Are You with Me?

Poet Stephen Sexton speaks with host Seán Hewitt about the need for mystery, the exoticism of American English, and making meaning with the reader. Stephen reads his poem “The Capital of Heaven” and Oni Buchanan’s poem “The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia.”

Episode Transcript

Seán Hewitt (00:02):
The Glimpse.

Stephen Sexton (00:06):
So there are certain formal ideas that are
comfortable to me. There's acertain length of line that I tend
to like. There's a certainmusicality that I'm always going to
be drawn to, but in most cases, Idon't want to know where I'm going.

Seán Hewitt (00:20):
Welcome to The Glimpse. I'm your host, Seán
Hewitt. Stephen Sexton likes acertain amount of mystery. He's the
author of two books of poems,including, If All the World and
Love Were Young, winner of theForward Prize for Best Collection.
In 2020, he was awarded the E.M.Forster Award and the Rooney Prize
for Irish Literature. He teaches atthe Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's

(00:40):
University Belfast. Stephen Sextonis our guest today on The Glimpse.
Whether he is melding elegy withthe world of Super Mario or staging
an imagined conversation betweenW.B. Yeats and the singer of the
Smashing Pumpkins, Stephen Sexton'spoem set up a dance of the

(01:02):
intellect, a real humanity and aplayful, inquisitive sense of form.
In Stephen's work, there is alwaysan element of surprise, of joy and
language, of generous humanity, andthe underlying links of ideas are
fused or allowed to spark off andillumine one another. I love the
sense that we might never quiteknow where a poem is going until we

(01:24):
get there. And in Stephen's case,each of his poems feels like an
event in thinking. Stephen Sexton,welcome to The Glimpse. It's great
to have you here.

Stephen Sexton (01:34):
Thank you, Seán. My pleasure entirely.

Seán Hewitt (01:36):
Where are you speaking to us from?

Stephen Sexton (01:39):
I'm speaking to you from Derry in the northwest of
Ireland, from a very newlyrefurbished, let's say, attic room,
which has all my books finallytogether again in one place.

Seán Hewitt (01:52):
They're all reunited

Stephen Sexton (01:53):
Finally.

Seán Hewitt (01:54):
Just before we pressed record, Stephen was talking me
through a beautiful set of bookshelves behind him, and they are
painted in what we have nowidentified as "Eating Room Red,"
and it's a lovely color, and can Ihear a dog barking?

Stephen Sexton (02:10):
If you hear a dog barking, it's a dog that's about to
leave this building. I hadn'trealized that she hadn't already
left this building, but any momentnow,

Seán Hewitt (02:19):
And how is she doing? I know you've recently got a new
puppy, right? In the last year orso?

Stephen Sexton (02:25):
Oh, she's very strong and spirited, let's say

Seán Hewitt (02:29):
That's strong willed.
So I would love to begin by asking you to read your

Stephen Sexton (02:30):
Very much so.
poem. It's a new one of yours, onethat I hadn't read in either of
your collections. I wondered if youcould identify in it— you know,
before you read it— anything thatmight be changing in your own work,
or how it feels to have new poemsthat aren't collected and kind of

(02:55):
be embarking on that process again.
Thanks for asking. I mean, I guess to some extent, I'm
always aware that I want to bemaking new things. And that's not
simply the act of writing a poem.It's a shift in thinking or a
formal shift, maybe, although insome cases they might be the same
thing. I mean, what this is doing,in my opinion, is going to a

(03:20):
slightly different kind ofphilosophical tone or mood that
ordinarily I'd be inclined toavoid.
I like stuff. I love being in theworld. I love thinking, not too
much. But for some reason oranother, I find myself going
slightly towards the spiritual,let's say —but maybe more
specifically, Christian. I mean,I'm not a Christian person; I guess

(03:43):
was brought up in that way, in theway that many of us in Ireland,
Northern Ireland are. But recently,it's just thinking about those
systems, thinking about thosepatterns of thought, and wondering
what impact any of that has had onhow I use language. Given,
especially that's probably one ofthe first examples of heightened or
metaphorical language I probablyencountered. So coming back to that

(04:06):
kind of thinking is happening.

