Pádraig Ó Tuama: On Circumnavigating the Gaps, the Poetic Voice, and His New Collection ‘Kitchen Hymns’

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, professor, conflict resolution mediator, and host of On Being’s podcast, Poetry Unbound. For over two years, Pádraig was a voice I heard about once a week on the Poetry Unbound podcast, where the host [Pádraig] reads and explores various poems from countless poets worldwide. It was here I developed an interest in Pádraig’s work, and not just because of his pleasing Irish accent. 

He is the author of several books of poetry, including the collection, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. His forthcoming collection, Kitchen Hymns (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), becomes available for purchase in mid-January. As a poet and theologian, Ó Tuama’s work delves into the human psyche through the lens of history, religion, spirituality, and identity. Kitchen Hymns is a collection of returning, of letting go, and of forgiveness. Through narrative, character, dialogue, and memory, Ó Tuama opens the reader to his deeply personal experiences for the sake of contemplation and wonderment. His love for poetic craft and narrative forges a rousing connection between personhood, story, and art. Ó Tuama spends his time between Belfast and New York City.

Samuel Louis Spencer: Pádraig, how are you?

Pádraig Ó Tuama: I’m good, thanks. How are you?

SLS: Very good, very good. You’re in New York?

PÓT: I am. Where are you?

SLS: I’m in Tampa, Florida, where I live.

PÓT: All the way down there.

SLS: What are you doing in New York?

PÓT: I live here most of the year. I’m self-employed. I’ve got a bunch of jobs, one of which is with Columbia. And then the Poetry Unbound stuff also means that I’m here.

SLS: Oh! For some reason, I thought you were traveling to New York, that you always lived in Ireland.

PÓT: I have lived in Ireland for most of my life. And I have an apartment in Belfast. I’m there about four months a year. So yeah, I hang on to that bit. I don’t think I’ve quite left yet.

SLS: When I was trying to think of the theme for this interview, I kept coming back to the poetic voice or the poet’s voice. I learned who you were because of Poetry Unbound. I didn’t know who you were for the longest time; I was listening to your voice over and over and listening to the poems you were reading. I want to talk to you about Kitchen Hymns, but before we get to that I wanted to talk to you about the poetic voice. If you had to come up with a definition, what would that be?

PÓT: I suppose I tend to think in plurals. So I think about the poets’ voices, and that’s both in terms of register as well as persona. It’s also in terms of knowledge about time—is the poet looking back, or is the poet looking forward? Or is the poet in an unknowing state, trying to look around and trying to see? I see it as a plural thing. That’s particularly in the form of how you employ poetic voice and craft. On the bigger thing, I suppose, there’s a way within which you’re always trying to keep in contact with your ever-changing voice. I don’t think it’s ever just one thing. Hopefully, your/my poetry is changing as years go by, and what it means for me to engage in the poetic voice of myself is changing… while at the same time having a distinction of, you know, the parts [of you] that stay the same and then parts [that] are evolving and changing.

SLS: Those parts that change, the parts that you leave behind, how are you [or we] supposed to look back at them as a different person in the future?

PÓT: I heard that Rabindranath Tagore said that people often look at their earliest poems and feel a little bit of embarrassment because they feel like maybe they weren’t refined enough, or maybe there was something that you might think that you grew out of. But there’s also something very vulnerable and brave and insightful about what it was that you needed to put down on paper at the start. So yeah, I look at various poems of mine and think, Oh, well, I’d edit that differently now. Sometimes I do, but also I’ll be fifty next year, and I look at it thinking: Well, why would I expect a thirty-year-old to know what a fifty-year-old would want to say, or how they’d wish to edit. I don’t think I’m expecting that the writer at thirty would be able to, or should have to anticipate what the writer at fifty would say.

SLS: It’s interesting. You said the word “persona.” Billy Collins called it the same thing. He called it “a voice that is yours,” and I feel like sometimes we go past that, we grow past that voice, and it no longer belongs to us. I look at some of my first poems and think to myself, I was so naive. You know?

PÓT: Of course you were! But what’s wrong with being naive? I mean, naive just means to be born. Everything’s small when it’s born. You know, you can’t say to the new ’be old.’ It has to go through time and disappointment and pain.

SLS: Before you discovered you had this voice, where did you find it? How did you attain it and then retain it?

