Earlier this month, Vona Groarke became the 10th poet in a distinguished line to be named the Ireland Professor of Poetry. At the age of 60, Groarke is ready for a new challenge. She is finishing up her time as writer in residence at the prestigious St John’s College, Cambridge, and her children are grown up.
“Suddenly the adrenaline has kicked in,” she smiles. “Also a sense that I’m not going to live forever and whatever work I want to do, I ought to just do.”
The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 to celebrate Seamus Heaney following his Nobel Prize win, and every three years since, a poet of honour and distinction is chosen to represent the chair. Previous professors include Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Paul Durcan and, most recently, Paul Muldoon.
Groarke describes Muldoon as a tough act to follow. She’s an admirer of what he achieved during his time as professor of poetry, particularly his seminar series How To Read A Poem, which offered the reading public strategies for accessing contemporary poetry. “It was a really clever way of not dumbing down poetry but also bringing people in.”
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Groarke may be a more understated presence than the rock star poet Muldoon, but she is looking forward to bringing something fresh to the role when she begins this September. Her work speaks for itself. Over the past 30 years she has written 15 books, including nine collections of poetry, a book-long essay and her brilliant book Hereafter, a complex dialogue with her late grandmother’s life as an immigrant in New York, which Groarke wrote during her time as Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
One thing she will not be doing during her tenure as professor of poetry is force-feeding the nation poetry. “I notice in England there’s this idea of ‘bringing poetry to the people’ and I need to put asterisks around that idea because I think, yeah, if they want it. We’re not in the business of ramming poetry down anybody’s throats so if we invite them and they accept the invitation, then that’s wonderful. If they don’t want to accept the invitation, then we shouldn’t consider that a failure. People are interested in different things. And also, if we try too hard to interest people who don’t want to be interested in it, you end up sometimes compromising the art form and emphasising things other than the aesthetic element of it. I think in Ireland we’re pretty good at not doing that but we need to be a little vigilant around that area, to respect the craft, to respect the aesthetic, to respect that it is an art form and it’s not for everybody.”
She is very much a believer in poetry as an art form first and foremost. “There is a fashion for talking about the social application of poetry – poetry as a force for change, poetry as a force for expressing anger, a protest – and it can be those things, but we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it is also an art form and it has elements of craft and aesthetic and we lose something if we lose sight of those.”
How does she feel about becoming something more of a household name as the professor of poetry? “I feel slightly ambivalent about it,” she laughs, “because I live alone at the base of a mountain in the countryside and I cherish that. I like the retreat aspect of my life.”
Groarke was always going to be a writer. “I think I figured out early on in life that imagination is the most important and least valued aspect of human existence.” The youngest of six children, she grew up on a farm in Ballymahon, Co Longford. She describes herself as a bit of a swot in school and even though she considered studying law (her father ran a legal practice in Longford town and four of her five siblings went into the family profession) she says it was always going to be English in Trinity for her. “I think I just knew that I was more interested in this than I was in anything else.”
![Poet Vona Groarke: 'If you give [someone] a novel, it’s just one world; if you give a poetry book, you give a multiplicity of worlds.' Photograph: Joe O'Shaughnessy](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/3UCR44OZ7RANDCAU67RMWJRSQQ.JPG?auth=209e703a16cba542aef7aaa9b9859737ae0ec763be94060fefb425d64c8e4519&width=800&height=1070)
She went to boarding school for three years in Our Lady’s Bower, Athlone, before moving to Galway where she did her Leaving Cert at Taylor’s Hill secondary school. During this time she lived with her older sister who was married with her own young family. “I had never held a baby, never played with a toddler, I’d never done any of those things so it was an absolute joy for me to be living there. ”
For people who are unfamiliar with her work, she is most often compared to Elizabeth Bishop and she describes herself as slightly more in the Borodin school than the Woody Guthrie school of poetry. She is known for her rigour of form, precision of language and complexity of feeling.
She didn’t write poetry while she was studying at Trinity, despite a lively scene there. “When you’re reading Wordsworth, Yeats and Shelley they seem to be sculpted in Carrara marble. They don’t seem like something you can have a go at yourself.”
It wasn’t until after she had left college and attended a poetry workshop with Eavan Boland that she found the impetus she needed to begin to write. It’s also where she met the poet Conor O’Callaghan. “We went on to get married and to have two children. We’re not still married, but that was very formative. It just seemed like that became a kind of a world, like we were living in poetry.”
It was romantic but not easy earning a living as poets in the beginning. She has taught poetry at the University of Manchester since 2007 but sees the creative writing industry as something of a double-edged sword.
“When the creative writing trade kicked in, everybody became involved in that because it was a job that you could do part-time and that would leave you room to do other things and there was something appealing about working in a university and having colleagues and having a pension. I couldn’t have managed without it, really, but I wonder if it squeezed our pool of experience slightly. We all have the same jobs, we all do the same work, none of us are farmers or hairdressers or whatever ... It was fantastic, but I think there was a little cost to that in terms of the art form.”
She thinks it’s a little different in Ireland, where institutions such as Aosdána, of which she is a member, and the Arts Council and even the recently piloted basic income scheme for artists all offer an alternative means of financial support for writers.
She thinks Irish poetry is in good health but worries a little about poets being tempted away by the bright lights of novel writing. One of the issues, she thinks, is agents (Groarke has never had one) encouraging poets to expand into other forms. Another is big poetry prizes being awarded to debut collections.
“I think it’s actually really bad for the profession and for the poets themselves, because if you’ve won the TS Eliot Prize with your first book, I’m not saying you only write for prizes, but if you’ve already achieved what most of us spend careers trying to get on the shortlist for, then it does kind of make you feel like, where do I go next? What’s next?”
So what makes a good poem in her opinion? “There has to be, I think, an element of sincerity or the poem misses something. I think the element of sincerity might be the pulse of the poem, and you have to find it somewhere but it may not always be on the surface. I think that the ability in a poem to think and feel coterminously ... it needs to be doing both, not to the same extent or in equal measures, but if those elements are missing then it’s probably going to be a limp enough piece of writing.”
If there was one simple thing that she thinks could invigorate Irish poetry, what might that be? “The best thing that could happen for Irish poetry is for people to buy poetry books. If you give [someone] a novel, it’s just one world; if you give a poetry book, you give a multiplicity of worlds.”
Vona Groarke’s latest collection, Infinity Pool, is published by Gallery Press
