Fifteen years ago, I went on an evening course in creative writing Lucan run by the writer Stuart Lane. I wanted to write fiction. He led us, not always gently, into the unchartered territory of character creation, plays and poetry. I wrote a sonnet for the class and… I haven’t looked back. But if I’d known 15 years ago that it would take 15 years to get my first full length collection published, I’m not sure what I would have thought.
Lots of experienced writers say they cringe when they revisit their first book, or even disown it. That made me very slow to put my hand up and say I had a full collection of poetry and it was ready to be published. I’ve had lots of the poems published in Irish and British journals as well as a couple in America and Germany. I’ve won competitions and was nominated for the Forward Prize for a single poem as well as for the Hennessy New Irish Writing award so even I had to believe that it was high time to find a publisher.
I was very lucky to link up with Doire Press. They’re based in Galway, John Walsh and Lisa Frank. They have an astute eye and produce lovely books. In 2013, the collection Accurate Measurements by Adam White was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, which really put them on the map. They put out a call for submissions of ten poems and I tweeted a question whether they would prefer a theme of love, death or science. They asked for science so I gathered some of my science-y poems and sent them in. I’ve a physics background so science creeps in to quite a few poems. They asked for a full manuscript and said yes.
I run the Poetry Divas, a collective of women poets, Tríona Walsh, Barbara Smith and Maeve O’Sullivan. We read our poetry at events and festival and love to blur the wobbly boundary between page and stage, sometimes bringing other guest poets to read along side. We are well published but strongly believe that poems are meant to be heard as well as read. We alternate and work off each other, so I’ll read the poem set in a coffee shop and someone else will have a poem with cake as clothes. And then someone else will have a poem about a coat or a baby clothes and so on. It’s infectious how each poem can chime into the next.
The most recent poem in the collection, Unintentional Installation, was written when I was in Dingle last year with the Poetry Divas. We had a gig at Feile na Bealtaine. We went for a walk in the rain to an Art Exhibition in the Monsignor’s garden and there was this wheelbarrow… so I wrote this riff on the William Carlos Williams poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
In the collection, the oldest poem is from 2000, my first published poem from Poetry Ireland review. It’s about changing the toilet roll, among other things, and it has been used as an example in creative writing workshops that you can write a poem about anything!
I have had some fiction and non-fiction published and broadcast on RTE Radio. I also had a short play performed by Red Kettle theatre at the Waterford Royal Theatre. But in the last few years, 95% of my writing has been poetry.
Partly I think because it’s the poetry muscle I am exercising, so that’s how my brain is working but partly because I went back to working outside the home full time around then and found poetry easier to fit into the spaces between working and family life. I write on the train commuting in and out of Dublin and in the evening and at weekends, I rewrite. Just call me the laureate of Irish Rail!
I have a physics background and my fascination for science in general leaks into some of my poems. I have poems on fruitflies in cancer research, breast cancer, quantum tunnelling, Schroedinger’s cat and various chemical elements. Recently I was the first poet-in-residence at the Dublin Science Hack Day which was a fruitful and inspirational collaboration. I love such cross-discipline events. I’d love to do more.
Gerard Smyth launched The Space Between in the Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square on 23rd November 2015, I hope to be teaching some workshops at various places around Ireland in the next few months. More details when I have them here. You can buy the book directly from Doire Press here with free P&P worldwide, an ideal Christmas present! I hope to get it in to some independent bookstores too.
(c) Kate Dempsey
About The Space Between
From the kitchen table to the Periodic Table, from dancing cows to drunken poets, Kate Dempsey puts our loves and lies under a powerful microscope.
— Iggy McGovern
