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 2019 collection, The Gravity Wave.
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COR: Borges once said: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river”. What do you think he was getting at? (And I wonder if you ever feel the same way?) He’s a writer whose work seems to have resonated with you, as the sequence of translations included here implies – and in your next collection, too.
PS: Figuring out the full extent of Borges’s ideas about time would take a pretty long time, but here’s the full quote:
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
It’s the conclusion of his essay ‘A New Refutation of Time’ in Labyrinths and it’s a conclusion reluctantly arrived at. He was obsessed with time, and always attempting to define it, and, especially in that essay, it’s very much meshed with ideas about the very different views on personal identity in Berkeley and Hume, whether there’s a self as such or just a bundle of successive impressions. He believed that time is the fundamental problem in metaphysics and in another essay he said, “I mean that we cannot do without time. Our consciousness is continually passing from one state to another, and that is time: succession”. He also thought of time as circular, a kind of infinite cycle where the same acts are perpetrated again and again, and the same thoughts flit around the mind. It’s also connected with his idea of doubles, repeated versions of the same person, like the different versions of himself that appear in stories like ‘Borges and I’ or ‘The Other’, and his famous doubt “Which of us is writing this page, I don’t know.” But ultimately time is the consuming and inescapable fire of mortality: the sentence before that quote above is “Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound.”
I don’t know if it helps, but this a version I did of one of many poems that reflect on time, called ‘River’:
Time is what we are. We’re the infamous
parable of Heraclitus the Dubious.
We’re the water, not the diamond, we’re
lost, and restless, and no one will find us.
We’re the river and we’re the Greek
staring at his own face in it, seeing it change
in the changing water of the mirror,
in the crystal that changes like fire.
We’re the self-satisfied river going
where it’s always gone, we’re pinned to the sea.
Everything has waved goodbye, everything
moves away. Where is memory’s bright coin?
Even so, there’s something that stays behind,
a stubbornness that won’t budge, an itch in the mind.
I love the idea in that last line, in the Spanish it’s “Y sin embargo hay algo que se queda/ y sin embargo hay algo que se queja.” There’s something that stays, something that complains, or isn’t satisfied. We may be defined by time but there’s more to it than that, more to us than that. There is something in us that endures even if we are “droplets in the stream of Heraclitus.” He was always writing about Heraclitus, both attracted to and deeply resisting his notion of life as flux: No man ever steps in the same rive twice. In another poem, Borges has Heraclitus actually become a river and can’t return to his bodily self. And that view, very often expressed in his work, that time is circular, opposes the flux of Heraclitus. Borges’s obsession with time is one of the things that draws me back to his work again and again.
COR: Could you explain in layman’s terms what a gravity wave is, and what attracts you to this concept? In the title poem here, a moment ripples like a “single breath” through space and time, gathering intimacies as it goes – the “turning / of neck towards neck” and “widening of the eyes” – to convey “the hair’s breadth’s whisper / of what passed between us.”
PS: We’re back to that obsession with time again. A gravity, or gravitational wave is a ripple in space-time caused by violent and energetic events in the universe, such as colliding black holes or supernovae, and the powerful idea for me was that it’s possible for scientists to record traces of, say, two black holes colliding more than a billion light-years ago. So that sense of events ramifying almost infinitely: think of what does to your sense of time, and that’s an idea played with in the title poem. Obviously it’s a very much scaled down version of the cosmic ripple, it’s applied to our lives, our own gestures. It’s like slowing everything down and imagining that the ripples from our own lives and actions keep on flowing. And likewise, there’s the notion in the book of overhearing traces of civilisations long since vanished. I suppose I’m attracted to that idea of things continuing to ramify, that even our small lives can go on leaving traces. A secular notion of the afterlife, I suppose.
COR: The difficulty and necessity – sometimes, even, the thrill – of remembering is a deep-running theme in your work, but I’m reluctant to cast you as a poet of memory as such. Rather than memorialising days gone by, your poems set out in search of the possible pasts, the alternative presents, which crowd our imaginations. Now is a multitudinous, shape-shifting category – and we live there. “I lift my cup and a star / explodes, a meteor crashes into the moon”, you write, as a “blue alien looks out along his slice of time.” In ʽLes Neigesʼ, “the snows have melted / the years open” as the first days of a past romance begin to shine again, and “I lift the handset // to buzz you in”. For you, memory seems to be multi-dimensional, and prone to flux...
PS: There is actually a scientific concept of “the now slice”. The idea is that if an alien were ten billion light years away but not moving, his current time or his so called “now slice” would be in sync with someone here on earth. However, if the alien then started moving away, his now slice would be angled, resulting in his future becoming in sync with Earth’s distant past. Even more strange, and even harder to understand, if he were to move towards Earth instead of away from it, his “now slice” would be angled towards the future so that his future would be in sync with Earth's distant future. I’m not sure I can get my head around all that, but that poem comes from thinking about it, and from trying to marry a lot of different experiences happening simultaneously: my daughter going to secondary school for the first time, me listening to the Odyssey in the kitchen, an imagined alien and various events both tinily domestic and cosmic maybe happening at the same time. So, you’re very much right that “Now is a multitudinous, shape-shifting category”, and because of that imaginative licence memory feeds into the present and blends with it and becomes indistinguishable from it. Having said that, I don’t sit down and work at a poem as if it were a scientific problem. I’m not writing a thesis about time, it’s more that these are imaginative triggers, and more often than not a poem starts to appear because a line or an image presses in and demands a response.