Seán Hewitt (04:08):
Yeah, I think for a lot of people, religious language
is kind of a first introduction topoetry, even in primary school.
Just reciting prayers or hearinghymns and all of those things kind
of forms a bedrock, sometimes, ofthe way we encounter and think
about language. Can you notice anydifference in the way that language

(04:31):
kind of inflects the way that youthink in a poem or the way a poem
sounds? Or are you at the point yetwhere you can kind of articulate
what's going on?

Stephen Sexton (04:43):
I hope I'm not, because I really don't want to know
most of the time. I know it's kindof a commonplace idea, but there is
a certain amount of mystery that Ineed. You know, I need that
negative capability. I need "goinginto nothing." I need the road
towards nothing, of course and it'sfairly tangible, and I know what it
feels like, and I know how to walkalong it. So there are certain

(05:05):
formal ideas that are comfortableto me. There's a certain length of
line that I tend to like. There's acertain musicality that I'm always
going to be drawn to. But in mostcases, I don't want to know where
I'm going. And I think one of thethings that this poem does is flags
that very early on. I mean, at hevery start of this poem: perhaps an

(05:25):
apology for its quite large title.I mean, the poem tries to say,
like, "I don't know, I don't knowwhere this is going, but kind of
come, come with me, reader, ifyou're courteous enough to be
there, and let's see where we'regoing."

Seán Hewitt (05:38):
Yeah, it's one of the things I love most about this poem,
and I want to talk to you aboutthat. Would you? Would you read it
for us?

Stephen Sexton (05:45):
The Capital of Heaven. The capital of heaven is
the living. I don't know what Imean by that yet, but it has less
to do with the trace of gold eachperson contains— a thought is
heavier— and more with a momenttoday under the great canopy of oak

(06:08):
trees. In the park where it isalways summer, a sister was
teaching her brother to hold asegment of clementine up to the
sun, so the light could find theseed with the future in it, which
he could toss over his shoulderlike salt at misfortune. So much of

(06:31):
everything is beyond intention; somuch of sacrifice is pleasure. If
it must be inevitable, let there belifetimes and lifetimes before
orange trees grow wild here in thesun-scorched grass. I don't mean

(06:52):
it's paved with bones, but I do. Iwant to say it again to make it

mean something different (06:59):
the capital of heaven is the living.

Seán Hewitt (07:06):
Thank you very much. I wanted to start off by asking about
that repetition, kind of bookendingthe poem with the same idea or the
same line and making it meansomething different in context or
in intonation, and I wonder whereyou arrived at this idea of

(07:28):
repeating, and where you sit on theidea of repeating necessarily
meaning changing?

Stephen Sexton (07:35):
No, thanks for asking. I mean, it's an interesting
thing to me that this poem endswhere it does, because I'm often
suspicious of a poem that thatfolds in on itself at the end, that
it seems to promise the trajectory,it seems to fairly earnestly want
to go somewhere, and then it thenit folds back again. So usually I'm

(07:56):
resistant to that, that kind of anidea. And each time I repeat that
phrase, which I think is quite abig title, "The Capital of Heaven
is the Living"— that's a, you know,it's a big way to start a poem, one
that I'm not necessarily sure of insome ways —but what immediately
follows that first instance ofthat, is this kind of apology,
like, you know, "I don't, I don'tknow where I'm going either."
And what happens at the end of thepoem is this similar kind of voice:

(08:20):
"Yeah, I want to do this. I'm goingto do this." So I think there's a
shyness about that repetition. Imean, really, one of the things
we're doing with repetition istaking up someone's life. These
lines are a second, a second and ahalf, two seconds of a real
person's real life. So in the sensethat the phrase might be the same,
absolutely; I mean the context forone thing is massively different

(08:43):
from one period of 30 seconds toanother. So while, I guess, the
sense of music that comes withrepetition, I like the sense that
time is being marked betweenrepetition. I'm hyper-aware, I
guess, of the entire context thatthe shifts between those two moments.

Seán Hewitt (08:59):
Right? Yeah, because even if you repeat an idea, you're
drawing attention to the gap oftime between the first instance of
that line and the second. And,inevitably, something has changed.
Even if it was just a gap of emptytime, the reader has changed or
something about the repetitionmarks a place and time, and time

(09:24):
moving forward. And a lot of thispoem seems to me to be about the
future and time moving forward,and, perhaps in some ways, about
the precarity of the future. Iwonder, is that sense of futurity
something new to emerge in yourwork? Or is it a more persistent
concern for you now; you know, doideas of spirituality inevitably

(09:48):
point you into futures?

