12 or 20 (second series) questions with Thomas O'Grady
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up onPrince Edward Island. He is Professor Emeritus at the University ofMassachusetts Boston, where he served as Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to2019. He was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writingfaculty. He is the author of three books of poems, What Really Matters (2000) and Delivering the News (2019), bothpublished by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the Hugh MacLennan PoetrySeries, and Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems (2025),published by Arrowsmith Press in Boston. He is currently Scholar-in-Residenceat Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recentwork compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
On an earthy level, I’ll admit that for a guy growing up on PEI, thephrase “published poet” rang almost as magically as “NHL defenseman” or “leadguitarist.” On a loftier level, holding What Really Matters in my hands,I felt a certain sense of arrival—and of affirmation that maybe I had somethingto say that was worth saying. But then 19 years passed before the publicationof my second book, Delivering the News. Tellingly, I suppose, the“Selected Poems” of Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems includes only15 poems from the first book and only 20 from the second. I’m not disowning allthe rest, but I feel that the ones that I’ve included resonate moreconsistently with the 55 (or so) “New Poems” gathered in Coming Ashore underthe title Nuages. With What Really Matters, some of the poemsI’ve omitted seem more “earnest” now than they did when I wrote them. In Deliveringthe News there are poems that I still love that seem now more “of theirmoment,” so they got sidelined. I think that Nuages has more poems thatare built to last. Time will be the judge of that.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction ornon-fiction?
I published a couple of short stories before I committed to writingpoems. I still write fiction, but the writing of poems—short-ish lyric poems,to be exact—fit more neatly into my available time: I was an IrishStudies/English professor with an ambitious scholarly agenda (which I’mmaintaining in retirement), and my wife and I also had a very full domesticlife with three daughters underfoot (literally) when I was setting out. But Iwas also teaching a lot of poetry in my literature classes, so I think I gravitatedtoward that genre because it was very much in the air I was breathing . . . andI felt comfortable breathing it, both inhaling and exhaling.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Doesyour writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first draftsappear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?
For me, poems are like cats—they appear mysteriously and unannounced. Igrew up with cats, and my wife and I are currently on our third and fourthcats, beautiful sisters, and I pay close attention to feline quidditas.Likewise, I pay attention when I feel a poem stirring in me: of course I try tocoax it into being, but sometimes I have to let it emerge on its own terms andin its own good time. That being said . . . I’ve written poems in one sitting,and I have poems that have sat silently inside me for years, even decades,before they start to show themselves.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of shortpieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?
I never sit down with the express intention of writing a poem. Mypoems can start with a word, with a sensation, with a vague memory that hasbeen randomly triggered, with an emotion. Once I jot down a phrase or a line, Imight be off to the races . . . or I might not. None of my three books of poemsstarted out with even the slightest notion of a “book” in the offing: I writeone poem at a time. Eventually the poems accumulate (sometimes I feel likethey’ve bred like rabbits behind my back) and then I try to herd them into somesemblance of order. With each of my books I’ve recognized through that processof herding that there are certain themes or motifs that recur, and I’m happy tohear the poems shout out to each other either in a sequence or sometimes acrossa distance of many pages.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Areyou the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m very happy to share my poems by way of readings. For me a reading isa social occasion (friends, family, kindred spirits), and the poems are mostlyjust “the occasion” for that larger occasion. My poems tend to be short—muchshorter than the stories I tell to set them up!—so I think they’reaudience-friendly for on-the-spot ingestion. Also, I think that when hearing mypoems read aloud, an audience can more easily tune in to my natural tendency asa writer to work, or play, with the intrinsic musicality of language. But,frankly, when I’m writing a poem I’m not thinking of an audience: I’m thinkingabout the poem, of trying to get it right. I recently came upon, and wrotedown, this observation by Seamus Heaney: “the onesimple requirement—definition even—of lyric writing is self-forgetfulness.”
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even thinkthe current questions are?
