Kevin Gallagher is a poet, publisher, and political economist living in Greater Boston. His most recent book is And Yet it Moves (MadHat, 2023) and recent books are The Wild Goose, and Loom. His poems and reviews have appeared in the Partisan Review, Harvard Review, ArtsFuse, Green Mountains Review, and beyond. Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston area annual of poetry and poetics. He works as a political economist at Boston University.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I started identifying as a poet when I was twenty, but didn’t publish a book until I was forty. I had published poems in the Partisan Review and the Harvard Review a decade earlier but in those earlier days I spent more time focusing on publishing the work of others through the magazine compost I co-published. When I turned forty I published two chapbooks, Isolate Flecks with Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva press and Looking for Lake Texcoco with Mark Lamoureux’s Cy Gist. When I held those collections in my hands they propelled me with affirmation and inspiration. Now And Yet it Moves, published by Marc Vincenz’ MadHat Press, is my eighth book—my fourth full length book.
And Yet it Moves is quite different than my last book, The Wild Goose published by Paul Marion. The Wild Goose was (largely) written when I was a poet in residence at the Heinrich Boll cottage in Achill, Ireland for two summers. I’m a quarter Irish if my last name didn’t give it away and my father had recently passed. That book is an exploration of Ireland, my life with my father and beyond.
And Yet it Moves is a pandemic book. I was shaken by the denial of science and reason in the United States but like Seamus Heaney during ‘The Troubles’ I saved my descriptive rage for the kitchen table but wanted to engage differently as an artist. As I say in my introduction, this was not the first time we lived in such an era. I delve into the Medici era in this book, a poetic journey of the rebirth of wonder followed by its denial manifest by Galileo’s imprisonment. The book is a series of poetic monologues of that time, telling that story.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Our mother took us to the library
every weekend and we had to get books. I read mostly fiction and was
taken by Orwell, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain. I read poetry in school but
would never pick it up on my own—until I heard Bob Dylan and it was all over.
Wow did he fuse the ‘raw and the cooked’ into one inside and out with a
new post-modern sensibility but a meter that sang on its own. From Dylan
I worked backwards being most struck by Williams, Levertov, Rexroth, Patchen,
PAZ, Seamus Heaney, O’Hara, Walcott, John Brooks Wheelwright, Muriel Rukeyser
and Charles Olson and others before I hit a wall in the early 20th Century.
Then I time machined to Homer, Virgil, and Catullus.
Through
Rexroth I entered the world of Tu Fu, Li Bai and Japanese poets too.
Non-fiction is another story. I’ve written nine books on the global
economy. Let’s save that for another day.
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 first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does
your work come out of copious notes?
There are two kinds of poems I write. The first are those that just hit me, I’ve referred to those as ‘lightning bolt’ poems. Something happens or I see something or reflect and then comes what David Hinton calls ‘contact’ and boom I start writing and yeah perhaps 80 percent of what happens when the lightning hits my tree stays on the page in the end.
The other kind of poetry I write are more ‘projects’ as you say. My first book like that was LOOM, also published by MadHat. That book, in method, is the most similar to And Yet it Moves because it is an exploration and conversation with a history to make sense of the present—an ‘archaeology of mourning.’ The older and busier I get—rhyming ain’t the day job—the more important these projects are because they are always there for me. At this point in my life I’m dodging a lot of lightning bolts.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
To finish where I left on the last question I guess, for the lighting bolts I end up collecting those in loose books. The ‘projects’ are seen as books. My book Radio Plays published by Dos Madres is somewhere in the middle. It is a collection of shorter set pieces many of which were lightning bolts—or short storms!
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
A poem doesn’t work for me until I’ve read it looking into a pond of eyes and seeing if I can connect. Readings are essential for me. I don’t think I’ve published anything I haven’t read in public or at least walking around my house beforehand.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think we are all asking who are we, where are we, what are we doing, what are we being. Like Duncan and Olson I see poetry as an open field for these questions.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The poet is the point of contact with a reality revealed in the creation of the poem and shared.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Most publishers and editors I have encountered either don’t like the book and won’t publish it or like the book and largely publish it as is. Actually, And Yet it Moves is an exception. The poems were originally all fairly straight sonnets but Vincenz helped me hone them a bit more to true projective verse and they are now more like those of Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Since they evoke the ruins of the Roman Empire in Renaissance Italy I am calling them ‘ruined sonnets!’
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t try to be someone else.
Sing your own songs and most importantly in your own voice.
Everyone’s is unique and each person is equally incredible.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep,
or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I work full time. For the past five years I have had the privilege to be a poet in residence each summer for a few weeks but I use that to take things to the finish line. In my case I turn off the work laptop at around half time of the Celtics game with the sound off and start working on my poems. If the game is close I stop the poems and bleed green. If not I can go on very late sometimes or hit a wall and go to bed.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
As I said earlier, the longer run ‘projects’ are what I move to. I also write reviews, most recently for the Arts Fuse and Harvard Review… That can help.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The robust smell of my German Shepherd, REXROTH!
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
And Yet it Moves is all of the above—triggered by science, but there are poems in there about Michelangelo, Vasari, Botticelli. In the background the New York painters of the 1950s and slapping away on a big canvas above me when I write. On many levels I am engaging with climate change in this book, so nature is there. In The Wild Goose I evoke Dr. John playing his piano and Desolation Row is always playing in the background.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I listed a bunch earlier in our conversation. I go back to those the most but am always on a new quest to learn something new. Homero Aridjis is the poet I have been diving into the most lately, as well as Cid Corman. I’ve been reading plays a bit more than poetry though, particularly Brian Friel and August Wilson.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Play for the Boston Celtics!
16 - 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 not been a writer?
NBA Basketball Baby! But that’s a joke, I’m five foot nine. That said one of my best friends’ grandma was the Red Auerbach’s secretary and I majored in Physical Therapy for a few semesters thinking I’d be the trainer for the Celtics. Poetry broke through.
I should say that part of the motivation for all this is a social justice. The poetry can go in one way, action in the other. In my day job I work as a political economist trying to get the institutions of global economic governance to align with the goals of financial stability, human wellbeing, and environmental sustainability.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I played instruments when I was younger. My mother had us in art classes all the time too.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
That’s new? I just read Ron Padgett’s DOT, Bernadette Mayer’s Milkweed Smithereens, and the new selected poems of Larry Eigner edited by Jennifer Bartlett. Best book though I’d say has been Homero Aridjis’ new Self Portrait in a Zone of Silence. Wakefield Press has just come out with an incredible crop of Max Jacob in translation that I recently reviewed for Harvard Review. Great film?! My son and I had a blast yesterday watching The Instigators. Was great to know every neighborhood it was shot in!
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am almost finished with another archaeology of morning, perhaps in some way it is a prequel to the book LOOM I discussed earlier in our conversation. This book deals with the Tempest of the settlement of Massachusetts, the translation of its land and people to the West, and to the final battle that confirmed colonization. A truth that lies in the names of so many roads, rivers, and streams here, but is never discussed.
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