COR: This collection seems haunted by the knowledge that “what began as voice / freezes to edict”, what was once a heart-lifting song “wakes as an argument / nailed to time”. Literary traditions (and the industries that grow up around them) can often sap the vitality from the poems they claim to safeguard. Your instinct, by contrast, is to celebrate and reanimate the life between the lines – as in your homage to Sappho, or in ʽEurydice Awakeʼ, which envisages the famous mythological character “following no one and wanting nothing / but the place waking to itself / before I go back down.” Poets such as Eavan Boland and Mary OʼMalley have re-written classical (and indeed, Irish) myths from the perspective of their female characters. What prompted you to do the same in the poem above?
PS: I take your point that tradition and the whole paraphernalia of reception and criticism can drain the life from poems, or that poets can get too wedded to and dependent on tradition and become cowed by it. On the other hand, poets can also be greatly energised by what went before and feel themselves to be in an active and creative conversation with the past, and I suppose that sometimes at least I fall into that category. It tends to be the distant past that I find myself engaging most intensely with, or poetry in other languages where you have to negotiate that linguistic barrier first, or poets read purely in translation where someone has given you access to very different sensibilities. In any of those cases you’re reaching out beyond the comfort zone of English and extending your own sense of what’s possible. With that Eurydice poem, I had the opening image of her in a world much like our own “waiting / like a courier in the lobby / for someone to come” and the beginnings of a voice and the sense of Orpheus as a preening rock star. And then piecing together a sense of Eurydice’s life. The lines you quote are at the end of the poem, where I see her wandering the city, roving the world with no specific purpose other than “to sit on the grass in the sun and the rain / or walk through the streets at dawn”, enjoying those things on her own terms and enjoying inhabiting just herself.
COR: In many of these poems you describe – and critique – a kind of technological colonization of the emotions we feel and the languages we use in the twenty-first century. “Robot lyrics cram the playlists, ice / assembles in the fist”, you say, while in another piece you resolve to “walk / up the deviceless avenue / notified by trees” of your progress. I take it (maybe I’m wrong) that you won’t be writing a paean to Mark Zuckerberg any time soon. What place does poetry have, do you think, in a Big-Tech age that views people primarily as consumers, and seems intent on reducing human activity to the wan predictability of a commercial algorithm?
PS: There’s no doubt that we are always the product, that the aim of Big Tech is to monetise its users, and every advance in technology seems to reinforce that. I say that as someone who is very interested in technology and a dedicated user of it in lots of ways. That includes interacting with the likes of ChatGPT, using it a virtual gofer, fact checker, critic, journey planner and chef, using it to see what it’s actually capable of and what it’s likely to be capable of in a few years’ time. I’m constantly astonished at the ability of what is not really intelligence so much as a language swallowing and regurgitating set of algorithms to offer plausible criticism or draft translations, but I’m equally astonished at how it lies when it doesn’t know something, how it simply makes stuff up and offers a sort of chancer-ish authenticity. Ask it to quote poems by Peter Sirr or Ciarán O’Rourke and it will say, “Sure thing’”, and come back with total rubbish scraped from a Hallmark postcard. It’s the ultimate used car salesman, never at a loss and blithely unconcerned with any notion of truth. And yet I see how, at enormous carbon cost, this will improve exponentially to the extent that it will take some concentration to divide the A.I. from the human. And it will always be a heartless, transactional technology, created by money and driven by money. So, the robots are coming for us, and creeping into our emotional lives and sensibilities, and again, since they’re controlled by the bottom dollar, we need to be extremely vigilant. Writers and artists are right to be worried about A.I. because it represents and attack on the idea of individual creative agency and authorship, it arrogates to itself the tools and expression of individual human creativity, reducing it to a superficially attractive and plausible but really a bland amorphous mishmash of pseudo-creation.
Writers for a very long time have been imagining worlds dominated by A.I. and it’s our destiny to be living in the far reaches of science fiction. I’ve had plenty of guilty fun with robots, I should say, as in that poem, ‘Robotics’ or ‘At the A.I. Conference’ and ‘The Robot Diaries’ in The Swerve, and in an unproduced radio play about a robot poet. It’s a fruitful intersection – the line between human consciousness and artificial intelligence, even if we haven’t so far really encountered true machine intelligence. When we do, I expect to be invited to launches of lauded collections by sensitive robots, which I’m not sure is something to be looked forward to. Then the real poets, and the real everybody else, will find themselves pushed a little further into the margins.