{"id":59255,"date":"2025-03-18T10:00:23","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T15:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=59255"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:22","slug":"beyond-the-burden-of-belief-padraig-o-tuama-on-religious-trauma-eros-and-poetry-as-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/beyond-the-burden-of-belief-padraig-o-tuama-on-religious-trauma-eros-and-poetry-as-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the \u201cBurden of Belief\u201d: P\u00e1draig \u00d3 Tuama on Religious Trauma, Eros, and Poetry as Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do we engage with the sacred when religious language has been used to control, coerce, and erase alternate spiritualities, when history is littered with traumas enacted by institutionalized religion? Irish poet and host of On Being\u2019s acclaimed podcast Poetry Unbound<\/em>, P\u00e1draig \u00d3 Tuama is familiar with these kinds of traumas. Born in Cork, Ireland, in 1975, while north of the border the sectarian conflict of the Troubles raged, he grew up gay in the Catholic church. From 2014\u20132019, \u00d3 Tuama worked as the leader of Ireland\u2019s oldest peace and reconciliation organization, Corrymeela, pursuing conflict resolution amid the enduring effects of the Troubles. To \u00d3 Tuama, salvific forces cannot be bound or defined by fixed languages of belief\u2014instead, healing is found in embodied encounter, collective questioning, the poetics of friendship, and storytelling.<\/p>\n

In his fourth and newest collection of poetry,\u00a0Kitchen Hymns <\/em>(Copper Canyon Press, 2025), \u00d3 Tuama trades dogma for the knowing that comes through experience and touch, reckoning with religious trauma, queer desire, rage, and grief. God becomes a \u201cfavorite emptiness,\u201d \u201cbelieve\u201d becomes \u201ca poor verb.\u201d The body is sacramental in these poems, which are simultaneously vulnerable and erotic, full-throated hymns of joy and sadness alike. In our conversation, \u00d3 Tuama opens up about the effects of sectarianism and colonialism on spirituality and languages of belief; the transcendence of eroticism; bereavements during COVID; poetry as resurrection; and the poem\u2019s relationship to the body.<\/p>\n

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Kate Millar (KM)<\/strong>: What was the inciting moment for Kitchen Hymns<\/em>?<\/p>\n

P\u00e1draig \u00d3 <\/strong>Tuama (<\/strong>P\u00d3T)<\/strong>: There was a great Irish musician, M\u00edche\u00e1l \u00d3 S\u00failleabh\u00e1in, whose concert I attended in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. He was a composer of traditional Irish music, but he mixed it with baroque, which isn\u2019t unusual. Irish music from the 1700s is very baroque because the British penal laws meant that a lot of Irish aristocracy went to Austria and Prussia, so there was always a rich exchange between traditional Irish music in the 1700s and baroque music. M\u00edche\u00e1l \u00d3 S\u00failleabh\u00e1in really amplified that connection, adding in some jazz. Hiberno jazz, he called the whole thing.<\/p>\n

He had the entire Irish Chamber Orchestra behind him. He was on the piano. He also had traditional fiddle players from County Donegal and traditional gaeilgeoirs singing across the multiple dialects of Irish on stage too. In the write-up for the performance, he spoke about how it was a conversation between formalized music, improvisation, and old kitchen hymns that you find in rural places like Donegal. And I was like, \u201cWhat are these kitchen hymns?\u201d So, I barely paid any attention to what was happening on the stage, beautiful as it was, because I was electrified by this term kitchen hymns<\/em> and then began a pursuit from that.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: What was your discovery in the research of kitchen hymns?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: It\u2019s a loose term for hymnodies that were never allowed to be sung in a chapel, because they weren\u2019t in Latin. They were songs, holy songs, sung in the kitchen, sung at home, probably composed by women, though nobody knows who they\u2019re composed by. The point of view of many of these old hymns is that of a woman who\u2019s holding a son of hers, and it\u2019s hard to know from stanza to stanza, and sometimes line to line, whether that son is a baby or a corpse. There\u2019s an extraordinary malleability to time and what\u2019s happening, the mix of both joy and grief. In that way, they\u2019ve got a particular Marian Catholic approach, but they\u2019re also much more expansive in the sense of all the circumstances of sorrow that a parent goes through. And what is it like to, what Shakespeare called, \u201cgive sorrow words.\u201d<\/p>\n

