting writers with fondness, a memorable night with Miroslav Holub reading in what was then The Blue Room with Allen Ginsberg in the audience (he was over for a reading for Poetry Ireland in Liberty Hall); Iain Crichton Smith, R.S Thomas, W.G. Sebald, Alice Munro, Grace Paley (an event we organised with the journal, Graph), and many, many more. It wasn’t necessarily an easy job; funding was always an issue and there were the inevitable wars with those who had a different vision of the Centre, but the ten years I spent there were, I hope, largely positive and made some contribution to the literary life of the city as well as the wider community. I’d come back from six years abroad, and there was an excitement about the city then, a sense of new possibilities that hadn’t been there when I left. There was Temple Bar, a host of new cultural organisations, a general sense of a deeper commitment to cultural experience. I was glad to leave it, though, in the end. I felt I wanted a less public life and more time trying to write.

 

COR: The second half of the book is occupied by ʽEdge Songsʼ, a gorgeous sprawl of riffs and variations on a range of medieval Irish lyrics and verse-prayers, as well as an immersive reflection on the art of translation itself. What excited you about the original materials you were working with? As you said in an earlier exchange, you studied Irish in university – and have long held that a “dual language heritage is a huge opportunity rather than a burden”. Have you ever written (or been tempted to write) as Gaeilge?

 

PS: I’ve always been excited by early Irish poetry, those marginal voices, monks on a break from the scriptorium spotting a blackbird or sensing the approach of spring or winter – there’s an immediacy, a freshness and an urgency about the poems. I love the response to nature and that personal, individual voice. I agree with Maurice Riordan’s characterization of these poems as “a founding moment in Western European poetry.” At the same time I was discovering the Latin poems of wandering scholars like the brilliant Sedulius Scottus, and going back to later middle Irish poems like ‘Aisling Mhic Chonglinne’ and the English of the fourteenth-century ‘The Land of Cockaigne.’ So I had all this stuff in my head and just started, as you say, riffing on it. I had a lot of fun, I have to say. I was trying to get a version of that distinctive voice you hear in the poems, and that’s partly why I have this slightly elaborate framing device of the poems being remembered or misremembered by an imagined poet. But you don’t need that, I didn’t want any scholarly apparatus, I just wanted people to read it straight through and enjoy the individual poems.

 

I studied Irish as you say, I still read and speak it, translate poetry from it. I spent years translating horrible stuff like annual reports and software manuals into it. And I’ve written critical essays and articles in it. The only thing I’ve never actually done is write poems in Irish. I think that’s because I never stepped across the line of commitment into a fully inhabited Irish-language consciousness. I never became a proper Gaeilgeoir. I was and probably still am more of a Bearlóir who happens to speak Irish. I’m also deeply interested in other languages, specifically in poetry in other languages. But the only language I dream in is English, the only language whose music I’m entirely immersed in is English and I’m simply not capable of writing a poem in Irish. I wish I was; some people manage poetic bilingualism, but few do it convincingly.  

 

I remember Declan Kiberd used to talk about the “dhá arm aigne”, or two mental weapons, two intellectual and emotional possibilities that having both Irish and English gave you and that were necessary to comprehend the culture of the country, and I do believe that. English only goes so far. Thomas Kinsella spoke eloquently about that, about the chasm between English and Irish, a chasm only partially crossed by translation. So Irish and Irish-language poetry especially, is part of my mental equipment, just not in that primary way that would release imaginative impulse. And there are so many excellent poets in Irish; I prefer to enjoy their work and not try to produce lame poems in Irish myself.

 

COR: This volume registers a disquiet that also appears intermittently in later collections, a troubled awareness of violence as a persistent force in human affairs, perhaps counter-balancing some of the consolations you lean into elsewhere. Iʼm thinking of a poem like ʽWe will make a pit, then...ʼ, with its litany of ritualised crimes, all recounted unflinchingly: “The football stadium / is not ideal, but itʼs all we have. Give us money / for a killing ground and weʼll kill them there.” What sparked this poem? Is it important – at an ethical level – for poetry to retain a capacity to disturb or denounce, alongside its much-vaunted ability to offer solace or praise?

 

PS: I don’t think it’s ever either / or. Solace or pain. Comfort or violence. Those kinds of binary choices. And in any case I think I probably lean into misery as much as consolation. I don’t tend to think poetry has any obligations to anyone or anything but the poet’s own sensibility and spirit. All that said, I’ve always responded to brutality and violence, directly or indirectly, and like any normal person am horrified by the routine horror of the world we live in. A certain amount gets into the poems, since it’s part of the whole experiential continuum. I’m not, I suppose, an issue poet or an opinion poet or an editorialising one. Poems, for me, don’t start in that sort of head space, but poets like everyone else live in the world and you can’t shut your eyes or your emotions to it, can’t avoid that “troubling disquiet” you mention. The poem you quote deploys actual words from news stories about stoning women for adultery and refers to other specific instances of murder, nothing is made up. 

 

COR: 2004 also saw the publication of your Selected Poems. Did this feel like a milestone at the time? Was it difficult to decide on the contents, whittling down your work to a representative sample?

 

PS: The feeling at the time was that since most of my individual collections were still in print a Selected shouldn’t be competing with them, so it ended up being quite a slim book. There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s more of a sampler than a representative selection. The initial impetus for it came from Wake Forest in the States, and then Gallery published it here, but it was very much a co-operative venture. It retrospect I might have been better off with a stronger representation for a US readership but it probably wouldn’t have made too much of a difference in any case. I’m always ambiguous about books because they disappear pretty quickly and so few people buy them or engage with them. I’ve never in my life met anyone who said they liked a particular book of mine. I was recently introduced at a poetry festival by a writer who wasn’t aware of the last three books I published and it was a reminder, again, of how little real impact a book of poems makes. A poem in a journal or newspaper, on social media, or even a reading, might actually have a bigger reach. This has always been the case, I think – poets who sell books are very much in the minority. Yet at the same time we go on constructing our books carefully, worrying about the order or the pacing, or the overall structure, all of which most readers cheerfully ignore. So poetry books, I often think, are weirdly notional in that respect. It’s a prose model wrapped awkwardly around a poetic impulse, and I don’t think anyone could convincingly argue that the unit of poetry is the book. Also, that Selected came out in 2004, and there have been a few books since then, so it’s representative of a certain phase or phases. It’s always strange, though, looking at or engaging with poems you’ve written, you always feel you’re building coffins for poems. Once they’re published they’re gone – like that Home Stores ad, once they’re gone they’re gone – and can’t help you any more, whereas it’s always comforting to be surrounded by a pile of as yet unpublished poems. You feel like you’re still alive.