12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jerm Curtin

Jerm Curtin grew up in ruralIreland and has lived in Spain for many years. His chapbook, Cacti & otherpoems , was published in December 2024 by Southward Editions at the MunsterLiterature Centre. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2021. He began writingas an adolescent and is now in his early sixties.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your mostrecent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I have been writing since my teens, changing, developing, andhopefully getting better all the time. My writing life has been 'off-grid', asit were: I have published very little, and I have no literary friends. As ayoung writer, after a brief contact with the poetry world in my native city ofCork, I felt, unconsciously at first, that I was better suited to the fringesof literary life. And of life in general. I have lived and worked all my adultlife in provincial Spanish cities, writing all the time and hoping my isolationwould give my work an individual perspective until I felt I had reached a stagewhen my poetry could go out into the wider world.

As a result, the poems in my chapbook are a selection from themany poems I have written over the years. They were chosen in an attempt tomark out an area I could call my own, to lay the foundations for future books.The poems are meant to be solid structures, the lines often heavily worked on.

Now that it has been published, I feel free to move up into theair, to use lighter materials, to have openings that would allow for more spaceand let oxygen in.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fictionor non-fiction?

Two reasons.

My area of rural Ireland still cherished, as I was growing up, therags and tatters of an ancient poetic tradition. My mother recited poems onimpulse as she went about the house. Her favourites have stayed with me.

On the other hand, Ireland in the 1970s was still a closedpatriarchal society dominated by rigid Catholicism, and poetry dovetailedeasily with an impulse towards inner freedom and became its expression.

For fiction I would have to have lived in a different type ofsociety or at least seen my relation to that society in a different light.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do firstdrafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?

I write a lot, but none of my first drafts is anywhere nearfinished. I need to find connections with other texts I have written, perhapsyears before, and work on them over an extended period before I feel a poem hasenough shape to deserve that name, and longer still before it has autonomy orindependence.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author ofshort pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working ona "book" from the very beginning?

Poems begin with attention, to an experience in life, to an echo Ihear in a word or phrase. It continues through a process of enquiry thatincludes the origin, development or consequences of that experience, and themore ground that process covers, the more intensely I work on a project.Fortunately, I don't have to meet deadlines.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creativeprocess? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

When I hear poets read, the voice adds another dimension. The poemceases to be just a text and comes alive.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? Whatkinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you eventhink the current questions are?

Given Ireland's uneasy relationship as a colonised country withits neighbours in western Europe, and my own origins in an underdeveloped ruralarea, I am conscious of my condition of outlier to the central trunk of thepoetic tradition in English.

Equally, I am aware that the echoes of my own experience and thehistory of my area in the impoverished and neglected parts of Spain,particularly Galicia in the north-west, and elsewhere in the world, place anonus on me to give expression to those who have in a sense been sidelined byhistory.

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?

I have just finished an extraordinary book Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Climate Crisis. The author, Tao Leigh Goffe,concludes that 'we desperately need more poets influencing policymakers. Withpoets at the international table to develop climate policy, what new horizonsare possible? They invent and distill the language needed for an optimisticfuture.' It would be nice to think that she is correct.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editordifficult or essential (or both)?

The final shape of my chapbook owes a lot to the poet Patrick Cotter, my editor at the Munster Literature Centre. He stressed that the bookshould act as a calling card, as an introduction to future work, and togetherwe sifted my poems with this in mind. He was easy to work with, patient, kindand understanding.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarilygiven to you directly)?

I read a lot of Rilke as a young writer, and practical lessonstaken from his work have been essential to my own writing, especially theadvice he received from Rodin, that artistic activity was work to be carriedout like any other work, on a daily basis.

Or that beautiful text where he suggests that one should wait, andgather meaning a whole life long, and if possible at the very end, one might beable to write a few good lines.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do youeven have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My creative writing happens at night, in silence andsemi-darkness, when the secretive workings of the unconscious mind dominate theprocess of putting pen to paper. Always pen on paper, with pages that are oftenunreadable, frequently very bad, and always in need of revision.

In the morning, the computer and the keyboard take over. Ianalyse, alter, cut and delete, and occasionally find something worth pursuing.

I think of my night work as a trip to a quarry, from which Ireturn with a block of uncut stone. By day in my workshop, I follow the veinsand fissures of the stone and try to find the shape that is hidden inside,waiting for the tap of the chisel to make its revelations.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or returnfor (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

The act of giving attention, of focussing on experience alwaysleads to some inspiration. If I am physically or mentally tired, or unwell, Iaccept that I will be unable to work, and engage in some other activity,cooking, walking, listening to music, that makes me feel better.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The damp that rises from the boggy soil of Atlantic Ireland, andthe heady aromas of wild flowers, like cow parsley or honeysuckle, or thesweetness of burning gorse.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, butare there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music,science or visual art?

I feel that poetry has most in common with photography, in whichan opportune moment gracefully shoulders a wealth of experience. I findinspiration in many great photographers, from André Kertész to Willy Ronis,Saul Leiter or Rinko Kawauchi.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work,or simply your life outside of your work?

When I was a teenager, the best poetry in English came from NewYork and Northern Ireland, and Heaney and Ashbery were and remain hugelyimportant for me.

Milosz and Tranströmer, Lorca and Machado. Aurelio Arturo, theColumbian poet. The Galician poet Uxio Novoneyra, available in English translation by Erin Moure. Diane Seuss and Daisy Fried, Kathleen Jamie, Alice Oswald and Pascale Petit, Alison Brackenbury and Gillian Allnutt, Eilean Ni Chuilleanáin and Martina Evans, John Burnside and Mark Doty.

I also see my own development as a consequence of the discovery ofa short book by V. S. Naipaul, who I had never heard of when I picked it up bychance. He is justly criticised today, but Finding the Centre was a revelationfor me. This account of how he came to write his first book, Miguel Street,which I immediately got hold of, consciously focused on the process of leavinga non-literary background and turning that background into writing material. Isaw the characters he created from the streets of Trinidad in people I knew inrural Ireland. He was also the first writer who got me thinking about thecontinuing role of the British Empire and colonial experience in the place Igrew up, despite independence. I think he also helped me find my own way in aliterary tradition I loved, but found at times overwhelming, the tradition ofJoyce and Frank O'Connor, Yeats, Kavanagh and Heaney.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I want to write more about being a young adult in Spain in thelate eighties and nineties as the fervour of the transition to democracyvanished and the tentacles of the old regime made their presence felt againthrough the first right-wing government, an early taste of the fascistinheritance experienced more widely today. 

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what wouldit be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?

I am not a writer. I couldn't have made a living from poetry, andnever really thought I could, but writing is a safety net that has prevented mefrom ending up as something much worse than I am.

I teach English as a foreign language, but I sometimes fantasizethat I wouldn't have made a bad tradesman, a carpenter or a stonecutter.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I drifted naturally towards writing as a teenager. I was bookish,and poetry was 'in the air' in the place I grew up.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the lastgreat film?

My enthusiasm is often for books I have been reading mostrecently. These include the afore-mentioned Dark Laboratory, essential readingalongside Michael C. Mann's 1493 and Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse toexplain how we have ended up where we are today.

I have learnt a lot from Eula Biss's Having and Being Had, a lookat the economics of writing, and from Christiana Spens' The Fear, aphilosophical study of anxiety.

In Spanish, I have loved Martin Prieto's Un poema pegado en laheladera, portraits and analysis of Argentinian poets to add to the morefamiliar work of Borges, Pizarnik and Olga Orozco.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am working towards a full collection.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;