Hello friends and welcome to the London Writers' Salon podcast.My name is Parul and today we have another small but beautiful episode focused on poetry.
If you're curious about poetry, maybe you're a poet yourself, maybe you want to strengthen your poetic practice, well this is a brilliant episode for you. A little while back, Matt and I interviewed the Irish poet, Padraig O'Tooma.
He let us go behind the scenes of his life as a writer and as a poet, and this episode is a condensed version of that.We pull out some of his advice on writing poetry.
We ask him, how can we become better noticers of the world so that we can bring that into our poetry? We asked him, how do you know when a poem's done?How do we edit it so that it's ready for the world?And then he reads us some of his poetry.
He reads us The Butcher of Eden, and he goes behind the scenes to tell us how he constructed that and how he edited it.Without further ado, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Padraig Otuma.
was a part period in your life where you were studying to be a priest, which you ultimately left behind.But you've ultimately held on to this idea of prayer and poetry as prayer, a tool for agnostic prayer.
And it seems like it's filled this space for you that maybe religion, at least prior in your life, filled and that no longer does.And I wonder if you could share
what your daily prayer practice looks like, if you have a daily prayer practice, and how poetry fits into that.
I suppose I'd like to say that I'm not sure that anything fills the gap that any of us have in our lives.We all have this nothing.
Paul Valery has this great line, an aphorism that said, God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing pushes through. And I love that.
And I don't think any poem or any theory of everything, or any religion can address, finally, the void that we face and the nothing that is part of our lives.Emily Dickinson talked about finite infinitude, you know,
being caught between knowing that we're finite, but also having an imagination of infinity.And there's an exile in that and a yearning in that and a dignity and a creativity of it, and a crisis as well.And so
I suppose even when I was very involved in religion and studying it particularly, I was always moved by and drawn to those writers of religion that were uninterested in certitude and much more interested in speaking about mystery, not in an abstract way, but in an absolutely definite way.
Meister Eckhart is credited with being a mystic.I'm sure he'd be aghast to be called a mystic.He died in about 1330, maybe 1328.And at one point he says, none of us know what God is.
And I find that kind of language to be absolutely concrete, and yet it also opens up a window of possibility.
So what I like in the context of language is language that has integrity, that isn't hiding an obfuscation, but also isn't trying to make easy that which is not easy.
I like the idea that we can recognise human experience, recognise limitation and also recognise yearning.Some prayer is good enough for that and some poetry is good enough for that.Those are the prayers and poems that I'm moved by.
You describe poems as being a testament to the process of noticing
and you say a single moment can open the door to an experience that's bigger than the single moment might imply, sometimes that opening is a challenge, sometimes it's a comfort, other times a question, very occasionally it's an answer.
It got me thinking, for someone who wants to write a poem, what does good noticing look like?How do you think of that practice of noticing?
First of all, I should say that the word in Irish for poet is phile, F-I-L-E, and phile shares etymology with the verb feic, which means to see.And so to write a poem is, in a certain sense, to try to see.
And there is something visual about a poem, the arrangement of it on the page, the pauses, the line breaks.I would hope, too, that there's something visual in the poem philosophically and that the poem is trying to see
and maybe by sequence make some kind of argument, but not necessarily by saying, and here's how you should interpret the poem, because who is the poet to know how the poem should be interpreted?
An enormous amount of what I admire about poetry is when a poet can use tangible objects to create emotional effect.Rather than saying, I want you to feel sad, I want you to feel very sad.
The poet might have a line like Victoria Riddell does in one of her poems called Exodus, where she talks about finding a box of photographs. of family members who'd fled Holocaust.
And in the photographs, there's names written on the back of it in a stubbed pencil.And one of the photographs is of somebody holding an untilled orange in their outstretched hand.It creates such a moment of yearning.
And I feel something without being told how I should feel, or without being given the precise instructions about how I should interpret that feeling.I simply feel it.
And that's what I think is really necessary in writing a poem is that I want to ask when people are writing a poem where they've got a stanza or a line or a conclusion that in a certain sense is trying to land it and to say, and here's what you should do with all of this.
to say what would happen if you took those instructions out, if you took the adverbs out, the adjectives out, and simply let us see and see what happens to feeling when we do that, and to allow the argument of the poem, if the poem does have an argument, to progress through the sequence of object rather than progress through instruction.
