Brian Kirk : part five

How does a poem begin?

Sometimes it’s a line you wake up with or a phrase you’ve heard. Mostly it comes from the real world. Other times it’s a cadence, a repetition of sound. The old diesel trains made a peculiar rhythm as they built up speed, and that sound was always in my head as a child growing up beside a railway station. All you need is a word or two to start and, for me, the form emerges as I go.

Brian Kirk : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

I like to go back to Yeats and Eliot, particularly to read aloud. Prufrock or The Waste Land are very good. I also enjoy reading sonnets, both old and new – I like the formal at times.

Brian Kirk : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I think the power of poetry lies in its ability to convey more than one meaning at a time. In prose for instance, particularly the essay, we are trying to be as precise in our language as possible. Poetry can manage, via a range of effects, to convey seemingly contrary ideas or generate a range of sometimes conflicting feelings in the reader all at one time. It many ways, poetry reflects the real world more closely than prose in that it does not attempt to establish polarised, black and white attitudes, but embraces the confusions and mixed emotions of the everyday.

Brian Kirk : part two

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with? 

I have one particular, first reader, the poet John Murphy, who has been tremendously important for me. But these last few years I am also a member of the Hibernian Poetry Workshop who meet in Dublin every month. They are a very experienced and critical, yet encouraging, group.

Brian Kirk : part one

Brian Kirk is an award-winning poet and short story writer from Dublin. His children’s novel The Rising Son was published in December 2015. He was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2013 and highly commended in the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2014 and 2015. His first poetry collection After The Fall was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem “Birthday”, taken from that collection, won the Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com.

How did you first engage with poetry?

At school, first of all. I was lucky to have a good English teacher at Secondary School, so I enjoyed most of the poetry I came across. Then I suppose I discovered the Beats, and later I went looking for other modern poets. It’s an unending journey of reading and discovering new and old poets. When I was 19, I began to write poems and did so for a while before studying English Literature in London when I was in my twenties. I stopped writing for a while and then went back to it some years later and here I am still learning fifteen years later.