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 1995 collection, The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange.
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COR: Iʼd be keen to hear about how you came to pen ʻA Journalʼ, the long, lush series of poems that closes this book, written in conversation with The Kanteletar, a nineteenth-century collection of Finnish folk poetry. And while weʼre on the topic of journals: do you keep a notebook or diary? If so, what do you fill it with – found poems, profound thoughts, literary gossip, favourite words?
PS: That poem, which actually I think, or maybe hope, is the opposite of “lush”, was a journal of a particular time and relationship, and so it takes the form of letters, faxes, notes, rushed or more leisurely communications, reflections, imaginings. There was a certain speed and urgency about it. A love poem that’s also trying to speak out of and across our different languages and cultures. It very much is rooted in something that happened and in the kind of joy and confusion and mess of that. And that’s what I was trying to do. It wasn’t so much even a consciously kind of thought-out thing, but I needed a form that would answer to the situation, that would get both the desire and distance in.
The other aspect of it, as you say, is that it adapts folk songs from Keith Bosley’s translations of the Finnish cycle, The Kanteletar, so that element becomes important, too. I delve into the image trove of that poem, images, for example of weaving and stitching, textiles and fabrics, images that connect with the desire to communicate. The poem is a kind of patchwork, I suppose, an attempt to stitch all of the various pieces (there are forty individual poems in the series) into some kind of overall emotional and imaginative pattern. The relationship with those Finnish folk poems is a big part of that. I never wanted to tell or present a linear, structured story. I never do – that’s what prose is for. And that’s why I tend to favour provisional sorts of forms.
Do I keep a notebook or diary? Diaries no, I’m not organised enough for that. I do usually have notebooks on the go, working notebooks where the first drafts of poems usually tend to appear or where I jot down ideas or anything that occurs. A dream, something seen on a walk. No profundities or literary gossip, I’m afraid.
COR: With its rooted imagery and air of fable, ʻListening to Bulgarian Musicʼ chimes somewhat with the work of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. It begins, “God grant me crooked corn and a cool day / she prayed and it happened”, before continuing:
The field was all hers and she moved
down the outnumbering sheaves
to where he stood, his body bent
above the stubble, waiting for her.
Itʼs also one of a number of your poems that take inspiration directly from music. Wallace Stevens wrote that “Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns.” Do you agree, that poetry somehow exceeds or surpasses music as an expressive art? Have either of the poets Iʼve mentioned been important to you?
PS: The poem comes out of listening to Bulgarian music, which I was very interested at the time. There was a particular song that I was listening to, that I was really taken with, and it was the story of that song which I took for the poem. I robbed the poem, really, from the sleeve notes to the CD and I retold that story.
I do of course admire Eiléan’s work, and I’ve written about her a good bit as well. Stevens, of course, was always a huge interest if not necessarily an influence. I don’t agree that poetry exceeds or surpasses music. I don’t think anything can exceed or surpass music as an expressive art. I could say that music has been as important as the poets that you’ve mentioned. I know I’ve written quite a lot of poems that are inspired by music, even if they don’t necessarily attain the condition of music. I wish they did. They don’t. But music is very important to me. I listen to music all the time. I listen to music even as I write. I have playlists that I rely on to get me into the zone where something might come alive, some dormant spark take fire. It’s really trying to trick the brain into a kind of creative Pavlovian response. If it’s Max Richer or Roger Eno it’s poem time… that kind of thing.
COR: The “mood of relaxed urbanity” to be found in your work has led some critics to compare you to Frank OʼHara and the New York School. Iʼm not fully won over by the analogy myself, but what are your thoughts on it? For all their ludic elements, I find your poems – when read alongside OʼHaraʼs, for example – less sardonic in their supposed whimsy, and more attuned to history, the layers of time and experience that crowd below the surface of the cityscapes they roam through. In this collection, ʻPages Ripped from Julyʼ seems almost like a modernist poem, synthesising a diverse array of personal and historical fragments.
PS: I love Frank O’Hara and lots of poets from the New York School. James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, early Ashbery, as well as O’Hara, were all meat and drink when I was starting out. I suppose where that not very accurate comparison comes from is that my work, or some of it, is concerned with and inspired by the urban and urbanity. I have the kind of imagination that gets fired up by cities and get nervous, as O’Hara almost said, if there isn’t a bus stop around. There also would have been the Objectivists (Carlos Williams’s term for them): Louis Zukovsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker. All poets I still go back to.
You’re right when you talk about the history and the layers of time and the crowd below the surface of the cityscapes. It’s true I’m constantly aware of that. And the prose book I wrote, Intimate City, also is very much about that sense of layered experience and the sense of walking through a thousand-plus year-old city and just being aware the imprint of the past.