N\u00f3ir\u00edn N\u00ed Riain is a great Irish scholar of music and theology. I went to meet her and talk to her about the kitchen hymns\u2014because nobody has written about them. She was able to say, \u201cWell, if you look through this particular collection of ethnomusicology, a little book called D\u00e1<\/em>nta D<\/em>\u00e9<\/em>,\u201d\u2014which means Poems of God<\/em>, published in 1928 by \u00dana N\u00ed \u00d3gain\u2014\u201cif you read through this, and then look at the footnotes in the back, and you see the reference in the footnotes to where the melody and the lyric came from the same valley, then, you\u2019re probably reading the lyric of a traditional kitchen hymn.\u201d So that was a very helpful piece of codification to understand. I speak Irish, and so it was great to be able to use that.<\/p>\n

Though nothing in my book is a direct translation, or even a direct response to these kitchen hymns, in some ways it\u2019s taking the spirit of that and thinking, What do I say in my kitchen? What happens there, and what happens in places that wouldn\u2019t be allowed in a chapel? What\u2019s a poetic for that? What\u2019s a language for that? What\u2019s a risk for that? That\u2019s at the heart of the book.<\/p>\n\n

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\n \"Self<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Poetry in Times of Crisis<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Seth Perlow <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

KM<\/strong>: I was drawn to your idea of the removal of the \u201cburden of belief\u201d that you introduce at the end of the collection\u2019s first part. It feels like the inciting incident for the \u201cDo You Believe in God?\u201d sequence of poems: fifteen poems with the same title, all responding to that question with a story rather than any kind of theological creed. Could you talk a bit more about the \u201cburden of belief\u201d?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: It\u2019s a critique the whole way throughout the book, a critique of the verb believe<\/em>. I like that burden<\/em> and verb<\/em> rhyme. Early on there is a line where the grasses say, \u201cBelieve<\/em> is a poor verb,\u201d and then toward the end, just before the \u201cDo you believe in God?\u201d sequence, the speaker of the poem says, \u201cThe burden \/ of belief isn\u2019t on me anymore.\u201d I wanted to separate the idea and question of God from the verb believe<\/em> because I think believe<\/em> places extraordinary weight\u2014intellectual weight, spiritual weight, conceptual weight and fact-based weight\u2014on any individual who\u2019s trying to contain that. I began to look for other verbs when it comes to my doubt and my rage and my yearning and my suspicion and my sadness, all gathered around the question of God\u2014my politics of the question of God. And believe<\/em> seemed far too propositional and far too conclusive. I wanted to respond to the sometimes intangible, vague, misty, or ideologically led idea of belief with stories of erotica, stories of the body, stories of tangibility, stories of risk, experimentation, stories of politics, stories of time. So that a response to the question \u201cDo you believe in God?\u201d is a story.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: It was a clever device to have so many poems with the same title. The poem becomes cheeky, answering the question and refusing the whole notion of the question at the same time, or the possibility of a singular answer. You interrogate the language of belief: \u201cDo you believe in Mass<\/em>?<\/em> a missionary asked. \/ The question seemed like asking me if I believed in toast, or tea, \/ or beatings. Plain facts. Are you asking if I like it?<\/em> I asked. \/ He doesn<\/em>\u2019<\/em>t understand<\/em>, she said, looking straight through me.\u201d That was really powerful to read. It captured how when there\u2019s fixed language around belief, it renders people invisible.<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T:<\/strong> It renders people invisible, but it also renders people as objects. The setup for that particular poem is Northern Protestant missionaries (so-called missionaries) coming across the border to convert Catholics. You know, asking the priest if he believes in God\u2014how fucking arrogant, you know? And the imagination that a) they\u2019re in a different country, because of the certain British imagination that the two jurisdictions of Ireland are foreign to each other; and b) the idea that they had something to say, which was about a demand.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the strange thing: If that group of young people ran a few seminars in our village in Cork, saying, \u201cListen to some Northerners talk about their experience of faith, living through the Troubles,\u201d half the village would have turned out\u2014because they would have been telling the truth. Instead, they were pursuing<\/em> the village, trying to imply to them that they should all become Christian\u2014as if they weren\u2019t. There\u2019s an intellectual failure in that kind of imagination of who \u201cthe other\u201d is, and \u201cthe other\u201d in that situation was the Catholic Southerner.<\/p>\n