It's really helpful to hear how you think about seeing, noticing, writing.Actually, in your memoir, there was a creative exercise.
You said you ran with groups and you asked them, if right now you were to write the story of your life, what would the first sentence be?I'm curious about this question.What is it about this question that serves as a useful entry into reflection?
I do love that exercise.I've done it all over the world with people.I think right now might be a very important part of it for me, because it isn't saying, what would the first line of your autobiography be?
Because if you do publish an autobiography, it will be permanent.And I'm interested in asking people right now.And so therefore, what that question invites is a conversation regarding time.But right now, where would I need to start?
And it shows ultimately that the question of start is malleable.And it doesn't have to start with, I was born on a Tuesday in a hospital run by nuns in Cork. Okay, I can start somewhere else.
And because who am I to say that I was born on a Tuesday in a hospital run by nuns in Cork?Who am I to say that that's the beginning of my story?
Maybe I should start with my parents or my great grandparents or my great, great, great grandparents, or the great, great grandfather who was the sole survivor of the starvation in Ireland, what is mistakenly called a famine.
So how am I to know what the beginning is?And so by putting in the modifier of right now, I suppose what we're showing is that time is a many flavoured thing and we don't know what to do with time.
And also, I think the beginning of a story can often contain the nascency of what might unfold.So you think of Toni Morrison's, they shoot the white girl first.What the hell?What does that tell us?
How much must you need to know before that's the opening line to a book?Obviously not an autobiography, it's the opening line to a book. What else is there?Most of this happened.I think that's what Kurt Vonnegut starts off with.
You too shall marry a boy that I choose, as Vikram said at the beginning, of a suitable boy.But somebody else might begin by saying, she told me she never wanted me.Okay.Or it might say, I grew up well loved.It might be summative.It might be a shock.
One time when I asked that question, somebody started off by saying that their opening words to the story of their life was, what the fuck?And I said, it's the only capital, W. And she said, oh, no, the capitals are WTF.
So the opening lines say an enormous amount about what's to follow.And have an intelligence about time.And I ultimately think that every poem is part of trying to engage with the mystery of time.We don't really know what time is.
We neither know what time is nor God is, even though there's lots of writing about both.And so I think poems that are trying intangible reality to engage with the complexity of time are always going to unfold something very interesting.
One time in a group, one young guy said, in the beginning, there were four.Shortly after the beginning, there were only three.What? four and three make seven, playing with the beginning of the book of Genesis.Somehow there was loss in there.
There was allusion to mythology.There was also playfulness too, with shortly after the beginning.It was so effective.So these are just spontaneous lines.I give people about three minutes to come up with it.
And then we spend some time doing some live literary criticism about their responses.And then say at the end, what would it be now?Because probably after half an hour, your choice about where you'd begin would be different.
we'd love to hear some of your work.And we can use this maybe as a jumping off point to explore the craft of writing poetry.What's a good poem for you to read for us?
Well, I'll read two.They're both shortish.One's kind of brutal and one's not, if that's okay.I'm very interested in the literature of religion as we've looked at it.
So there's a text in the early part of the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Hebrew Bible, Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit that has given them insight.There's a line that says, now God made Adam and Eve coats of skins and dressed them.
So I wrote a poem called The Butcher of Eden, imagining God as the butcher who killed the animals who were then skinned.The Butcher of Eden.And when he was finished, he scraped fat from the backs of stretched skins.
wiped the blood, sewed the seams, bit the thread with teeth and said, rest yourselves in these.And they said, what is this verb?God shoved his knife into the earth and said, it's like make believe, but for your body.
They looked at all the meat still steaming from when it was alive.God said, eat and watched while beasts of Eden fed on beasts of Eden.And here's one about time travel.It's called The One Thing.
It's actually not about time travel, it's about parallel universe theory.Sorry.The One Thing.There must have been some other me who lived some other time who realized he knew the one thing that would save me.
And he must have found a window, opened it, and shouted through it, that saving sound that saved me. And he must have felt a failure, I am sure that other me, because he failed.He did.He didn't save me from all the things that beat me.