‘Pages Ripped from July’ was written in Italy in the summer before I left. It starts off in Puglia as a kind of hyper-aware listing of everything, all the bright light and busy-ness of southern Italy in early summer, but also “the entire / tradition of observation, of the heart / open, exulting at what lies before it.” It’s a slightly madcap diary – there, finally a diary! – realising the impossibility of doing justice to the world, “our eagerness to see / one more thing, one more pile / of Norman stone, one more silent / palm-haunted square...”. There’s also a bit of fun at the expense of trashy Italian media. The whole book is really about attempts to find ways of being at home in the world: there are lots of transactions and negotiations between people and places, arrivals and departures. Poems like ‘Tenancies’, ‘Home Ballads’ or ‘ A Dream of Habitation’ make that explicit, but it runs through the book as a whole.
COR: I think one of the remarkable qualities of your poetry is its perception of – and often, its insistence upon – the multiplicity of experience. Am I right to suggest that this has been a liberating concern for you over the years? You write in a later poem, ʻChinaʼ, “we can no more live singly than light can fall on one place only.” You approach a similar recognition here, in ʻOptionsʼ: “I you we he she they remember / let us say the garden but each one / says it differently how so many undergrowths / clutter this one space”. (I wonder if thereʼs also a touch of T. S. Eliotʼs ʻBurnt Nortonʼ here: “Other echoes / Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”).
PS: I think you’re right about that focus on the multiplicity of experience. It’s not a thought-out position, more of an instinctual reaction, a sense of the constant connectedness of experience, that we’re not just those isolated unique selves to whom the world or experience is presented. ‘China’ is definitely about that; it starts off with a memory of a childhood street in a different city and spins out from that, opens up something else, a portal into other experiences, sensations, perceptions. And ‘Options’ is an earlier version of that, but occupies the same territory, inner and outer lives seamlessly blending. Walking home late through the city is the starting point, but a lot of things rush in together: images, myths, memories, language. The lines you quote come towards the end and again are trying to articulate the sense of the infinite canvas of memory and of human mediation of experiences, psychic or real. I’m pretty sure ‘Burnt Norton’ isn’t in the mix. I never went near Eliot after college and only recently have I gone back to him via Matthew Hollis’s book on ‘The Waste land.’ Now I’ll have to read ‘Burnt Norton’ again!
COR: ʻTrade Songsʼ emerged from your reading of a book edited by Elkan Nathan Adler, Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 19 Firsthand Accounts. I can imagine a small army of academic scholars scratching their heads on first encountering this poem, which wanders in a rather far-flung manner from the territories and narratives with which Irish poets tend to be associated. I may be guilty of caricature in that proposition, but I think youʼll understand the point Iʼm trying to make: that a poem like this establishes the world as its home – digressing from pre-approved trails of (Irish) history and culture, in search of wider vistas. Is this the case, or am I over-thinking it?
PS: I don’t plan poems and try not to strike attitudes. It all happens much more organically. I’ve always been interested in travel accounts so was very happy to find that book, especially since it was a series of first-hand accounts and because the focus was trade, so it gives a real picture of how the world worked as a series of often brutal transactions – the “fruitful exchange” was spices and cloth but also slaves. So the poem that resulted is a concoction of real and imagined people and travels. I don’t think I have to worry about that army of Irish Studies scholars – their reach isn’t very wide and this poem is unlikely to trouble them. It’s true, though, that the poem isn’t set in Ireland and that a lot of my stuff is not location-specific. Even Dublin rarely gets name-checked even though a lot of poems are situated there. I’m happier with streets than with city or country names. And God knows, there are enough poems about Ireland and Irishness and the divil knows what. Your home is wherever your imagination draws you.
Right now my home is in Sappho, Catullus (I keep going back to him), the poems of Borges which, yet again, I’m translating and responding to, and whatever else sneaks in when I’m not looking. And my home is also necessarily my city, my life, all that usual, habitual stuff. Last night Enda and I went to see Jumpha Lahiri and she was talking about being at home everywhere and nowhere – Bengali parents, growing up in the UK and the States, moving to Italy and immersing herself in Italian so fully that she now writes in Italian. She was also talking about how she hates to name specific places or identify her narrators and even though my experience is completely different, a lot of what she was saying resonated with me. The sense that home is a complicated notion, and is also something you have to create yourself. And that we live in a world where many people are forced to rethink their own identity, nationality, linguistic affiliations and who are forced to live far from their original homes. So it’s certainly nothing to be taken for granted.