And we were \u201cthe natives,\u201d you know. I was complimented for the comprehensibility of my accent\u2014looking back, it was so pejorative. I wanted to look at that. The speaker in that poem is very close to a teenage me. There was a circumstance where somebody asked me, \u201cDo you believe in mass?\u201d And I was like, \u201cI don\u2019t know what you mean.\u201d Ultimately what they meant was, do I believe what they<\/em> believe. In that situation, the question was a trap. It was a shibboleth. It was a way to indicate sectarian belonging, and there was zero self-consciousness, it seemed to me, in using language for a trap. People with cross-border experiences in Ireland will understand the religious dynamics of sectarianism there but people outside of that will also understand when somebody\u2019s asking a question but it\u2019s not their real question. The real question was something like, do you want to be one of us<\/em>? Or, do you want to neglect your cultural and religious and political background?<\/em> Do you want to become something else through the tantalizing offer\u2014as well as the unstated threat\u2014of changing your belief system? <\/em>In some ways the poem is an intellectual pushing back on the commodification of belief as some kind of sectarian threat under the guise of an invitation.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: Do you feel like the burdens of belief, and the languages of belief, are very culturally determined?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Well, it depends what it is, I suppose. I\u2019m not a person of belief, even though I love the question of God. It depends what it is you want to do with your belief. Plenty of people believe in God, and they use that as the beginning point for curiosity about the world. Whereas other people have a belief in a religious point of view, and they use that to convince and to recruit and to market. Often by denigrating other systems of moral thinking and action, and seeking to alienate people from their cultural background. That\u2019s the history of missionaries, isn\u2019t it? To go elsewhere, believing that you have an answer to a question that you refuse to imagine people are already asking. Questions about origin, source, purpose, meaning, love, community, right action. People everywhere ask those questions. But the missionary imagination is that you\u2019re going to a place where people aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: The collection seems to land at a different type of belief, like in the \u201cRite of Baptism\u201d: \u201cHere is what we cannot guarantee you: \/ guarantees, or history\u2019s purity.\u201d Do you think that belief<\/em> is a word that could be salvaged if redefined?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Yeah. Well, my guess is that there\u2019s already a hundred different ways of thinking about belief. I\u2019m interrogating and pushing and rejecting certain approaches to that verb that have been particularly manipulative, and particularly ideological or imperial. That is not fair to everybody who uses that verb. Though the character who\u2019s speaking in \u201cRite of Baptism,\u201d I don\u2019t think they\u2019re very likable. Maybe I agree with much of what they say but they have no power. At no stage, apart from this linguistic intervention, are they saying, \u201cI\u2019ll help.\u201d They\u2019re basically saying, \u201cYou\u2019re alone. You have to learn to help yourself.\u201d And that is something I wanted to put into the book very definitely. In many ways, Kitchen Hymns<\/em> is an exploration of the lyric address, the word you<\/em>. How is it that the word you<\/em> occurs? \u201cDo you<\/em> believe in God?\u201d and then what\u2019s evoked from that. The you<\/em> that occurs in the imperatives of \u201cRite of Baptism\u201d\u2014and the way that it ends, \u201cyou must believe \/ some of this\u201d\u2014is very important to me, that even that speaking voice knows that only some<\/em> of what they say must be believed.<\/p>\n

