MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Irish word file - spelled F-I-L-E - means both poet and seer. Well, for Irish poet Padraig O Tuama, seeing the world through poetry is a calling, whether that's his own poetry or someone else's. Several times a week, O Tuama walks listeners through poems on his podcast, "Poetry Unbound." Now he is out with a new anthology focused on the pain and the pleasure of human connection. It's called "44 Poems On Being With Each Other." Padraig, welcome.
PADRAIG O TUAMA: Thanks, Mary Louise.
KELLY: There are a lot of poems out there about a whole lot of different kinds of relationships. How on Earth did you narrow it down to 44?
O TUAMA: I'm not entirely sure.
KELLY: (Laughter).
O TUAMA: I mean, I had spreadsheets of poetry, which I never thought I'd need to do.
KELLY: Sounds like an oxymoron to have a spreadsheet of poetry.
O TUAMA: (Laughter) Yeah, I know. Yeah.
KELLY: Yeah.
O TUAMA: I should have done it on parchment or something. That would've made it much more appropriate.
KELLY: With a quill pen, yeah.
O TUAMA: Yeah. I was curious about how it is that poetry could speak to all kinds of experiences of the human condition. Joyful ones, as you mentioned, you know, the pleasure of being with each other. Painful ones, you know, difficult experiences, grief or shock. The demand to be with yourself as well, and that can be a mixture of all kinds of things. So I suppose I wanted to get poems in many different kind of categories about what it's like to be with somebody else or be with yourself.
KELLY: Well, let's talk about one of them, one titled "Fear And Love," by Jim Moore. And first, would you read it to us?
O TUAMA: Yeah. "Fear And Love," by Jim Moore. I wish I could make the argument that a river and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego are enough. But whatever comes next must include tents in the parking lot, that homeless camp on the way to the airport, and the hole in your cheek from the cancer removed yesterday. I said last night in the few seconds before I fell asleep, you do realize, don't you, everything is falling apart? You said, OK, I'll try to keep that in mind. And now it is starting to be late again, just like every other night for the last 75 years. Fear and love, a friend said in an impromptu speech at a surprise birthday party. We all live caught between fear and love. He tried to smile as he spoke, then sat down. Yesterday, you saw the moon from the operating table where they were about to cut you. Look, you demanded, and the surgeon bent and turned to see it from your angle, knife in hand.
KELLY: So much in that one. Why does this poem stick with you?
O TUAMA: Oh, I love it. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons in every line that I love it. But it's that final part - look, you demanded - and then the surgeon being the one to obey the person upon whom the surgeon is about to do some surgery. The surgeon bent and turned to see it from your angle. Part of me thinks that one of the levels of this poem is thinking about the ways that we can affect each other, even when you're in a situation where you are about to be operated on.
KELLY: Yeah.
O TUAMA: Like, this person is able to say to the person with all the skill and all the health, look, and he does that. And he has knife in hand. We're so close to each other. We can hurt each other, we can change each other, and we can show each other what we're able to see from our points of view if we'd only dare to demand or ask or offer.
KELLY: You do include personal anecdotes.
O TUAMA: Yes.
KELLY: Almost like diary entries that accompany...
O TUAMA: Yeah.
KELLY: ...These poems that's your own analysis. Why did you want us to see these glimpses of your own life?
O TUAMA: Well, I suppose I'm interested in how it is that people can turn to a poem and feel like the poem's in conversation with yourself. So partly, by bringing parts of my own life, I want to show here's what you can do, that it isn't just about looking at the technique of metaphor or how many stanzas or whether there is or isn't rhyme or a particular kind of form. It's also about saying, oh, that line makes me think of that thing that happened to me yesterday. One of the poems in the book is a Langston Hughes poem. And I chose that because somebody had written to me a few years ago on Instagram and said that there had been a close friendship that had fallen apart, and was there a poem for her? And so I suppose we're often looking for a small secular liturgy for our lives, and poetry can provide that sometimes.
KELLY: So drum roll - let me turn to, you did just publish a collection of your own poetry.
O TUAMA: Yes.
KELLY: It is titled "Kitchen Hymns." Congratulations on that.
O TUAMA: Thanks very much.
KELLY: On the jacket, you write that the collection is, and I'm quoting, "structured like a ghost mass where God has disappeared but longing still has things to say." And I read that and thought that's absolutely beautiful, and also, I have no idea what it means.
O TUAMA: (Laughter).
KELLY: What does it mean, Padraig O Tuama?
O TUAMA: I'm mostly interested in hearing what you don't think it means.
KELLY: Where God has disappeared but longing still has things to say. Are you circling us back in a way to that idea of human connection?
O TUAMA: Well, I am. And also, I suppose God is just a noise we make to contain something about what it is we long for and our relationship with our longing. I trained in theology. To fixate too much on the word God, I think, is to miss out the fact that prayer arises naturally in the human heart, whether or not anybody has a relationship to formal religion. So a ghost mass for me is using structure and trying to say you can come here, whatever you think about this sound we make with our mouths, God, because there's yearning in the human heart.
KELLY: There is a whole section of your book where every poem is titled "Do You Believe In God?" Why did you set it up that way?
O TUAMA: Well, I think that that phrase, certainly I came across it in quite an aggressive way, where there used to be evangelical missionaries from the north of Ireland would come to Cork, where I grew up, and would ask everybody - the priest, the nun, people on the way in and out to mass - do you believe in God? And it felt like a trap, you know? And the question wasn't, do you believe in God? It's do you believe in God in the proper way as dictated by me? Do you believe in that? And I got to know some of them. They were lovely people. And so I've been interested for a long time in what happens with that question, do you believe in God, and what's it like if the you is structured in a way of profound exchange rather than a trap? I'm less interested in the word believe and much more interested in the word you.
KELLY: Would you read us out with the one, again, titled "Do You Believe In God?" The one that begins, I turn to you.
O TUAMA: For sure. Do you believe in God? I turn to you not because I trust you or believe in you but because I need a direction for my need. You, the space between me and death. You, the hum at the heart of an atom. You, nothing. You, my favorite emptiness. You, what I turned away from and will turn to. You, my ache made manifest in a dress. You, silent. You, what my friends saw as they died. You contain what's not containable. You, shape of my desire.
KELLY: That is Padraig O Tuama reading to us from his collection, "Kitchen Hymns." He is also editor of the new anthology "44 Poems On Being With Each Other." Padraig O Tuama, thank you for a moment of beauty in a chaotic moment.
O TUAMA: Thank you very much.
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