PÓT: The Irish education system is filled with poetry. We were learning poems by heart in two languages, Irish and English, from the age of five to seventeen every week. So I always loved poetry. And this wasn’t a private school; this was just the ordinary education system, nothing fancy. Very few of those were children’s poems, and most of the Irish language ones—I shouldn’t say most, at least half the Irish language ones—were political poems about occupation by the British. So poetry always spoke to contemporary events and political events, and a number of those poets we learned about in history, also because they were executed by the British. So I always saw that poetry and citizenship and voice were all doing similar things. I wrote poems as a teenager, and those are the kind of poems that you’d expect a teenager to write. Who am I? What’s going on? All of those things. But I wrote a lot of poems, and I knew I liked it. I read some people in my late teens then, and it was difficult for me to continue to read them without stopping, reading their work and picking up some paper and pencil myself, and responding. Less so in terms of a direct response, but more so there was something about their capacity to write that set off some echoes in me.

SLS: Right, I admire that. So, which came first, theology or poetry, and which one brought you to the other?

PÓT: Oh, poetry, there’s no question. I’m only interested in theology in as much as it is a form of poetry. Obviously, theology has other concerns, but the parts of theology that interest me are particularly the ones that can be read poetically.

SLS: When other people are reading this interview, what should they know about reading poetry, and when it comes to finding their poet’s voice, how important are the external sources?

PÓT: Well, that’s something that’s impossible to control, isn’t it? I mean, you release a poem, and then it does what it wants to, and you know you can’t really accompany your poem with reader’s notes. Of course, you can give some diacritics and you can create a poem a little bit like a map for the voice by the way you use line breaks, or punctuation, or capitalization—there’s all kinds of ways you can do that to try to indicate. But you can’t control it.

SLS: If you were to control it, is it no longer your voice?

PÓT: I don’t know. I’m not that interested in controlling it totally beyond what’s capable. After that you’ve got to go: Oh my God, they picked up on that, or they read it this way. It’s not only reading what’s on the page. Every poem is seeking an audience, and therefore the conversation between the poem and whomever it is that’s reading, it creates some new experience—there’s the hermeneutics, there’s the interpretive faculties, there is the pause and the breath, but also there’s the way within which the emotional life of that individual and their artistic life is somehow in conversation with the emotion and articulation and language of the work. And so the poem becomes something different in the voice of someone else. And that’s part of the risk, part of the vulnerability, I think, of putting a poem out there. To write a poem is a different thing than to release a poem. They’re two very different things.

SLS: Yeah, I agree. You say when you write a poem, you do so for an audience. Can that audience be you? Can it be no one?

PÓT: Well, I do think that the poem’s primary audience is the writer themselves; that there’s something uncovering, there’s something being explored, there’s some shape that whatever thought it is you’re working on is looking to find some shape of language, some shape of both form as well as surprise. I think sometimes that to imagine the audience that a poem is directed towards requires some subtle thought, because you want to make sure to ask complicated thoughts about that audience because every audience is more than one thing.

SLS: Yeah, absolutely. You talk about language in one of your poems, in Kitchen Hymns, and in it, you say: “Though I’ve lost God, God is the only language I speak.” Tell me about that. What is that language to you?

PÓT: Well, I suppose that’s what the book is. That poem is in the shape of a kind of a punked-up villanelle in the sense of those lines, “Though I’ve lost God, God is the only language that I speak.” It repeats itself in various iterations throughout the poem. God is also called “my favorite emptiness” in another one of the poems in that section, and that for me is an indication of the necessity of negative capability; the necessity of the breath, the necessity of the presence of absence. Everything we know about physics is entirely reliant on emptiness that we don’t know how to speak about. You know, the emptiness in an atom, the emptiness even we call space. Of course, it’s not space, it’s filled with quantum and whatever the hell time is, if that’s there, if that exists, and gravity and thermodynamics. All of those things are in what we call space. And therefore, I suppose I think God in many ways is just a noise we make in order to talk about things that we don’t know how to talk about. But we still need to talk about them… Somebody dies, and we find ourselves adjusting the tense of the ways in which we speak about them. They used to rather than they do. We speak about their body, then, rather than him or her, whomever it is we’re talking about; I went to see his body… You know, her body is being brought to the grave site today. There’s a way within which we make this strange distinction between her and her body. And there’s an emptiness there that we don’t know what to do with, and I think many of the world’s philosophies and psychoanalytic writings, as well as religions, concern themselves with what we do in the gaps. And we can’t fill them; all we can do, perhaps, is to try to circumnavigate them.

SLS: To fill them is unnatural… Is emptiness the same as loss to you?

