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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on-demand, I'm grateful you are here. This is National Poetry Month. A time to celebrate the beauty in how we use words to express ourselves and shine a light on the parts that make us all human, whether that's love, happiness, grief, even anger. Some poets have used their work to call attention to social injustices. Later this hour we'll talk about Booker Prize winning poet Ben Okri's latest collection of poems about the 2020 racial injustice protests, the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster and the pandemic.

We'll also hear about a collaboration between a visual artist and poet tackling the harm of cash bail in the US criminal justice system. Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and artist Titus Kaphar blend visual art, poetry and redacted documents in their new book. Plus Actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner talks about his long held passion for music and his Grammy nominated spoken poetry word album Hiding In Plain View. First, let's get into it with a conversation from author and poet Colm Tóibín about his new collection of poems Vinegar Hill.

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Author Colm Tóibín is best known for his novels like Brooklyn, which is due for a sequel next year, as well as the claimed 2021 release The Magician. He's also written many works of non-fiction and even a few plays. However, the one thing he had not published were poems. That is up until last year. Now fans of Tóibín can experience his writing in a new way through his debut poetry collection Vinegar Hill. There are 61 poems that tackle themes of death and mortality, religion, sex, politics, Irish history, and the pandemic. Let's listen to part of my conversation with Colm Tóibín.

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When did you start writing poetry?

Colm Tóibín: When I was 12. In our house you were meant to go and study in a room on your own from the age of 12. All the new subjects, physics and Latin and French and everything. I wasn't that interested so I would start writing these poems and then I really did that regularly. Really, a few times a week until I was about 17 and I went to university and then it was much more serious because there were other people writing. Then when I was 20, it stopped. It just simply gave up. I was a failed poet. I was an ex-poet.

I was one of those guys wandering around Dublin who was nearly a poet. About 30 years later, after I wrote the novel about Henry James, and it was a big novel with a lot of revision. When it was gone, I'd been living in language, I'd been living in print and I had nothing more to do. Slowly, but really by surprise, in the evenings I would get a line and I would follow it and see where it would take me. I wrote it over the next, I would think, 15 years or maybe 10 or 12 years. I wrote maybe one and a half, two poems a year. I had about 25 when the pandemic started.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. One or two poems a year. Were they poems? Did you work on them the entirety of the year or did you just have these floods of inspiration to write poetry?

Colm Tóibín: No. Part of the fun was the revision that I would simply get a line, follow it anywhere. Any thought came into my head, I would put a melody on it, give it words, and let it go down and down and down the page. Then just start cutting back and adding. Often these poems from that period are often just end up being six lines long. No, I worked every day. Sometimes I would go back every hour and see what was wrong. Often in the morning you can be quite brutal in the morning if you've had very emotional thoughts at night. You can have quite cold thoughts in the morning and it's very good for poetry because you can cut back any excesses or sentimentalities or anything that really shouldn't be there.

Alison Stewart: When you look at your poetry back through the decades, what have you noticed about how your approach or your style has changed?

Colm Tóibín: It took me a long time to get a tone that was almost conversational, almost formal, like someone speaking that was a voice that was mine rather than. I think the reason I stopped [unintelligible 00:04:51], I was trying to write these strained poems. I was more interested in being a poet than writing the poem. The poems were all not just derivative, but so knotted and clotted and with so many efforts in them.

Alison Stewart: Overwrought.

Colm Tóibín: When I finally got this voice, it was a much more relaxed voice. There was a lot of irony there, which I couldn't have done when I was 17. Yes, I found a tone.

Alison Stewart: Such funny a sentence, was being a poet not thinking about the poems. Such a 17 to 20 year old Colm, what does being a poet mean? What does that look like?

Colm Tóibín: Oh, in Ireland, you see, there was nothing else. It was honored and people in the country and admired where people liked [unintelligible 00:05:41] and Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. It wasn't as though we had Hollywood or we had millionaires or we had Wall Street or we had industrialists. It wasn't like that. Or being a poet in Ireland was, and still is, a really important vocation and it's much admired. Partly being a young poet even if you'd published two poems, people would notice you and say, "That's the guy with the poem In the Irish Times last Saturday. Did you see that poem?" Poems, oddly enough, in a small literary city like Dublin, still matter.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Colm Tóibín, his debut poetry collection is called Vinegar Hill. When did you start putting all of these poems together that appear in this book?

Colm Tóibín: I had cancer and I was on chemo, and the chemo included steroids and steroids are curious. They grind away inside you and they give you about one hour pure clarity every day. In that one hour, a few times I got a poem and then revised it and worked on it. I published two of them and an editor at [unintelligible 00:06:47] in the UK based in Manchester John McAuliffe, who's a poet himself, just said to me, "Do you have any more of those poems?" I said, "Yes, I've had them for ages." I showed him what I had and he was so encouraging. He was so nice about them.

