An Interview with Thomas Kinsella

At eighty-three years of age, Thomas Kinsella stands as something of an elder statesmen among Irish poets, and he is widely acknowledged as one of Ireland’s most important contemporary authors. Born in Dublin, Kinsella began his long and distinguished literary career in the 1950s, and has continued to this day to publish innovative and challenging poetry that reflects his lifelong preoccupation with both eliciting order, and imposing order, on the direct experience of life. Kinsella’s first major collection, Another September (1958), was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Subsequent collections garnered great critical acclaim in Ireland and England, and he received the Denis Devlin Memorial Award in 1967. In 1965 Kinsella abandoned a promising career in the Department of Finance and moved to the United States, where he was writer-in residence at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, for three years. Kinsella accepted an invitation from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1970 to join the faculty as professor of English, a position he held for the next twenty years.

Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968), which marked Kinsella’s departure from his early formalism, first introduced his work to a large American audience. In this volume, Kinsella’s evolving poetic view of life as an ordeal and the importance of an artistic response to this ordeal, surfaced clearly. In 1972 Kin-sella published Butcher’s Dozen, a response to the Widgery Report on the killing of thirteen civil rights demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday. The poem first appeared under Kinsella’s own imprint, the Peppercanister Press, which has continued to publish all his new work before he revises and reissues the material in trade editions. Butcher’s Dozen was followed by A Selected Life, Finistere, and Notes from the Land of the Dead that same year, and Vertical Man and The Good Fight in 1973. The second series of Peppercanister publications, appearing in the years 1974–1978, includes One, A Technical Supplement, and Song of the Night and Other Poems. Later Peppercanister work has included The Messenger, Songs of the Psyche, Her Vertical Smile, Out of Ireland, St. Catherine’s Clock, One Fond Embrace, Personal Places, Poems from Centre City, Madonna and Other Poems, Open Court, The Pen Shop, The Familiar, Godhead, Citizen of the World, Littlebody, Marginal Economy, Man of War, and Belief and Unbelief. Two new Peppercanister publications are forthcoming.

Kinsella has devoted a considerable portion of his career to translating Gaelic literature, most notably with his 1969 translation of the epic the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the anthology An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). Among his most influential critical interventions is his examination of the contemporary Irish writer’s relationship with the dual heritage of Gaelic and English literature, which he first considered in a 1966 address to the Modern Language Association, “The Irish Writer,” and subsequently developed in The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland (1995). Kinsella is also the editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986).

I interviewed Kinsella on July 27, 2010, at his daughter’s home in Booter-stown, a suburb of Dublin, where he and his wife Eleanor were spending the summer. Prior to beginning our interview, Kinsella asked me about my own experience as an Irish person who had lived and worked in the United States and about my decision to leave my career as an attorney and return to university to study literature.

TK:

You’re reminding me of my own early indecisions. I began by wanting to be a physicist and studied science one term in University College Dublin, until I realized I couldn’t spend my life at science. Meanwhile I had succeeded at an entrance exam for the civil service, and began a ten-year period in the Department of Land, and later in the Department of Finance. I met some impressive people there, and the work was fascinating—but it was very demanding, especially in Finance. That presented a problem. My writing was increasingly demanding, and my project of translating The Tain had stopped.

In 1965 I was given an offer from the...