And he must have sat like some sad God from sadder scriptures and wept at all he failed to do.He had so little time.And all my life, I've been climbing up to little windows, opening them, and saying the one thing I can say. Thank you.
Thank you so much.It's such a treat to hear you read your work for us.I'd love to now explore a little bit of what went behind the scenes of either one or both of these poems.Maybe I start with the simple question of where did the poem begin for you?
You can choose either one of those poems.
The pusher of Eden began, I was speaking at a festival in Glasgow, and I had maybe four things to do in one day.And I just needed to get away from the venue where the festival was.And so there was a great pub called the Loriston in Glasgow.
And I went in there to have a pint and just be surrounded by noise.Because I knew if I went anywhere else, I'd fall asleep and then feel groggy for the rest of the day. I don't know how this idea of God being called the butcher of Eden came to mind.
And so I sat in the corner of this pub and wrote that poem.It was much, much longer initially.It had three sections.That was only the first.
and I was so captivated by it that all the tiredness of having given two talks and knowing that there were two more to come dissipated.
There was an England-Scotland rugby match that was on the television and the place was filled with roaring and I wasn't paying any attention to it.
And as I was leaving to go back to the festival, which was only half a mile walk away, I was leaving with maybe 10 minutes to go before the end of the rugby game. And this fella at the door said to me, where the hell do you think you're going?
We're just about to beat England.Come back.He bought me a pint and we stayed in touch.Very funny.That's where the butcher of Eden started.
So you talked about editing.How do you know when a poem's done?What does that feel like?
I mean, you abandon it.Somebody famous said that, you know, poems are never finished, they're just abandoned.
But I think when I'm at the stage where I'm simply rearranging, putting an em dash here, putting a semicolon there, I feel like, OK, I'm now doing stuff where you think, actually, it could be any of these options and where I feel like the modifications are not making substantive changes, but are simply down, A, about creation consistency, which is very important, and B, just about modifications of style.
You think, well, ultimately, this poem has left me now, and it's out of my hands.And any other changes I would do would simply be diacritical.And at that stage, I think that what I'm doing is not modifying the poem much.
And then the editing is complete.Of course, then you send the poem off.And then you look at it in a new way entirely as soon as you've sent it off. I'm sure people have that.What do you mean by consistency?
Well, some of it's very practical in terms of consistency, which is like if I've got a sequence of 10 poems and in some of them I've used a lot of inverted commas, if I'm using direct speech and in others of them I've used italics.
So that's a way of looking at consistency.
have I created a narratorial voice that on the one hand is really insightful about everything that's going on and on the other hand is duplicitous and is seeking to trick the reader and on the other hand is only finding out what's happening as it's going along.
It's fine to use all three of those but the question is, do I know what I'm doing? And have I paid attention to that?Just down to, are they very heavy on the ornamentation of the poem in terms of em dashes and semi colons?
Or am I trying to find a way where maybe the line breaks or some kind of use of space can do that and create natural pause for the eye without trying to populate the landscape of the poem with too many of those in a way that would feel a little bit like it's an equation.
have I paid attention to when do I use, when do I write A and D and when do I use an ampersand, which isn't to say you can only use one or the other, but if you're going to modify, it's a good idea to know why you're modifying.
And so, yeah, it's those kinds of things.That's what I mean by consistency.
Patrick, this has been such a joy and such an honor to spend this time with you.
Matt, thank you very much.Thanks to everybody.Thank you.
Thank you for tuning in to the London Writers' Salon podcast.If you enjoyed our chat and you'd like to join us for the next one, please visit londonwriterssalon.com for more information on how to become a member.
As a member, you will have access to our interview archive, to our workshops, and our cozy online writing community.Whatever kind of writer you are, it is an excellent place to make new creative connections and focus on your craft.
And if you struggle to find time to write, you're welcome to write with us at our daily Writers Hour writing sessions.
It runs Monday to Friday, four times a day, and all you need is the desire to write, something to write with, and something to cheers us with.
We think it's the world's best virtual co-writing space for writers, creatives, or frankly, anyone who just needs to get some work done.Visit writershour.com to sign up and join us.
Sign in