It was the first time anyone had ever really encouraged me as a poet. Once I had him to send poems to, and I would often think, "Look, I'll leave this for a week more because I don't want to send John a poem that isn't completely finished," he became not just an editor, but a sort of first reader and someone I was trying to impress and someone who was being very kind back. The kindness was really saying, "If this works, we will publish a book by you." For me, of course, that was a dream I had when I was 12, 13, 14, that I would publish a book of poems.

In a way, the book of poems interested me more than the actual writing of the poems did. The sense of what it would mean to have a book of your own poetry art. When this was being offered, the pandemic was on. I got down to work, I worked every day. I thought, "This is my big chance. I have all this time. I cannot come on in the future." I didn't have time or I was busy with something else. I'm not. I have long days here. I'm going to work and I'm going to send John every so often five or six new poems and see what he has to say.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's hear a poem. What would you like to start with? Los Angeles maybe?

Colm Tóibín: Yes, I'll start with In Los Angeles. This was written in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, Who can say what he had in mind, or where he was headed,

the last man ever to walk a dog?

Water was scarce, and the sun burnished the paintings in the Getty.

About suffering, of course, they were never wrong.

But none of us imagined that between two trucks on the 110, I would see Icarus crawl.

His bronzed smile and tanned legs hover in the mind as much else fades.

I told him about the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of souls, and life everlasting.

But it was he said, too little too late.

Lux Aeterna; Tantum Ergo; Dies Irae.

Even the dear old hymns would not give light its shade, shade its dark.

People moved through their houses wondering where in the name of God,

they had left their phones, their glasses, their e-cigarettes.

Their take on what must now unfold.

Alison Stewart: That was Colm Tóibín reading from his new book of poetry Vinegar Hill. That poem mentions water scarcity, and there are several poems about locations. There's one in Washington DC which is specific about what ails are political system, corrupt leaders, the proud boys are mentioned in that poem. There's one about Venice, there's a little take on capitalism. How do poems help you work through your concerns about our culture, about the way we are living our lives?

Colm Tóibín: I think what happens is that what's really on your mind gets into a poem in a way that often surprises you. That I haven't been writing about global warming, I haven't been writing about the climate emergency. I haven't written essays on it. I haven't been on marches on it. What's funny is that made its way into so many poems that surprised me. There's a poem called Eve and it's about Adam and Eve. Eve talks about the world wearing out. That we're in a world that's wearing out. There's another poem about the moon. That with all the climate change, what if the moon disappeared in the sky? It mentions in passing that the western seaboard, which would be Ireland, I suppose, has already gone. That sense, I was living in a time when-- Certainly in California, you really think of the sun and, and the whole scarcity of water and the dryness, but I honestly didn't know until those poems how much this had begun to matter to me and how much this had entered my consciousness so that I suppose poems are one way of learning these things.

Alison: That is the second poem in the collection In Los Angeles. The first line of the first poem titled September is,

The first September of the pandemic,

The sky’s a water colour white and grey.

What was going on with you that day?

Colm Tóibín: The poem is a sonnet and it really did happen. I was in Dublin, and it was the first September of the pandemic, and it was a Sunday morning, and I went out and there was no one on the street. It was that funny fluffy September weather in Dublin with a lot of clouds, but the clouds moving. It was a luminous thing. There was no one on a street that's often busy. Suddenly a man approached me. I'm not making this up. He was wearing a mask, I really didn't know him, and as he passed me, he looked at me, and it's the last line of the poem, he says, "Someone told me you were dead." It felt as though we'd moved into an aftermath, or afterlight, or an afterday where time wasn't exactly itself.

The city wasn't really the city. It'd been emptied out. We were living in a luminous time after time when a man could actually-- He said it to me and he passed by. I went home, I was living on that street, and I wrote it down and then I began to form it. Then I realized, "Oh my God, I could make a sonnet from this," because I have a last line. That genuinely happened, and the first drafting of it was written on the very day within an hour of it happening. It's like a diary, except with these poems they are chiseled, they are worked over and over [unintelligible 00:12:27] anything unnecessary is taken out.

Alison: One poem in the collection, the one with the longest title is Lines Written After the Second Moderna vaccine at Dodgers Stadium Los Angeles 27 February, 2021.