I am very interested in what happens in the you<\/em>, between the you<\/em> of the speaker, parts where I refer to myself as you<\/em>, where characters are in conversation, where the voice on the page is speaking to the readership. That voice is multivalent as well as changing as well as not always believable.
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I wanted to separate the idea and question of God from the verb\u00a0believe\u00a0because I think\u00a0believe places extraordinary weight on any individual who\u2019s trying to contain that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

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KM<\/strong>: I love this notion of a capacious you<\/em>. I am interested in the you<\/em> of \u201cEat this Bread\u201d: \u201cThe way you hold your mouth open \/ and you hop after your mother \u2026 The way you ask and ask and ask \/ as if you know you\u2019ll die if you don\u2019t. \u2026 You don\u2019t know \/ what satisfaction is. \/ The way you tantrum your wings.\u201d And then it ends with, \u201cI can\u2019t stand you.\u201d I\u2019d love to hear more of your thoughts on this address specifically.<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: What\u2019s really coming under scrutiny in that poem is the speaker. The bird\u2019s just a bird, a baby bird. What else is it supposed to do? Of course it tantrums its wings. The \u201ccheep, cheep, cheep,\u201d the sound of it\u2014why is it that vulnerability in something so tiny draws out such rage and rejection from a speaker? I was curious to put that in, and to have the you<\/em>\u2014the hateful you<\/em>\u2014speaking. But the hateful you<\/em> is very close to me, you know. I saw a small siskin; they look a little bit like a greenfinch. It was just a golf ball of early fluff feathers, bouncing around after its mother. The mother was feeding it seeds. I had seeds out in the back patio. There was an unadulterated demonstration of need in this chick, and it evoked a feeling of rage in me, a feeling of envy, presumably. I was thinking, \u201cMy God, what?\u201d I love birds, but why this experience? That\u2019s one of the things that the poem is trying to explore. How cruel we can be under the guise of observation. And how, in a certain sense, the speaker is in a crisis, needing to examine what it is that\u2019s being evoked in them in the face of something very vulnerable.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: It\u2019s Carl Jung\u2019s idea of the \u201cshadow self.\u201d The bird is the speaker\u2019s shadow self, what the speaker can\u2019t stand in themselves, their own need.<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Of course. Need is another way of saying prayer. Another way of saying desire. Pri<\/em>\u00e8<\/em>re<\/em>, from French, means ask<\/em>. In order to ask, there has to be some experience of need. So, this experience of rage in the face of something that is so in touch with its need is a theological exploration in the absolute tangibility of a) the circumstance in front of the speaker and b) the circumstances within the speaker.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: Would you say that this address transmutes into some kind of prayer itself, so that anger is a prayer?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Yes. It\u2019s a prayer, a very difficult one, to contain. Again, the kind of prayer that occurs outside of a chapel.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: I am really drawn to what you\u2019ve said about desire and need being tied to prayer. It makes me think of another one of your \u201cDo You Believe in God?\u201d poems. The one that begins,<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019ll hurt<\/em> he said \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I said I know<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why did you choose that form?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: That poem is scattered across the page in little fragments. You can follow it along by reading it directly across the page. But there\u2019s caesura everywhere, elements of breaking or elements of expansion. You could look at it in either way. The speaker is narrating a powerful, overwhelming, early erotic experience. A sought erotic experience. And, in fact, the first lines, \u201cIt\u2019ll hurt<\/em> he said,\u201d are from a man saying to a younger man, \u201cAre you sure?\u201d You know, checking consent. And the ecstatic, almost mystic experience that the speaking character is brought into, where concepts of manliness, concepts of the body, concepts of self, are amplified. Where there is an amplified rage and eros, pleasure and voice and rhythm that occurs in the space between these two characters. I suppose one of the ironies of the poem that\u2019s exploding on the page is that it\u2019s actually a poem about penetration.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have a formal technique for what I was exploring. It just felt like an apt way to demonstrate the irony of what\u2019s happening in erotic lovemaking where it is, on the one hand, people seeking to come as close as possible, but, on the other hand, you go very far away. You transcend as well as descend.<\/p>\n