Stephen Sexton (09:51):
I think they do. I mean, I mean, I've long been into
the future. It's been an interestof mine even since I was very
young. I mean, what happens in thispoem that hasn't happened,
generally speaking, across my workso far —and it's not because I am
not extremely concerned about thewell-being of our planet, of the

(10:12):
crises that we're all facing, insome ways —but, yeah, I mean this
is the first instance, probably,that I can think of that something
like an ecological concern has comethrough, and it's not a coincidence
that it's coupled with a sense offuturity.
What this poem sort of hinges on,in some ways, is, you know, seeing
a child accidentally plant thetree, you know, by not wanting to

(10:34):
eat a bit, the bit of orange thathas a seed in it. You know, they
might accidentally plant an orangetree, but that orange tree is not
going to grow here,

Seán Hewitt (10:40):
Right.

Stephen Sexton (10:41):
But one day it might. We're in this kind of
chaotic future at that moment.

Seán Hewitt (10:45):
Yeah, and it brings back to the idea the line in your
poem, "so much of everything isbeyond intention." There is a sense
of indeterminacy and so many movingparts in the ways that futures are
made, either by chance or accidentor on purpose. That line, "the
capital of heaven is the living" issomething that might have arrived

(11:10):
and caused a question for you. Butis that how it happened? How did
the poem come about?

Stephen Sexton (11:16):
I can't remember for sure, but what I imagine
happened, as far as I can remember,is that that line must have been
accompanied by this experience,which, you know, not that it
matters, is a fairly true thing. Imean, I was walking around the park
and saw some kid refusing to eathis little segment of orange,
mostly because he didn't want tohave to negotiate a seed. But I

(11:38):
know that I wrote this poem, one ofthose ones that comes very quickly,
in like 20 minutes while, you know,boiling water or something like that.
But I think you're right too, topoint out the kind of question,
maybe, of that first line, becauseit's a big statement that, you
know, if you're going to make it,you have to try and qualify this.
And I suppose what's started tohappen when I think about —again,

(12:01):
maybe not spirituality, butsomething closer to the Christian
experience that I've been aware of,or some of that— is this sense of
what this afterlife is, of thinkingof something like heaven, as well,
as a kind of capitalist system, insome ways. But it's, you know,

(12:21):
it's increasingly baffled me, whichis, "Why should the streets of
heaven be paved with gold? Like,where do you get that gold from?" I
mean, I know it's been perfectlywell talked about, but I guess this
sense that, you know, as a concept,the afterlife works with a certain
kind of scarcity. It has asupply-and- demand model in some
ways. Where is it peopled? Where isit resourced? It's the living, and

(12:46):
I think it takes the poem, then, totry and work through what that
thought is and to try andrationalize what ... I mean in
some ways, it's kind of aprovocative opening line, but, I
mean, one of those odd moments of20 minutes' work where you look up
and something's there.

Seán Hewitt (13:03):
And it's done, and there's a poem, the page is
printed. I wondered about the—I'mnot sure "addressee" is the right
word of this poem—but the source ofpower that might allow these things
to be possible is in this poem. Doyou imagine an addressee? Is it the
reader?

Stephen Sexton (13:24):
It's a good question. I suppose when I think of
an addressee, I do, I think, Ithink of something slightly more
dramatic. I mean, if there's thisrisk of an inevitability, if I may
say it, I'm I'm talking to whoeverwill listen, is one thing, but also
I'm talking to the people I knowand like and love, you know,

(13:44):
talking to my friends. So I feel asthough there aren't enough poems
that people write to their friends.And while it's no one in
particular, there is this sense of,"Yeah, I want to say this."