Colm Tóibín: I was coming home in the car and my boyfriend was driving and I was sitting there and-- It's hard to remember it now, but that vaccine became, for people who wanted it, gold. You couldn't wait for your day, you were buzzed, "No, I'm getting it tomorrow. When are you getting?" "Oh, I'm getting." Being in the queue in Dodgers Stadium, I felt, "I'm an American. I'm here. Look at me." Then how efficiently it was all done.

People complained about bureaucracy. Well, here it was bureaucracy working, and it was so pleasant, and you stayed in your car, which is such a Californian idea. You didn't leave your car, you just simply opened the door of your car and stuck at your shoulder, and they they did it. On the way home I thought, "I can do anything now. Now I can be feel safer." I started to think about all these images of suddenly becoming someone new, so it opens with, "I'm a shiny example, I am the Lord thy God," and then I list a whole lot of famous people that I am as I went home that day, ending with, "I am the cat's pajamas. I am WB Yeats."

Alison: What is an aspect of this pandemic, of the before times, that poetry can capture that other art forms can't? What is it about this pandemic time as opposed to the before times, I should say?

Colm Tóibín: I suppose it can capture that strange gnawing fear that was there, that is very hard to put into words, and I think affected some people very deeply, where you had a long day ahead and the only thing that might matter was the news to see how is this pandemic going? People who had fair busy social lives, and depended on their social lives and meeting their friends, with all that over, it's quite hard to write about or quite hard to be precise about how that deprivation, loneliness, and not being able to go places affected people. Poetry is perhaps one of the ways that this can be done, where you can put in images. Images like just this strange business of meeting a lone figure on a previously busy street on a given Sunday. What that moment is like. It felt otherworldly. It felt strange. You can get, I suppose, unresolved emotion into a poem in a way that it's very hard to get it into ordinary conversation or into an op-ed piece.

Alison: My guest is Colm Tóibín. The name of his poetry collection is Vinegar Hill. We'll hear more poetry from Colm, and have more of this conversation after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It. My guest is Colm Tóibín. The name of his debut poetry collection is Vinegar Hill. There is a short poem towards the end of the book I know you wanted to read. I think it's got an interesting-- Some people may know the story behind Pangur. Would you share it with us and then read the poem?

Colm Tóibín: Pangur is the name for a cat. It's a very old cat because it's one of the-- What happened in Ireland with the arrival of Christianity was there really weren't battles between Pagans and Christians. It all settled down remarkably easy. The monks developed these beautiful monasteries in which they wrote down the stories that were only available in the oral tradition, so suddenly we have manuscripts now. Then they copy each other's manuscripts. In the middle of all this, there's a monk working who has a cat in the room. The cat is called Pangur. He writes the poem, which is one of the earliest Gaelic poems, and he says, "I'm hunting for words and my cat, Pangur, is hunting for mice. We're both involved in the same sort of activity." Now, a lot of Irish poets have translated this and done versions of it. This is mine and it's called Pangur.

Pangur, a neighbor's cat comes to my flat for peace and quiet,

He likes to lick my bare toes while I type,

but he cannot keep himself in check,

and soon he starts to bite.

Pangur, I bark, If you don't stop,

I will put you back in the poem written by that monk.

Alison: That was Colin Tóibín. You write in your poem about a trip you took aboard the ship The Estonia, and she sank a year after you were on board. People may remember the story. 852 people drowned. Then later in the poem you are snorkeling, and scuba diving, and in this excursion where two people are left behind. They ask if everyone on the boat is here, and everybody just says yes. Then you write a little bit more about your fear of scuba diving. Not because you'll be left behind, but you have a fear of being injured while scuba diving, so you decide to snorkel. How did being proximate to traumatic events lead to this poem?

Colm Tóibín: Some of these poems are narrative poems where something just comes back into my memory. The night of that ship, it sank a year later, but when it sank, thinking, I was really deep down in this cabin, and I imagine the water is coming in, and thinking about the night. The same thing in Australia where just a week before we went out into the Barrier Reef, two people had been left behind on the same boat as we went out. Just thinking about all that and trying to find a way of telling a story that would normally be a storyteller story, or would appear in prose, to try and get it into a poem so that you're getting-- You see, with a poem you need one more thing. You need to actually end the poem with some--

You can't just tell the two stories and say that's a poem. It isn't a poem. What can you say about this? At the end of the poem I was thinking about that idea of water is disaster, of fear of water. When I was there, the boat was an easy reach. I was snorkeling, but I wasn't scuba diving. I was afraid just to go down. The boat was an easy reach, so there was really nothing to worry about. Nothing to suggest disaster except the waves themselves. The swell that is unnatural, even at the best of times. All highs and lows, untrustworthy, even when calm. Just undulating willfulness, no conscience, no regrets.