KM: <\/strong>The paradox of intimacy, which brings back the idea of you<\/em> as well. When there\u2019s a poetic address, sometimes you<\/em> is a distancing word, sometimes it is very intimate, sometimes one is speaking to oneself.<\/p>\n

This poem made me think of Frank Bidart\u2019s poetry, such as \u201cMusic like Dirt\u201d: \u201cI will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary \/ bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.\u201d Did you situate yourself within a poetic lineage in this collection?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: The Irish poet Thomas MacDonagh credits W. B. Yeats with having identified a particular approach he called \u201cthe Irish mode,\u201d which was based on him studying Irish language poetry and listening to the certain arhythmical patterns of rhyme that occur in Irish language poetry which are usually assonance based. They manifest themselves in building up a certain precaution, then modifying without being part of a formal system of modification of rhyme. I know that my poetry is enormously indebted to the Irish language poetry that we were studying in school as well as the rhythms of Yeats\u2019s work in English and the people who were influenced by Yeats. He was a massive figure, politically and poetically. He\u2019s a complicated character, too, but I have been hugely influenced by him. I reread all of Yeats\u2019s work at the beginning of this project.<\/p>\n

I wanted some of the rhythms of speech in the book, so the word said<\/em> is one of the most frequently used words. He said, she said, I said, all of these. I wanted to keep them in because they are the patterns of everyday speech, and I suppose some contemporary poetics. Marie Howe is a big influence in paying attention to the elements of everyday speech as formal poetics.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019d say every poem in my collection has a pattern of rhyme\u2014not a mathematical pattern of rhyme, but what I would hope is a pattern of rhyme that you might hear in rainfall, or in a stream, or in a bird, or in a heartbeat, or in the things we say to ourselves. That these are natural, sometimes disturbing, patterns of rhyme that I wanted to manifest in all of these.<\/p>\n\n

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\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Poetry for the Deluge<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Margaret Ronda <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

KM<\/strong>: The pattern of rhyme applies to the leitmotifs recurring throughout the book, as well as your series poems. In the \u201cHell Psalms\u201d series, why did you choose to use prose blocks, white ink on black pages?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: I must have written a hundred Hell Psalms. At the end of 2020 I lost eight years of data on an upgrade of the operating system on my computer. I back up meticulously on the cloud, but the cloud also fails. One very close friend and two acquaintances had died that year, too, and it just felt like at the end of 2020, during COVID, it just felt like the last straw. I hated myself that it was the loss of data that catapulted me into real despair, but I couldn\u2019t bear to look at the screen. I could not bear to look at the screen, because I had eight years where, for every book of poetry that I\u2019d read, I\u2019d copied out the poems that I liked, and then coded them according to being able to do a quick search for stuff. I had volumes and volumes and volumes of writing there that I was convinced were all backed up well\u2014and then they were all gone. So I was just lost, and I found myself needing to write, so I\u2019d close my eyes and type these Hell Psalms onto the screen. I found myself in the persona of Jesus of Nazareth, in an underworld\u2014not any theological imagination of Jesus, but a mask. A truth-telling mask\u2014maybe a part of me, but maybe a part of my readings of these texts, too. I\u2019d been reading lots of Irish mythology, and Gilgamesh as well, thinking through ideas of hell and the underworld that you see in Irish mythology, Greek mythology, Gilgamesh, anything at all that I could get my hands on. I wondered what would Jesus say? What would his speaking voice be?<\/p>\n