I read widely, and I am open to all sorts of poems even if they aren’tthe sort that I might write myself. I would never prescribe or proscribe forother writers what poems should or shouldn’t do or be—they either speak to usas readers or they don’t. Do they or don’t they—that is the question! In thecase of my own poems, I recognize, and admit unabashedly, that I am at least acollateral descendant of poets in the Irish lyric tradition—but with a PEIaccent. From the start, my poems have mostly steered clear of highfalutin’ orobscure diction, though I don’t shy away from a rich sonic texture (alliteration,assonance, consonance, internal rhyme) or even from a sonic structure like aformal rhymed sonnet. I’ve written a lot of sonnets—maybe more than my fairshare—but the abiding lesson I’ve learned from working with fixed formsinvolves the reciprocal relationship between the formal structure and therhetorical structure of a poem. As I work on a poem, I eventually becomeconscious of the movement of an idea through the movement of the words and thelines and then try to shepherd everything toward satisfying closure.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?
Robert Frost purportedly said: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.” In ourpolitically, socially, and culturally fraught day and age the boundary linebetween grief and grievance seems not only blurry but perhaps fluid. But I worrythat some writers (and readers) give too much credit to poetry’s capacity toredress the wrongs of the world. Airing grievances under the guise of poetrymay get the blood boiling, but I subscribe to Zbigniew Herbert’s position: “It is vanity to think one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.”
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficultor essential (or both)?
I have never worked with an outside editor. I never even took a CreativeWriting course or workshop. I don’t show unfinished work to other writers. Iguess I learned how to write poems simply by . . . writing poems! My wife is myfirst reader, but I never show her what I’ve written until I’m fully satisfiedwith it myself. With Coming Ashore, the publisher/editor made only onesuggestion, which I accepted—that the “New Poems” section be titled Nuagesas a nod toward the poem with that title which is itself a nod toward manoucheguitarist Django Reinhardt’s wistful melody that became the unofficial anthemof the French Resistance during World War II. Did the publisher/editorrecognize that lyric poetry also sings against the darkness of the differentclouds that hang overhead in our place and time? Maybe . . .
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily givento you directly)?
Perhaps this rationalizes my slow process of writing and my modestoutput, but I think often of the advice CzesławMiłosz proffers in a poem titled “Ars Poetica?” that dates to1968: “poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearableduress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us fortheir instruments.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry tocritical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think it would be overly simplistic to say they use different parts ofthe brain, though there may be some truth to that. Back in my teaching days, Iwould encourage both my Creative Writing students and my literature students toengage with a text by “reading like a writer.” Even as a scholar or a critic I alwaystry to engage with a poem, or a book of poems, or a work of fiction, or lit-crititself on its own terms first: that, I hope, gives me a generous way of takingits measure before I take a more “evaluative” stance toward it. So I suppose thatfor me it’s a first take and then a double-take.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you evenhave one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Nowadays, my day starts around 6:50 a.m. with a quick cuppa java beforeheading out with our new puppy tugging at the far end of the leash. Back in theolden days, when we had three highschoolers under our roof, I would set thecoffeemaker for 5:45 and try to get some writing done before the rest of thehouse awoke around 6:45. I like to start pushing words around the screen asearly in the day as possible—usually nothing of substance comes of that, butit’s at least an act of faith. Then during the day I move from project toproject to project—currently, an article on James Joyce and an essay on Heaney,a review of a fine new Irish novel (Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses), afeuilleton about walking the dog that may end up engaging with Polish poet AdamZagajewski . . . But then several mornings each week get interrupted by coffeemeet-ups with friends, though I must say that interruption is a small price topay for a good chat.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (forlack of a better word) inspiration?
Because my teaching career had me on a steady heavy diet of “serious”writing—“literary” fiction, “major” poets, masterpieces of drama, and so on—Ialways kept on hand a good supply of “palate cleansers,” mostly classic noirnovels and international spy thrillers. Page-turners. That’s still the case. Irecently read a couple of novels by Jack Beaumont—The Frenchman and DarkArena—and I’m currently deep into Nick Herron’s Slow Horses . . .I’m also deep into Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins (about the birth ofImpressionism) and I recently read John Higgs’s Love and Let Die (aboutJames Bond and The Beatles) . . . Sometimes, simply coming up for air from theheavy stuff can get the creative juices flowing again . . .