PÓT: Oh, no. No, because emptiness might always have been empty, whereas loss is the experience of something that you thought was filled and is now empty. It’s a different experience.

SLS: When it comes to voice, how does your poetic voice come through in your own poetry?

PÓT: For instance, in Kitchen Hymns, there’s the longest section [of the book] in the form of two voices in conversation with each other. The archetypal voices of Persephone, who is the Queen of Destruction in Greek mythology, who spends half the year in Hades and half the year above ground, and Jesus of Nazareth, who has just been condemned to Hades after he’s been crucified, and has now found his way out of Hades, strange and afraid and agnostic and horny. And she is familiar with this passage, and he is in shock of the first iteration. These two voices consumed me for years. When I got into writing them, I was like: what would they say? Of course, in a certain sense, they must be projections, a part of me. But the creative endeavor can’t just be explained by the idea to say: this is the internals of the mind working itself out. There’s also mystery. In some ways, she [Persephone] is nothing like me. I admire her so much. Maybe she’s who I want to be. And they have space between themselves, too. They’re profoundly attracted to each other on an intellectual and erotic level, and his [Jesus] need is something that drives him, and her need to leave is something that drives her. So I like both of those characters, and they’re both enormously flawed, and I don’t think the question is answered as to whether they are a good couple or not. They’re not trying to be a couple; they’re lovers for a short period of time.

SLS: What about Persephone—her disposition, and having to go to Hades and come back up—what about that intrigues you?

PÓT: She’s my favorite of the Pantheon of Greek gods. Persephone is a title, you know. She was called Kore previous to having been abducted by Hades, and she emerges from there with this new name, Persephone. So on the one hand, of course, she’s a victim of abduction, of rape, of torture of imprisonment—and at the same time, in these old texts about her, too, it’s clear that sometimes she’s much more comfortable in Hades than she is returning to the embrace of her mother when she comes back up every spring. And so [that’s] the anarchy of ancient literary forms in these mythologies, to say that something can at once be both about trying to survive violation, and on the other hand saying, look how far you’ll go to get away from your mother or your father, or whomever it is, or yourself. So I find her fascinating. When you think of her being the Queen of Destruction in hell, and then every year having to come up to see the spring emerge as she emerges. She is the spring.

SLS: Is it the Garden of Eden [the scene in which Jesus and Persephone share in Kitchen Hymns]?

PÓT: No. All across the Mediterranean, there’s supposed to be places where there’s a gate to Hades. And so this is just an imagination of where it is that she emerges. But I love your association of it being the Garden of Eden. There’s a play on that, of course. I mean, there’s a pretense of that, but I didn’t want to in any way stretch that. I just wanted it to be a little imaginary piece of salt that tastes on the tongue.

SLS: Yeah, that could be my Christian bias. Why is Jesus this adolescent, helpless, needy person?

PÓT: Well, it’s interesting you see him as helpless, adolescent, and needy. I see him as a bit lost, which is a different thing than adolescence. Lostness can occur in many decades of your life. There’s all kinds of ways in which [you can be lost], in your forties or your fifties or your sixties or seventies or eighties. I think he is at that stage of his life, trying to figure out what he means, and what it means to be there. I did a Master’s in the Gospel, so I have a deep interest in that literature, and I have a real interest in the character of Jesus of Nazareth as he’s portrayed in those literatures, as well as the Gnostic Gospels. He can be a very flat character in literature, because so often so much is ascribed to him. He knows he is God, he knows what’s going to happen, he knows what’s going to go on, he knows he’s going to rise, blah, blah, blah. It’s just like he’s like Superman. I think Superman is the singular most boring superhero there is in the world because he knows absolutely everything. He can do pretty much everything. I think that TV show, The Boys, is an interesting, diabolical take on the opposite of that. I find that entertaining, and I think the literature about Jesus of Nazareth is far too interesting to demean this historical character into something like a holy superman. So I suppose I wanted to explore: What does it mean to take seriously the literature at his execution, which was brutal, [when] he said: “Why did you forsake me?” And so often that’s viewed through a certain theological lens that says, oh, he had to do this because he’s taking on sin, and it’s viewed through all of these justifications which I don’t believe in. I don’t see him as adolescent. I see him as something that will happen to all of us multiple times, over many decades, throughout our lives.

SLS: What advice do you have for someone who is working on honing their own personal poetic voice?