The prose poems focused down towards the bottom of the page, they are trying to physically depict something that\u2019s arising from under the earth. That character is in despair towards the beginning, but not towards the end. It\u2019s a certain journey towards some kind of acceptance and resolution all occurring in these Hell Psalms. The relief pages are just a way of arresting attention, that this is a different register, and these are a sequence, without having to announce that they\u2019re a sequence on the page. A sequence within a sequence, if you like. And they\u2019re also an experience of solitude, a person in conversation with himself, a person addressing a you<\/em> who never speaks back. They\u2019re a reflection of interiority. So, on the one hand, it\u2019s in the underworld; but on the other hand, it\u2019s inside a body, it\u2019s inside a brain. And just because there\u2019s no light occurs in those places, it doesn\u2019t mean that there\u2019s no enlightenment.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: It feels as if the journey of that speaker is realizing the emptiness of you<\/em>, the container for all desire, the idea of God. Though, concurrently in the collection\u2014as well as experiencing a divorce from abstraction, the distant you<\/em>, the absent God\u2014there is a narrative of touch and tangibility in the relationship between Persephone and Jesus in the fourth poetic sequence, \u201cIn a Garden by a Gate,\u201d where they meet at the gate to hell. Could you speak about these two journeys?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: The character speaking in the Hell Psalms is, of course, moving away from previous ideas of God, and is beginning to move into some kind of experience of speaking to a favorite emptiness. There is an epigraph in the book from Paul Celan, \u201cBlessed art thou, No One.\u201d I love that line from his poem \u201cPsalm\u201d because it speaks of how, even though one might believe there\u2019s nothing, one might have a need to speak. The source of prayer, or yearning, or praise, or lament, or rage, needs to find an expression. Isn\u2019t that what poetry is?<\/p>\n

So this is an overlap between one of the functions of prayer and one of the functions of poetry: to imagine that there\u2019s an experience of listening at the end of it. Even if this character is unsure, or reframing, or in doubt, or decided that there is no such thing listening, there is nonetheless the yearning to be listened to, and the need to create on the page that which you may not believe exists.<\/p>\n

This is what that character is trying to do, and is aided along by touch, as you say. There is an erotic component to the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and Persephone. In fact, I shouldn\u2019t even call him Jesus of Nazareth, he\u2019s more like Hell Jesus because he has been fundamentally changed. He\u2019s not from anywhere now, and they each know that they\u2019re gods. He, for the first time, it seems, or certainly the way I\u2019ve constructed it, has met an equal. He\u2019s saying, \u201cOh, you know my father\u2019s God,\u201d and she\u2019s like, \u201cMine, too! He\u2019s a bastard.\u201d He\u2019s been in hell, and she\u2019s like, \u201cI\u2019ve been there more times than I can count, a hundred hundred winters.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are ways that he is experiencing touch not only physically, but also intellectually, that is reciprocal between him and Persephone. There\u2019s deep respect, albeit deep trauma and wariness between them. But he\u2019s also experiencing what it\u2019s like to touch his own thoughts. To touch his own imagination. I wanted the masturbation poem in there for the purposes of celebrating self-touch. But some of that, too, is also about demonstrating Persephone\u2019s capacity to be interior, and for that to be a place of creativity rather than isolation and rage. And the Hell Jesus character hasn\u2019t learned that yet. He\u2019s shocked and embarrassed by it but clearly compelled also.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: That makes me think of the moment where Persephone asks him, \u201cWhat keeps you returning?\u201d And he says, \u201cI need to feel.\u201d That moment felt like a microcosm of what\u2019s happening in the whole collection. That garden is a place where the Jesus character is being given permission to feel all kinds of things that he hadn\u2019t had permission to feel. The book itself is a garden where the poems can interrogate feelings that have been suppressed or avoided for whatever reason. One of which is rage.<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Yeah, there\u2019s plenty of rage in the poems. These characters are both, according to the literature, victims of sexual violation. I was interested in what it\u2019s like to have a conversation about that. What it\u2019s like to manifest long time in the conversation between both of them. And what\u2019s it like for these characters to have wisdom to share, particularly Persephone to Jesus in terms of what it\u2019s like to live with rage. \u201cYou\u2019ll tell it one way \/ to yourself today, then you\u2019ll find the story needs to change \u2026 then spring [will come]. \/ Then summer, autumn, winter. Spring again.\u201d Persephone is used to having to deal with this story, and Hell Jesus is learning something that he doesn\u2019t have the coordinates for.<\/p>\n