Seán Hewitt (13:53):
Do you think that's a kind of growing sense, though, as
you have written more poems, orperhaps, you know, have a firmer
bedrock in in your own poems, thatyou you feel, know sort of worth in
taking a risk. Or, "you know what?I'm just gonna say it like I want

Stephen Sexton (14:14):
I'm aware of the risk, certainly, as I've suggested,
to say."
some instances where the speaker ofthis poem quite shy about the
things they're saying. They keepkind of undercutting themselves in
some ways. But I find it, I find iteasier to be plain in some ways. I
mean, I'm still kind of looking— asmany of us are, I think— for that
desirable, lucid, clean lyric sortof voice, which is technically not

(14:39):
something most people can do tostart with, and it may be the case
that one never actually gets there.But I'm interested in this kind of
plain voice that can say hopefullynot too unreasonable things, and to
offer something at least in someway interesting or compelling or

Seán Hewitt (14:57):
Yeah, well, I mean, this poem certainly does that. You
thoughtful.
have chosen a very interestingsecond poem. Before we get to it,
I just want to talk to you a littlebit about American poetry. It seems
that you know, you mention Americanpoets relatively often in in

(15:17):
relation to your own work. And whydo you think you kind of gravitate
towards the poets that you do?Because they don't seem to me that
they would be poets that maybewould be handed out to you at
university or that you'd find soeasily in a library.

Stephen Sexton (15:34):
I think on some level, it's it's an interest in the
language that I know and like best,which is English, and it's an
English that is just differentenough. I mean, the fact that I
live in Northern Ireland, and have,means that, you know, Ireland and
the United Kingdom, they are veryfamiliar Englishes to me. I mean,

(15:57):
the English of Britain is not thatinteresting or different, because
it's basically my English too. Sothere's, there's something about
the American English— and Americanpoetry more generally— but there's
something about that English on thefirst instance that feels kind of
foreign and feels exotic and feelsdifferent. Yeah, so that's always a

(16:18):
very interesting thing to me, and Ifind myself looking in that
direction, well, because there's,there's a huge amount of it,
there's a huge amount of incrediblyinteresting writing, but has always
been the case, and I do find myselfhunting it in some ways. I mean, I
kind of love the thrill of findinga collection I haven't found before
in a bookshop. But I'm always, I'malways looking, I guess, for, for

(16:40):
this kind of thrilling example ofpoetry that seems to chime with me
and with my intellect and with myinstincts.

Seán Hewitt (16:45):
Yeah, it's amazing. The disconnect sometimes that we
have with the U.S. poetry world,the amount of big, influential
American poets that there are thatwe don't seem to get much access
to. I'm fascinated by the way thatyou hunt down poets. You know, do

(17:07):
you read a lot online? Do yousubscribe to U.S. magazines? How do
you go about finding them?

Stephen Sexton (17:15):
I did used to subscribe to to a couple, Poetry
magazine being the main one, butlargely through recommendations, I
guess. I mean, it's one of thegreat advantages of having a job
like I do, which is teachingcreative writing. You have
colleagues and students andvisitors and all kinds of people
who are saying, "Hey, did you readthis?" Or "Did you see this?" And

(17:36):
you know, it's a great pleasure, Ithink, to be able to do that for
other people, especially forstudents. I mean, to kind of shock
them into something, shock themwith something you love, is a is a
really nice privilege to have.

Seán Hewitt (17:47):
Yeah, well, there's no better thing for a writer than to
be shocked out of, or shocked inrecognition of of some amazing
thing that you kind of feel thatyou should have known about all
along. We're going to take a quickbreak, but afterwards, you're going
to introduce me to another U.S.poet, I think,

Stephen Sexton (18:08):
Yes,

Seán Hewitt (18:09):
Who I hadn't heard of before. And this one's at least
nominally about a yak. So thankyou. We'll take a little break.

Cathy & Peter Halstead (18:29):
We hope you're enjoying this second season
of The Glimpse. It's just one smallpart of the Adrian Brinkerhoff
Poetry Foundation. We're thefounders Peter and Cathy Halstead.
Our goal is to make great poetrymore accessible to everyone, and we

do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film (18:46):
undefined
series, this podcast, and ourwebsite, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We
hope these works will lure you intoa parallel universe, the way a
Möbius strip brings you intoanother dimension without leaving

(19:07):
the page you're on. Thank you somuch for listening.

Seán Hewitt (19:12):
Stephen Sexton, welcome back to The Glimpse. So,
before the break, you were tellingus about how you go about finding
American poets and what they meanto you in your work. And you have
chosen here a poem by the poet OniBuchanan, and it's called "The Only
Yak in Batesville, Virginia." Canyou tell us a little bit about how

(19:36):
you found it, or when you found it,and why you've chosen it?

