12 or 20 (second series) questions with Thomas O'Grady

Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he served as Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019. He was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. He is the author of three books of poems, What Really Matters (2000) and Delivering the News (2019), both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, and Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems (2025), published by Arrowsmith Press in Boston. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

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

On an earthy level, I’ll admit that for a guy growing up on PEI, the phrase “published poet” rang almost as magically as “NHL defenseman” or “lead guitarist.” 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 something to say that was worth saying. But then 19 years passed before the publication of my second book, Delivering the News. Tellingly, I suppose, the “Selected Poems” of Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems includes only 15 poems from the first book and only 20 from the second. I’m not disowning all the rest, but I feel that the ones that I’ve included resonate more consistently with the 55 (or so) “New Poems” gathered in Coming Ashore under the title Nuages. With What Really Matters, some of the poems I’ve omitted seem more “earnest” now than they did when I wrote them. In Delivering the News there are poems that I still love that seem now more “of their moment,” so they got sidelined. I think that Nuages has more poems that are built to last. Time will be the judge of that.

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

I published a couple of short stories before I committed to writing poems. 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 Irish Studies/English professor with an ambitious scholarly agenda (which I’m maintaining in retirement), and my wife and I also had a very full domestic life with three daughters underfoot (literally) when I was setting out. But I was also teaching a lot of poetry in my literature classes, so I think I gravitated toward that genre because it was very much in the air I was breathing . . . and I felt comfortable breathing it, both inhaling and exhaling.

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?

For me, poems are like cats—they appear mysteriously and unannounced. I grew up with cats, and my wife and I are currently on our third and fourth cats, 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 to coax it into being, but sometimes I have to let it emerge on its own terms and in 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 short pieces 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. My poems can start with a word, with a sensation, with a vague memory that has been randomly triggered, with an emotion. Once I jot down a phrase or a line, I might be off to the races . . . or I might not. None of my three books of poems started out with even the slightest notion of a “book” in the offing: I write one poem at a time. Eventually the poems accumulate (sometimes I feel like they’ve bred like rabbits behind my back) and then I try to herd them into some semblance of order. With each of my books I’ve recognized through that process of herding that there are certain themes or motifs that recur, and I’m happy to hear the poems shout out to each other either in a sequence or sometimes across a distance of many pages.

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

I’m very happy to share my poems by way of readings. For me a reading is a social occasion (friends, family, kindred spirits), and the poems are mostly just “the occasion” for that larger occasion. My poems tend to be short—much shorter than the stories I tell to set them up!—so I think they’re audience-friendly for on-the-spot ingestion. Also, I think that when hearing my poems read aloud, an audience can more easily tune in to my natural tendency as a 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 thinking about the poem, of trying to get it right. I recently came upon, and wrote down, this observation by Seamus Heaney: “the one simple requirement—definition even—of lyric writing is self-forgetfulness.”

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 read widely, and I am open to all sorts of poems even if they aren’t the sort that I might write myself. I would never prescribe or proscribe for other writers what poems should or shouldn’t do or be—they either speak to us as readers or they don’t. Do they or don’t they—that is the question! In the case of my own poems, I recognize, and admit unabashedly, that I am at least a collateral descendant of poets in the Irish lyric tradition—but with a PEI accent. From the start, my poems have mostly steered clear of highfalutin’ or obscure diction, though I don’t shy away from a rich sonic texture (alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme) or even from a sonic structure like a formal rhymed sonnet. I’ve written a lot of sonnets—maybe more than my fair share—but the abiding lesson I’ve learned from working with fixed forms involves the reciprocal relationship between the formal structure and the rhetorical structure of a poem. As I work on a poem, I eventually become conscious of the movement of an idea through the movement of the words and the lines and then try to shepherd everything toward satisfying closure.

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?

Robert Frost purportedly said: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.” In our politically, socially, and culturally fraught day and age the boundary line between grief and grievance seems not only blurry but perhaps fluid. But I worry that some writers (and readers) give too much credit to poetry’s capacity to redress the wrongs of the world. Airing grievances under the guise of poetry may 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 difficult or essential (or both)?

I have never worked with an outside editor. I never even took a Creative Writing course or workshop. I don’t show unfinished work to other writers. I guess I learned how to write poems simply by . . . writing poems! My wife is my first reader, but I never show her what I’ve written until I’m fully satisfied with it myself. With Coming Ashore, the publisher/editor made only one suggestion, which I accepted—that the “New Poems” section be titled Nuages as a nod toward the poem with that title which is itself a nod toward manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt’s wistful melody that became the unofficial anthem of the French Resistance during World War II. Did the publisher/editor recognize that lyric poetry also sings against the darkness of the different clouds that hang overhead in our place and time? Maybe . . .