On a literary level I was curious about what it would be like to pose a Jesus character who has things to learn, who is meeting an equal, because in so much of the literature about him, he is so burdened by knowledge and preemptive knowledge and clarity and certitude that I wanted to take all those away. Playfully theological as the collection is, one of the theological things that I do think is important is that many human beings live without certitude and live in the context of shock. I wanted to look at what an incarnation would look and sound like if it took the body seriously, the erotic seriously, the conversation and questions and challenge seriously, and takes temporality seriously.<\/p>\n

I feel like I missed the last part of your previous question by going into that little tangent\u2014there was something else you asked.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: It was just about rage.<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Well, these are experiences of rage and denial, like Persephone asks Hell Jesus once, \u201cWho did this to you?\u201d because she can see what\u2019s happened on his back, and she sees that he stands warily, the muscles of his ass and thighs a little tight.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve worked in conflict resolution for many years, and you can always tell who in a room has been incarcerated for political reasons. People who will always want to have an eye on the door. At Corrymeela, where I used to work, most of the rooms where we did facilitation had multiple doors and lots of windows deliberately designed because we were working often with populations of people for whom enclosure was not comfortable. Where enclosure felt like incarceration, so there was always a vista out and multiple ways out.<\/p>\n

Persephone has held back from asking Jesus what happened because she can see that he, even though they\u2019re in a garden, is still trying to escape through some kind of door, even if that door is a door back to Hades. And then when she is saying, \u201cCome on, you have to tell me,\u201d and you encounter this rage of absolute resistance in him. \u201cCan\u2019t,\u201d he says. \u201cDon\u2019t want to, either,\u201d distinguishing the difference between capacity and desire. That is a wall of rage, a wall of refusal in him. Later on, in the middle of the night, he wakes her up, and he destroys the whole world and the heavens, in order to show through a kind of imagined cosmic, correlative projection of what rage can do in you. And Persephone goes, \u201cWatch!\u201d And she does the same thing. They experience something like catharsis in their meeting of rage, and that is at no point sat down and facilitated through conversation. Rage and trauma are experiences of the body, and they are resolved through creative experiences of the body rather than cognitive experiences of explaining it all.
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