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Well, being from Prince Edward Island—sometimes referred to as “themillion-acre farm,” sometimes as “Abegweit,” from the Mi’kmak word Epekwitk,commonly translated as “cradled on the waves”—I have to acknowledge twofragrances: freshly-turned soil and briny air.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but arethere any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, scienceor visual art?
The natural world has been a steady subject for me pretty much from thetime I started writing poems: landscapes and shorescapes and riverscapes, birdsand animals, the changing of the seasons . . . Ditto for music and musicians—Isuspect that somewhere in my subconscious, guitarists like Wes Montgomery andDjango Reinhardt and fiddlers/violinists like Michael Coleman and Paganini andmarquee artists like Irish tenor Josef Locke and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie are“avatars” for “the poet” . . . And another ditto for the visual arts—woodcuts,linocuts, paintings, etchings, photographs: Picasso and Chagall, Bonnard, DavidBlackwood . . . they all trigger my ekphrastic reflex . . .
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, orsimply your life outside of your work?
Many years ago, I published an essay in The New Quarterly in whichI wondered what it would feel like to write a poem like Seamus Heaney’s “The Skylight.” Maybe someday I’ll find out, but in the meantime his poems set ahigh standard for me . . . a standard reinforced frequently, I’ll admit, by myongoing scholarly commitment to his total body of work. Another poet whose workI like—I especially appreciate his use of simile and metaphor, but also hisdown-to-earthiness—is Ted Kooser. Early on, Mary Oliver showed me ways ofobserving the natural world: I love her line that “A poem should always havebirds in it”! Although I have no real way to measure this, I feel that myreading of Adam Zagajewski and Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer added some“sinew” to my writing in recent years. At our summer home, we have dozens ofsingle volumes of poems by writers from across the spectrum—I start manymornings there by plucking a random volume from the stack and reading a fewpoems to jumpstart the day. But mostly I read fiction and, increasingly,nonfiction—quite a bit of it involving Paris. I am especially drawn to theperiod of the 1920s into the 1950s. Giants walked the earth in those times.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In literary terms . . . I feel that I have a lot of fiction in me, bothshort stories and novels, set mostly on PEI. I’d probably have to give up myscholarly life to go down that path, and maybe I will . . .
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you notbeen a writer?
I always aspired to be a musician—specifically, a guitarist . . . When Iwas a highschooler and an undergrad, I developed pretty decent blues chops. Butthen I stopped playing for about 25 years. When I got back in the saddle, Ibecame obsessed with jazz guitar. I took some lessons and then played in anafter-hours combo for 19 years. I probably plateaued just before COVID pulledthe plug on everything, and then I moved a 15-hour drive away from my bandmates.I still have eight guitars, but as a guy in a guitar shop said to me recently,“Is that all?”
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Proximity, perhaps? Osmosis? My father was an English professor—we were avery bookish family! Seven children and we were all readers . . . I don’trecall much poetry in the house, though I have a specific memory that back inhigh school I happened upon Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” in ananthology: I typed it out and thumb-tacked it to my bedroom wall—it was awindow into a world far beyond PEI. As it turns out, I followed in my father’sprofessorial footsteps and ended up having a rich 36-year career at a fineuniversity in Boston teaching books that I loved and having the license to workwith words both on the clock and off.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue, atriple biography of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The author’smastery of the material was remarkable, but he wore his knowledge lightly andthe writing was compelling. The last great film I watched was Gilda,starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford: it was screened in a noir film seriesI’m attending. I had never heard of it before—it was a revelation.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Mostly I’m trying to clear my desk of some of the scholarly projects thatjust won’t let me go. And at the same time, I’m trying to kickstart some of theaforementioned fiction projects. But like the old saying goes, Art is long,life is short!