Stephen Sexton (19:39):
I can. So I came across this poem, I think, about 10
years ago, at this point, in ananthology called Legitimate
Dangers, which is a big, hefty bookof American poetry. It was in a
sort of Fulbright class. We had aFulbright Scholar taking a creative
writing class, and this was one ofthe poems in that. We're going to

(20:00):
talk about this poem, and I'm veryexcited to do so. I mean, this is
one of the ones that I was talkingabout that I love sharing with
people. But I want to also offerthe disclaimer that I don't really
know what's happening in this poem.That has not in any way diminished
how much I love it, but every timeI read it, it's really one of those
rare things that I get pretty muchthe same feeling now as I, as I did

(20:23):
the first time I read it. You know,it activates something in me that
many things don't, and very specialthings do, which is, "I know what
this feels like. I'm not sure Iknow what it means," And that's a
really important feeling for me.I'm much more of the senses than I
am of the intellect.

Seán Hewitt (20:40):
Would you read it for us?

Stephen Sexton (20:43):
The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia
At first I spent hours gazing atthe black and white horse in the
farthest pasture. He was so faraway, so tiny between the fence
slats, and even then I knew all hecared about was his mane and that
his tail was properly braided. Henever so much as galloped in my

(21:08):
direction. Even the flies thatedged his beautiful eyes never flew
into my wool or landed on my nose.The love affair was over before it
began. I started to dream of a drycistern in the middle of the forest
and dry leaves where the other yakscould play until leaves stuck out

(21:30):
of their hair and they looked likeshrubs. In my dream they lived in
the cistern and each morning lookedout with periscopes before
scrambling up the concrete walls tosearch in the forest for sprouting
trees. In winter I realized thatfor the other yaks it was fall all
year round, and that it had to befall, because otherwise they

(21:54):
couldn't roll in the leaves to looklike shrubs, and there had to be a
cistern because otherwise theycouldn't huddle in the pitch black,
and I knew then that I hadforgotten what a yak looks like,
though I am a yak, and I knew thenthat I had been away for a long

Seán Hewitt (22:12):
It's such a good poem, and in some way very difficult to
time.
articulate what's so good about it,because it's hard to pinpoint
exactly what I think it's about. Iknow you said you hadn't settled on
a firm idea of it, but what weresome of the ideas that have gone

(22:33):
through your head about it?

Stephen Sexton (22:34):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's maybe a couple that
lend themselves more obviously thanothers. I mean, one is a kind of
romantic relationship that, anunrequited one, is fairly you know,
obviously what's happening in thefirst stanza between a yak and a
horse. I don't know if yaks andhorses frequently have affection

(22:55):
for each other. I don't know, butthat seems to be what's happening
in the first instance. And then,and then what follows, I mean, my
instinct is, you know, is to thinkof something that also means a lot
to me is, you know, the MarianneMoore phrase about "imaginary
gardens with real toads in them,"which I guess take to mean that
sense that you carry that realfeeling, that real punctum, or

(23:18):
whatever it is, that kind of movesyou, and you put it somewhere else
into an imaginary space.
So I'm inclined to think, think ofthis as a fairly confessional poem,
let's say, where the speaker or theauthor maybe, has decided to
articulate this, this sort of loveaffair through a yak and a horse.
And that's kind of unkind, becauseit says quite frequently that this

(23:39):
is about a yak, and I think it doesthe poem a disservice to demand
that we treat it for its humanconcerns. So I think there's that,
but really, where I think what isso strange about the poem is we
have a fairly concrete premise. Youknow, it's fairly well set. The
images are very clear, and, youknow, kind of there's even a little
close up. I think it feels filmicin some ways to me. But so much of

(24:03):
the poem is a kind of dreamsequence, a kind of dream logic. I
mean, it starts, you know, about athird in, and pretty much carries
most of the way through. And Idon't know what is happening. I
know what it feels like.

Seán Hewitt (24:15):
Yeah, the dream sequence is a very strange one, in
a way. I found myself for a whilegoogling cisterns and various
images of cisterns, and they'rereally beautiful, kind of Moroccan
cisterns, and there are morefunctional concrete systems. But

(24:36):
all the while, in my head, Isuppose, I was wondering, "Why are
they in a cistern?" You know,"Where does this aspect of of the
dream come from?" And I suppose insome ways, it might be a poem that
seems to me about a desire toprovoke a search for meaning in
symbols or ideas, because thesethings become important to the

(25:01):
poem, and so we try to define somesort of logical importance for them
in a way that we might try and reada dream, you know, we might try and
put logic on it. And often, youknow, when dreams are recounted,
they're relatively boring to peoplethat weren't inside the dream or
that, or they seem kind ofillogical and pointless sometimes.