PÓT: Keep writing. Be part of a group of people before you publish, where they can give you feedback and say, here’s what’s working, or I don’t get it, I’m confused. And also they might say, Could you do it differently? Could time be happening backward? Could you alter the speaker? You know, my persona just means mask, but a mask of truth, not a mask of hiding behind. One of the things I like about my persona is that it’s a living mask, you know. I look different now than I did twenty years ago; therefore, the personas that I adopt, even if they seem to have a certain consistency throughout a poetic life, they also need to change; they need to age, they need to have scars. And that is why it’s really worthwhile having an intimate audience of a group of people with whom you share your work, in order for people to push back a little bit and for you to be caught up in that. Even if you don’t amend your work, it is benefited by having received some pushback.

SLS: Kitchen Hymns… I kind of understand why you have hymns, but what about a kitchen is important to you?

PÓT: ’Kitchen hymns’ is a phrase from Ireland for the hymns that were sung at home in the kitchen, rather than the chapel, because they weren’t in Latin, they were in Irish. And so, in a way, it’s a way of thinking of the things that concern our relationship with religion, and all that religion can imply; that don’t find their home in the places of religion, but find their home in the places of domesticity.

SLS: In the poem “Confessions,” what does the line “but I saw his face” mean, and what kind of revelation occurs?

PÓT: You know, it’s interesting to think about. That’s a poem in the persona of Mother Brendan. She’s another major character in Kitchen Hymns. She’s kind of a self-appointed, self-ordained anarchist, a priest of the earth, and of nothing. I like Mother Brandon a lot, but there’s something about, I suppose, what it [the poem] is trying to explore. She has some offense that her son has been Googling about what to do in a breakdown, an offense that comes from a sense of having failed, and that she’s in a moment of feeling angry, and [asking]: What could have happened? Why didn’t you come to me? There’s something about a moment where she’s able to change her point of view when, [in] the moment of seeing his face, she realizes there’s something more important to say here, which is…did you find something that helped?

SLS: I was really interested in the narrative of Kitchen Hymns. You start off in the real tangible world and then you slip into the dialogue between Persephone and Jesus, and then you come back into reality in a very pleasing way… It’s almost like you are Persephone.

PÓT: Yeah.

SLS: Tell me about that, because you mentioned you were particularly interested in narrative.

PÓT: Yeah, I mean, I want that section about Jesus and Persephone to work by itself as a sequence. But even in that sequence, there’s an extra one in the final part that isn’t in the sequence where they meet many years later. And I want to feel like we’re eavesdroppers on the story of their life, and we only know a bit. I know a bit more because I see all the other poems that didn’t make it in. And that is what life is like, you know. I wanted the themes of the book, whether in Mother Brendan’s voice, or in Jesus and Persephone, or those “Do you believe in God” hymns, or the many poems about birds, or the many poems about that reference, the hair—I wanted all of them to be distinct, but somehow, by the end, to feel like they’re in some kind of chorus with each other, a chorus of voices, to use your motif for this conversation. But also a chorus that holds together, and musical notes and conceptual ideas that create some kind of chord in and of itself.

SLS: Are you a very sentimental person?

PÓT: Oh, God Almighty, yeah, yeah. Right at this moment, Sam, all of my friends are in a chorus of humanity, saying: Fuck, yes.

SLS: I am, too, but I don’t understand how other people can’t be.

PÓT: Yeah, well, I have various friends who are like, well, ‘I threw it out,’ or whatever… whatever the thing is. And I’m like: What? Why isn’t it on your wall?

SLS: I had a girlfriend who gave me notes that I cherished, and when we broke up they hurt me so much to have, so I tried to give them back.

PÓT: Oh!

SLS: And she said, ‘I don’t want them. Do what you want with them, burn them!’ And I thought, No! Okay, fine. I’ll keep them.

PÓT: Yeah, I mean giving them back is a complicated thing because that implies that you’re trying to give back everything that the two of you were, or maybe something else. That’s where ritual comes in, too. Burning could be a powerful thing, you know.

SLS: Well, I still have them… That’s really it. Thank you for your time.

PÓT: My pleasure. Thanks for asking.

SLS: Yeah, I will be always listening.

PÓT: That’s kind. Enjoy the rest of the evening in the Republic of Florida. All the best.

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Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose: Kitchen Hymns, Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love, Feed the Beast, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community, In the Shelter, Sorry for your Troubles, and Readings from the Books of Exile. Ó Tuama is also the host of the popular podcast Poetry Unbound, which immerses the listener into one poem every week, and the author of the collection, Poetry Unbound, an expansion on the podcast that offers reflections on fifty powerful poems. He splits his time between Ireland and NYC.