I had tried to move from the two anecdotes in some overall overarching vision of the general danger and ruthlessness of seawater and of the sea, that it really genuinely has no conscience. That's where the work is sometimes. That you have the thing down, and you realize it needs one more thing, and I don't know what that is, and it won't come if I force it. I have to keep reading, and trying things out, and writing things down, then, no, that won't work. Go, come back tomorrow. Try it again. Then one day you get something, and it's all wrong, it's so wrong. You cut it, it's gone. Then another day you begin to get a glimmer. A glimpse of what it might be. That's called work, and it's lovely.

Alison Stewart: Some of the poems are from the perspective of historical figures of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley from an Austrian composer. What gets into you to write a poem from someone else's POV?

Colm: Gerard Manley Hopkins came to Dublin as a Jesuit and he wrote some of these famous sonnets just two blocks away from where I live in Dublin. He was very, very unhappy in the city and very lonely. He hadn't published his poems. They were published posthumously and he was a Jesuit, he was a convert of Catholicism, and he really didn't enjoy his time in Ireland and he died in Ireland. I went to the room where he died in that big building called Newman House on Stephen's Green in Dublin. I knew one anecdote about him that the only time he connected with literary life in Dublin was a visit to the studio of the painter John Butler Yeats, the father of the poet WB Yeats. That's the only mention we have of him entering into literary world. I wrote a poem about that.

The other one is about Anton [unintelligible 00:21:02] who came to Barcelona in 1936 to conduct the first performance of Byrd's violin concerto. Now, this shows you this way culture in that period in Spain, just before the Civil War, was really high and there were having premieres of violin concertos, but he couldn't do it. Whatever happened with the orchestra, whatever happened that night, he had to go to somebody else. It's just one of those little stories about almostness, someone who almost conducted an orchestra. I was using the phrase "knowing the score." I was using the double way where someone who knows the score, but he's dealing actually with music. It is literally a score. That's another poem about an historical figure.

Alison: My guest is Colm Tóibín. The name of his debut poetry collection is Vinegar Hill. You write about death as well in this collection. Would you read the poem Two Plus One?

Colm: Yes. This is a poem about my parents. There's a poem about the two are the parents and the one is me, two plus one.

My heart is watching and weakening,

mercilessly counting the beats.

It is bored, casually waiting for this to cease.

My father died at 53. Vessels leaked in his brain.

Then arteries weakened. He moaned in pain.

My mother's eyes were gray as his were blue.

Her breath rose high above the town before it sank in death.

I have their two weak hearts in one weak heart,

their eyes merged in my gaze.

His slow smile, her soft side glance oversee my days.

Alison: That was Colm Tóibín reading from Vinegar Hill. Did the pandemic make you think about death differently or even write about death differently?

Colm: It gave me long days where anything at all could come into my head and I could find a rhythm for it and put it into words. Obviously, one of the things was death because I'm in my mid-60s now, and it means that the earlier generation has passed on and, of course, memories come into your mind of various things, but sometimes something just mild and funny. For example, it came into my head one day after all the years that one day my mother, as a joke in the house had dressed up as a nun and come to the door as though she were a visitor. The poem is called The Nun. It was really very funny except that my younger brother kept looking at her and I kept looking at him because he just realized there's something funny here.

She was wearing glasses. She was doing a very good imitation of it, and she was talking about the missions and she seemed very holy, but it went on too long. He was very surprised in the end that the trick had been played on him. Anything at all that I remembered could start as a poem. Of course, some of them just didn't work and some of those poems, I left out of the book, but it was a very good time. I think death would be just meant to make it all too morose. Anything at all, including things that were funny in the past all came into my head. I had days to see what they might look like if I put them into poems. I had days to revise those poems and revise them again. I think it wasn't just morose. It wasn't just thinking about hard, sad things. It was anything at all really.

Alison: You wanted to read another poem that deals a little bit with death as well, and memory titled Because the Night. Would you read that?

Colm: Yes. This is the very last poem in the book. I think you put a last poem in the same way as-- the first poem has to have, I suppose, a bite to it, but the last poem is really about dreams and sleep. It's a end poem.

Because the night, not sleeping and then a night's hard sleep.

Waking unsure which room I'm in.

My old friend gone two years was there last night sitting at a table fully himself.

I know he is dead.

Even in the dream I knew this,

and yet I talked to him about ordinary things,

not how he died or where he is.

Sometimes my mother floats in and my brothers,

less often my father who died long before they did.

Then the old room in Hat Street or the top floor of number two Hawker Terrace,

where I lived years back come as though I still keep stuff in them,

but have stopped paying the rent and must sneak in and out because someone is under orders to waylay me.