(25:25):
But in this poem there's, there'sdefinitely a sense of resonance
that it might be gesturing towardssomething. To me, it seemed to be a
poem about community or affinitywith people who you may feel you
have left behind and notrecognizing yourself anymore, that

(25:46):
I perhaps read it in a in a moremelancholy way, that it seems to be
not being able to recognizeyourself, even if you could see
yourself. There's something quiteunsettling about forgetting what
one looks like.

Stephen Sexton (26:06):
I feel that alienation completely in it. I
mean, that seems in some ways tobe, maybe not the ultimate, but one
of, one of the ultimate kinds of ofalienation is, you know, to be not
the horse certainly, but now nolonger the yak either. I mean, the
other way of reading it as apossibility, I think, is one about
emigration or immigration is one. Imean, I don't think we would

(26:29):
consider the yak to be native toBatesville, Virginia, but there's
something quite specific about thepoem naming this place. There's a
sense of forgetting what one is. Imean, this is a creature. Suddenly
at the end of this poem, it'sbetween two, at least two sets of
identities. And there's somethingabout this, this kind of act of
longing that has in some ways beenresponsible for this disintegration

(26:50):
of self, maybe? That the objecthas been sought so long that the
subject has been effaced in someway by that longing. Which I think
is quite a human feeling and Ithink most of us could go some of
the way to understanding thatfeeling.

Seán Hewitt (27:04):
There's something about the way time moves in this
poem that's interesting as well.You know, we begin "At first I
spent hours gazing at the black andwhite horse in the farthest
pasture." And then we start thisdream, which moves through the
seasons "In winter, I realized forthe other yaks it was fall all year
round, and it had to be fall." Andthen the dream takes us so far that

(27:30):
by the time we get to the end,either we've been inside the dream
for a very long time, or the yakhas been away for so long that that
everything is distant from them. Doyou know what I mean? It seems to
be kind of a weird braiding of timehappening in this poem.

Stephen Sexton (27:50):
No, I agree.

Seán Hewitt (27:50):
Yeah. So, so much so that when we get to the end, we
almost feel like we've been awayfor a very long time.

Stephen Sexton (27:59):
Certainly from the initial premise, maybe, of the
poem, it feels, yeah, that you wereoffered. You might think, as a
reader, a fairly straightforwardkind of poem, but it does not go
there. "In winter I realized thatfor the other yaks, it was fall all
year round, and that it had to befall." That's the bit where my my
senses can't really follow it, butI start to feel what's happening,

(28:22):
and certainly the reputationstowards the end of "yak" —I mean,
one of the great pleasures ofteaching this poem in a class, or
having students look at it, is thatyou automatically gain the world
record in 30 minutes for the numberof times the word yak has been
mentioned. And we might be goingthere ourselves at this moment.

Seán Hewitt (28:41):
I wonder, you know we were speaking before, with regards
to you and your poetry, abouthopefully not knowing where you're
going. Have you found anythingabout this poem seeping through
into your own work?

Stephen Sexton (28:54):
Almost certainly. I don't know if I can pinpoint it
necessarily, but I think there'ssomething about the manner. I mean,
there's, I mean, there's kind of astrange formal sense to this poem.
I mean, it's well managed in termsof lines and stanzas. I mean, it's
in, three eight-line stanzas. Sothere's, there is a logic: there's
a formal logic that's working here.I think there's a sense of how the

(29:15):
syntax works. It's this reallywonderful—I mean, I think— "The
love affair was over before itbegan," with this huge break in it,
you know, it's funny. I thinkthere's such a sense of voice
that's coming through, I can almostsee someone rolling their eyes, or
a speaker rolling their eyes. "Thelove affair was over before it
began."
So I think there's incrediblethings that are happening where the

(29:37):
lines turn that entice me in someways, and it's interesting, I
think, for many of us looking at apoem like this, especially with
training, or maybe an outsizedinfluence from British and Irish
poetry as it's maybe typicallyknown. Well these are kind of— I
don't know if you agree—but theysometimes seem like quite radical

(29:58):
line breaks and radical ideas. AndI mean, it's one of the things that
I want to avoid in my own work, isis getting too stuck to your fairly
traditional sense of how linesshould work. And this is just a
different kind of formal logic, youknow. It's its duty is to itself,
to following its own patterns. Andthat's kind of an inspirational

(30:19):
idea in some ways.