The source of prayer, or yearning, or praise, or lament, or rage, needs to find an expression. Isn\u2019t that what poetry is?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: So, what is the relationship of the poem to the body?<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Poetry is a physical event. Way before there was any guarantee of having the vellum to write things on, or people having the capacity to read, poems were recited. Which is to say, that they\u2019re held within a body, communicated from a body, and experienced in the body. Like we\u2019re talking now, my tongue, my lungs, language is an inherently physical thing\u2014so is spirituality, which seems so vague and misty, but it comes from the word spirare<\/em>, meaning \u201cto breathe,\u201d which is again about the meat of the lungs. So, therefore, I think of poetry as primarily a physical experience. We even talk about the body of the poem. We talk about the stanza of a poem from the Italian word for \u201croom.\u201d Partly what I love about the shape of a poem on a page, and also the shape of a recited poem, is the enjambment, the line breaks, the empty space, the stanza break\u2014but also the necessity for breath, which is a sonic demonstration of enjambment. That is a communication of all of the \u201cnothing\u201d that can\u2019t be contained within the \u201csomething\u201d that\u2019s being recited in the poem. And that, too, is a physical thing that goes down to our atomic level. One of the speakers of my poems talks about the \u201chum at the heart of an atom.\u201d An atom is so filled with nothing that it seems surprising that it makes something at all. All of those are physical manifestations for me, for all poetry. I think it\u2019s impossible to separate poetry from the body.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: That\u2019s a paradigm shift for me. I\u2019ve been stuck in this false dichotomy, thinking, \u201cPoetry is words, it exists in the mind,\u201d as if the mind were separate from the body\u2014<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: As if the mind weren\u2019t meat! If I could take my brain out, we could look at it!<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: I realize that we haven\u2019t even touched on the elegiac components of these poems. Your friends whose voices are in here, who are resurrected. It\u2019s such a beautiful aspect of the collection, and I wanted to hear you chat a little bit about elegy as a hymn.<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: I love Elegy. It\u2019s a form of music. I interviewed Martin Hayes, a great traditional Irish musician a few years ago, and he spoke about how so many of the old airs in Irish traditional music are titled about an unbearable grief, but they are a slow air, responding in beauty to unbearable grief. That is such an old intelligence in us. Beginning with a hum or an instrument. Way before we would have had psychological concepts of describing the function of such things. What is very early in the day, and is enduring, is that in the face of the unknowable and the painful, cultures all around the world have responded with beauty. That beauty is a response to pain. So, I wanted to explore that\u2014or to continue that. We are all inheritors of poetic traditions from every country in the world that have been doing the same thing. I\u2019m not doing anything new. I\u2019m grateful to be somebody moved by poetry and having been shaped by poetry the whole way throughout an education.<\/p>\n

I wanted to bear witness to that in the voices of friends. There\u2019s the poem \u201cThe Long Table\u201d where I mention a whole number of friends, the ways in which they live in me every day. Terribly sadly, that poem got longer as I was waiting to publish the book. Somebody else would die, somebody else would die, somebody else would die. And I\u2019m like, \u201cWell, here they are.\u201d For me, that\u2019s an evolving poem. That poem will get longer with every year, sadly. But also truthfully. It\u2019ll be my time then, you know.<\/p>\n

With the very particular elegy called \u201cKitchen Hymn\u201d about my friend Glenn, that, too, is playing with the idea of religious belief. It\u2019s got an epigraph from Rumi: \u201cIf anyone asks: \u2018How did Jesus raise the dead?\u2019 kiss me on the lips, say: like this!\u201d That is a delicious demonstration of the longevity of responding to abstract ideas about resurrection or miracle with a physical thing like a kiss.<\/p>\n

I had been waiting for Glenn to turn up in a dream, and he never did. So I made it up. That entire poem is made up apart from the end bit where I\u2019m driving home through bright rain having sat at his desk and wept. \u00a0It never happened, and hence, the last line of it echoes, \u201cWhen you\u2019re quiet I fill the gaps. Like this.\u201d He was quiet in death. So, the poem itself points to the fact that I\u2019m making the poem up.<\/p>\n

KM<\/strong>: It occurring in your imagination doesn\u2019t make it any less true, if the word true <\/em>can be divorced from all of its baggage.<\/p>\n

P\u00d3T<\/strong>: Spencer Reece has a beautiful poem, \u201cThe Road to Emmaus.\u201d His sponsor from a 12-step group has died and he\u2019s devastated and he\u2019s meeting with a nun for some spiritual direction. And the nun says to him, \u201cWhat would he be doing today?\u201d He worked as the janitor of a school, this man who was the sponsor. And he just describes an ordinary day, waking up, getting the bus, going to work, going to a meeting, having something to eat, what he\u2019d wear. This is not an extraordinary day, or even a day of benevolence showered left, right, and center, on behalf of the sponsor. It\u2019s just an absolutely ordinary day. It shows the power of the imagination, and what it is that we are always seeking to resurrect in us in the wake of that which has died. But it also shows that which remains, which is memory, and imagination and creativity. And those things are a way of witnessing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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