Soon I will have to try and rescue books and clothes,

get back the music that echoes here,

especially on nights when you snore,

and I move into the study and sleep in the day bed,

and when I wake, I have no clue where I am,

what bed this is, but I will get up and find you alive, real, now.

And the morning starts, emails, the newspaper.

I carry the night all day though, a flight path, a way through.

Alison: That was Colm Tóibín reading from his debut poetry collection, Vinegar Hill. You write about a visit to the White House to meet President Obama and the interesting tactic deployed by the staff when they decided it was time for you and everyone else to leave on St. Patrick's Day. What happened?

Colm: Well, we were all very excited. There's nothing more glamorous if you're Irish then getting invited to the White House. Of course, Obama, you have to remember, he was so glamorous and the idea that I'm invited to the White House. I remember going down the train from New York and just other people on the train, "Are they going as well?" We'd [unintelligible 00:26:56] other Irish people, and, of course, we dressed up. I was with the theater director, Gary Hynes, and it was all absolutely marvelous. At one moment, I almost didn't get to shake his hand, but then someone who knew him brought him over and we shook his hand.

What was really strange was afterwards, obviously, Obama went back to his office, the Oval Office, to run the word and Michelle Obama was busy and Joe Biden vice president, but the Irish, for St. Patrick Date got put into a beautiful long room, and we got fed drinks. It was all marvelous until I realized that the waiters were standing in a row at the end of the room and they began to move one step at a time towards us, letting no one behind them. This was slow and it wasn't announced. It was only really when there were a third of the way in that you actually began to realize they meant business. That one step at a time towards us letting no one get behind them, they did this nonchalantly, casually.

It was gradual, but it was also firm. We were so high on our brush with fame, however, that we hardly noticed until they were a third of the way towards the exit. We realized that they meant business. We would have to go. Of course, this was, I suppose, an ignominious way of being put out of the White House. It wasn't as though you were being handed your coat or told, "Your car is waiting, sir." It was so elegantly done and so firm.

Again, this was 2010. It was a memory that came in and I said that it was tempting to see it as a metaphor for something for soft power, for soft coercion, for how to take a firm stand on foreigners or even more seriously, the way they did it one step at a time or for times poll like purposeful intent, how it moves discreetly, it inches forward without us noticing. Just as we are being distracted by wondrous sights and thoughts and idle talk, it pushes us firmly into timeless night and will not let us back, but that just seemed to me too poetic, too easy a metaphor to make.

The last stanza of the poem is, but that is stretching it. Instead, the thing itself, the fact remains vivid in my mind. It was surprising and exact. It left us all speechless, unsure if we would ever have the courage to tell our friends at home in any detail of the ingenious and effective scheme used to get us out of the White House on St. Patrick's Day 2010.

Alison: The way you described it, I like the way you said it could be more serious there, but I pictured a hunting dog in a meadow. The way they gently-- or if you have a dog, a hunting dog, and you're walking them and they press on your leg?

Colm: Yes, it's that lovely sense of being herded out as though speaking to you would not be helpful in that was that it needs a quiet force, but in any case, it took the shine off the day. I'm not sure how many of us ever told anyone about it, because we were so busy telling them about Michelle Obama, what she was wearing, or the way Obama spoke to Joe Biden. There were so many other things to talk about. Anyway, I thought it was time that that poem, [chuckles] somebody told the world about what actually happened that day.

Alison Stewart: Any you poem you would like to leave us with?

Author Colm Tóibín: If I just leave you, I think the poem, Vinegar Hill, itself is too long, but I'll just do the end of it.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Author Colm Tóibín: Just to give you a sense of it.

My mother is taking art classes

And, thinking it natural to make

The hill her focal point,

Is trying to paint it

What color is Vinegar Hill?

How does it rise above the town?

It is humped as much as round

There is no point in invoking history

The hill is above all that,

Intractable, unknowable, serene,

It is in shade, then in light,

And often caught between.

When the blue becomes gray

And fades more, the green glistens,

And then not so much. The rock also

Glints in the afternoon light,

Which dwindles, making the glint disappear

Then there is the small matter of clouds,

Which make tracks over the hill in a smoke

Of white, as though instructed

By their superiors to break camp.

They change their shape, crouch down,

Stay still, all camouflage, dreamy,

Lost, with no strategy to speak of,

Yet resigned to the inevitable:

When the wind comes for them, they will retreat

Until this time, they are surrounded by sky

And can, as yet, envisage no way out.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Author Colm Tóibín. His debut poetry collection is Vinegar Hill.

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We continue our salute to national poetry month. We'll from Booker Prize winning author Ben Okri A Fire in My Head.

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