Seán Hewitt (30:20):
Yeah. And it kind of, you know, comes back to the idea of
being able to feel a sense oflanguage without necessarily
pinning language down to a strictmeaning, even even in the mind of
the poet, you know, to be able tosay "the capital of heaven is the
living," and have a sense of, ofall the things that that might mean

(30:42):
by the time you get to the end ofthe poem, but not to have nailed
down one specific version that,that kind of puts the poem in a
straight jacket. And I think thatthat sort of sense of how to
interact with knowing and unknowingwithin your own poem and to leave a
space for unknowing is somethingthat is common between this poem

(31:06):
here and the poem you read for usat the start.

Stephen Sexton (31:08):
I think in every instance of something that I'm
writing, I mean, part of theambition is that there is a
connection with someone else. Andone of the ways of doing that is,
first of all, making sure you leavea space for them. But I mean,
people might also suggest that, Imean a function, a basic function
of metaphor or of simile, is toprovoke the sense that that a
reader is involved in this. I mean,one of the things that simile or

(31:30):
metaphor does is it sort of says,like, "Do you believe me? Like, are
you with me? Like, do you buy thiscomparison?" And I think that very
basic gesture says, like, "I hopeyou're there. I want you to be
involved in making meaning out ofthis." So I'm always hyper
conscious of that in in the sensethat I want other people to be
involved. The risk, of course, isthat you leave a gap so big that it

(31:53):
is meaningless, and that's that'smaybe part of the, part of the
craft is leaving a space exactlythe right size for the reader.

Seán Hewitt (32:02):
Speaking of which, what are you working on at the
moment?

Stephen Sexton (32:05):
Well, I'm trying to, trying to write more poems is
the, is the short answer. The poemthat we looked at, I think, in some
ways, is kind of emblematic of mymy thinking recently, in some ways,
is yeah, is thinking of these kindof two concepts. But I'm dismayed,
I suppose, by any system that, thatsays that the end justifies the

(32:27):
means, or that it'll all be, it'llall be okay, whatever it costs, or
that we believe in one sense of thefuture and not others. And I
suppose I've been troubled by thatproblem in lots of ways, of the
sense of the end justifying themeans, which is, how you end up,
you know, walking streets pavedwith gold. I think you you should
ask how the gold got there. Seemslike a reasonable place to start

(32:50):
with.

Seán Hewitt (32:52):
Stephen Sexton, I cannot wait to read the new
collection when all of these poemscome to coalesce. And of course,
there's no rush with any of that.And we will happily sit in the
place of unknowing until, until weget there. Thank you very much for
for joining us on The Glimpse.

Stephen Sexton (33:11):
Thank you, Seán, my pleasure.

Seán Hewitt (33:18):
Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host, Seán Hewitt.
Stephen's poem, "The Capital ofHeaven" was first published in The
Stinging Fly and aired with hispermission. Oni Buchanan's poem,
"The Only Yak in Batesville,Virginia" was from What Animal
published in 2003 and aired withpermission from University of

(33:38):
Georgia Press. Coming up next week,poet Parker Hibbett talks about
their relationship to rhythm andpoetry, the lyric eye and the
impact of Joni Mitchell's artistic betrayal.
Make sure to subscribe to TheGlimpse wherever you get your
podcasts. You can also findepisodes on our website
brinkerhoffpoetry.org/podcast. We'dalso love to hear from you; drop us

(34:01):
an email at the [e-mail] The Glimpse
is a production of the AdrianBrinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I'm
your host, Seán Hewitt. Our SeniorProducer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat
Yore is our Technical Director andMixing Engineer. Editorial
Director Amanda Glassman is ourcurator and production coordinator.

(34:22):
Amy Holmes is the foundation'sExecutive Director, and our
co-founders are Cathy and PeterHalstead. Thanks for listening.