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

Perhaps this rationalizes my slow process of writing and my modest output, but I think often of the advice Czesław Miłosz proffers in a poem titled “Ars Poetica?” that dates to 1968: “poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I think it would be overly simplistic to say they use different parts of the brain, though there may be some truth to that. Back in my teaching days, I would encourage both my Creative Writing students and my literature students to engage with a text by “reading like a writer.” Even as a scholar or a critic I always try to engage with a poem, or a book of poems, or a work of fiction, or lit-crit itself on its own terms first: that, I hope, gives me a generous way of taking its measure before I take a more “evaluative” stance toward it. So I suppose that for 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 even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Nowadays, my day starts around 6:50 a.m. with a quick cuppa java before heading out with our new puppy tugging at the far end of the leash. Back in the olden days, when we had three highschoolers under our roof, I would set the coffeemaker for 5:45 and try to get some writing done before the rest of the house awoke around 6:45. I like to start pushing words around the screen as early in the day as possible—usually nothing of substance comes of that, but it’s at least an act of faith. Then during the day I move from project to project 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), a feuilleton about walking the dog that may end up engaging with Polish poet Adam Zagajewski . . . But then several mornings each week get interrupted by coffee meet-ups with friends, though I must say that interruption is a small price to pay for a good chat.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack 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—I always kept on hand a good supply of “palate cleansers,” mostly classic noir novels and international spy thrillers. Page-turners. That’s still the case. I recently read a couple of novels by Jack Beaumont—The Frenchman and Dark Arena—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 of Impressionism) and I recently read John Higgs’s Love and Let Die (about James Bond and The Beatles) . . . Sometimes, simply coming up for air from the heavy 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 “the million-acre farm,” sometimes as “Abegweit,” from the Mi’kmak word Epekwitk, commonly translated as “cradled on the waves”—I have to acknowledge two fragrances: freshly-turned soil and briny air.

14 - 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?

The natural world has been a steady subject for me pretty much from the time I started writing poems: landscapes and shorescapes and riverscapes, birds and animals, the changing of the seasons . . . Ditto for music and musicians—I suspect that somewhere in my subconscious, guitarists like Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt and fiddlers/violinists like Michael Coleman and Paganini and marquee 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, David Blackwood . . . they all trigger my ekphrastic reflex . . .

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

Many years ago, I published an essay in The New Quarterly in which I 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 a high standard for me . . . a standard reinforced frequently, I’ll admit, by my ongoing scholarly commitment to his total body of work. Another poet whose work I like—I especially appreciate his use of simile and metaphor, but also his down-to-earthiness—is Ted Kooser. Early on, Mary Oliver showed me ways of observing the natural world: I love her line that “A poem should always have birds in it”! Although I have no real way to measure this, I feel that my reading of Adam Zagajewski and Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer added some “sinew” to my writing in recent years. At our summer home, we have dozens of single volumes of poems by writers from across the spectrum—I start many mornings there by plucking a random volume from the stack and reading a few poems to jumpstart the day. But mostly I read fiction and, increasingly, nonfiction—quite a bit of it involving Paris. I am especially drawn to the period 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, both short stories and novels, set mostly on PEI. I’d probably have to give up my scholarly 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 not been a writer?

I always aspired to be a musician—specifically, a guitarist . . . When I was a highschooler and an undergrad, I developed pretty decent blues chops. But then I stopped playing for about 25 years. When I got back in the saddle, I became obsessed with jazz guitar. I took some lessons and then played in an after-hours combo for 19 years. I probably plateaued just before COVID pulled the 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 a very bookish family! Seven children and we were all readers . . . I don’t recall much poetry in the house, though I have a specific memory that back in high school I happened upon Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” in an anthology: I typed it out and thumb-tacked it to my bedroom wall—it was a window into a world far beyond PEI. As it turns out, I followed in my father’s professorial footsteps and ended up having a rich 36-year career at a fine university in Boston teaching books that I loved and having the license to work with 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, a triple biography of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The author’s mastery of the material was remarkable, but he wore his knowledge lightly and the writing was compelling. The last great film I watched was Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford: it was screened in a noir film series I’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 that just won’t let me go. And at the same time, I’m trying to kickstart some of the aforementioned fiction projects. But like the old saying goes, Art is long, life is short!

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