Are You with Me?

In 2020, he was awarded the E.M. Forster Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast. Stephen Sexton is our guest today on The Glimpse. Whether he is melding elegy with the world of Super Mario or staging an imagined conversation between W.B. Yeats and the singer of the Smashing Pumpkins, Stephen Sexton's poem set up a dance of the intellect, a real humanity and a playful, inquisitive sense of form.

In Stephen's work, there is always an element of surprise, of joy and language, of generous humanity, and the underlying links of ideas are fused or allowed to spark off and illumine one another. I love the sense that we might never quite know where a poem is going until we 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. Thank you, Seán. My pleasure entirely.

Seán Hewitt: Where are you speaking to us from? I'm speaking to you from Derry in the northwest of Ireland, from a very newly refurbished, let's say, attic room, which has all my books finally together again in one place. Seán Hewitt: They're all reunited Finally.

Seán Hewitt: Just before we pressed record, Stephen was talking me through a beautiful set of book shelves behind him, and they are painted in what we have now identified as "Eating Room Red," and it's a lovely color, and can I hear a dog barking? If you hear a dog barking, it's a dog that's about to leave this building. I hadn't realized that she hadn't already left this building, but any moment now, Seán Hewitt: And how is she doing? I know you've recently got a new

puppy, right? In the last year or so? Oh, she's very strong and spirited, let's say Seán Hewitt: That's strong willed. Seán Hewitt: So I would love to begin by asking you to read your Very much so. poem. It's a new one of yours, one that I hadn't read in either of

your collections. I wondered if you could identify in it— you know, before you read it— anything that might be changing in your own work, or how it feels to have new poems that aren't collected and kind of be embarking on that process again. Thanks for asking. I mean, I guess to some extent, I'm always aware that I want to be making 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 in some cases they might be the same

thing. I mean, what this is doing, in my opinion, is going to a slightly different kind of philosophical tone or mood that ordinarily I'd be inclined to avoid. I like stuff. I love being in the world. I love thinking, not too much. But for some reason or another, 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 was brought up in that way, in the way that many of us in Ireland,

Northern Ireland are. But recently, it's just thinking about those systems, thinking about those patterns of thought, and wondering what impact any of that has had on how I use language. Given, especially that's probably one of the first examples of heightened or metaphorical language I probably encountered. So coming back to that kind of thinking is happening. Seán Hewitt: Yeah, I think for a lot of people, religious language is kind of a first introduction to poetry, even in primary school.

Just reciting prayers or hearing hymns and all of those things kind of forms a bedrock, sometimes, of the way we encounter and think about language. Can you notice any difference in the way that language kind of inflects the way that you think in a poem or the way a poem sounds? Or are you at the point yet where you can kind of articulate what's going on? I hope I'm not, because I really don't want to know most of the time. I know it's kind of a commonplace idea, but there is

a certain amount of mystery that I need. You know, I need that negative capability. I need "going into nothing." I need the road towards nothing, of course and it's fairly tangible, and I know what it feels like, and I know how to walk along it. So there are certain formal ideas that are comfortable to me. There's a certain length of line that I tend to like. There's a certain musicality that I'm always going to be drawn to. But in most cases, I don't want to know where

I'm going. And I think one of the things that this poem does is flags that very early on. I mean, at he very start of this poem: perhaps an apology for its quite large title. I mean, the poem tries to say, like, "I don't know, I don't know where this is going, but kind of come, come with me, reader, if you're courteous enough to be there, and let's see where we're going." Seán Hewitt: Yeah, it's one of the things I love most about this poem,

and I want to talk to you about that. Would you? Would you read it for us? The Capital of Heaven. The capital of heaven is the living. I don't know what I mean by that yet, but it has less to do with the trace of gold each person contains— a thought is heavier— and more with a moment today under the great canopy of oak

trees. In the park where it is always summer, a sister was teaching her brother to hold a segment of clementine up to the sun, so the light could find the seed with the future in it, which he could toss over his shoulder like salt at misfortune. So much of everything is beyond intention; so much of sacrifice is pleasure. If it must be inevitable, let there be lifetimes and lifetimes before orange trees grow wild here in the sun-scorched grass. I don't mean

it's paved with bones, but I do. I want to say it again to make it mean something different: the capital of heaven is the living. Seán Hewitt: Thank you very much. I wanted to start off by asking about that repetition, kind of bookending the poem with the same idea or the same line and making it mean something different in context or in intonation, and I wonder where you arrived at this idea of repeating, and where you sit on the idea of repeating necessarily meaning changing?

No, thanks for asking. I mean, it's an interesting thing to me that this poem ends where it does, because I'm often suspicious of a poem that that folds 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 then it folds back again. So usually I'm

resistant to that, that kind of an idea. And each time I repeat that phrase, which I think is quite a big 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 in some ways —but what immediately follows that first instance of that, is this kind of apology, like, you know, "I don't, I don't know where I'm going either." And what happens at the end of the poem is this similar kind of voice:

"Yeah, I want to do this. I'm going to do this." So I think there's a shyness about that repetition. I mean, really, one of the things we're doing with repetition is taking up someone's life. These lines are a second, a second and a half, two seconds of a real person's real life. So in the sense that the phrase might be the same, absolutely; I mean the context for one thing is massively different

from one period of 30 seconds to another. So while, I guess, the sense of music that comes with repetition, I like the sense that time is being marked between repetition. I'm hyper-aware, I guess, of the entire context that the shifts between those two moments. Seán Hewitt: Right? Yeah, because even if you repeat an idea, you're drawing attention to the gap of time between the first instance of that line and the second. And, inevitably, something has changed.

Even if it was just a gap of empty time, the reader has changed or something about the repetition marks a place and time, and time moving forward. And a lot of this poem seems to me to be about the future and time moving forward, and, perhaps in some ways, about the precarity of the future. I wonder, is that sense of futurity something new to emerge in your work? Or is it a more persistent concern for you now; you know, do ideas of spirituality inevitably point you into futures?

I think they do. I mean, I mean, I've long been into the future. It's been an interest of mine even since I was very

young. I mean, what happens in this poem that hasn't happened, generally speaking, across my work so far —and it's not because I am not extremely concerned about the well-being of our planet, of the crises that we're all facing, in some ways —but, yeah, I mean this is the first instance, probably, that I can think of that something like an ecological concern has come through, and it's not a coincidence that it's coupled with a sense of futurity.

What this poem sort of hinges on, in some ways, is, you know, seeing a child accidentally plant the tree, you know, by not wanting to eat a bit, the bit of orange that has a seed in it. You know, they might accidentally plant an orange tree, but that orange tree is not going to grow here, Seán Hewitt: Right. But one day it might. We're in this kind of chaotic future at that moment. Seán Hewitt: Yeah, and it brings back to the idea the line in your

poem, "so much of everything is beyond intention." There is a sense of indeterminacy and so many moving parts in the ways that futures are made, either by chance or accident or on purpose. That line, "the capital of heaven is the living" is something that might have arrived and caused a question for you. But is that how it happened? How did the poem come about?

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. I mean, I was walking around the park and saw some kid refusing to eat his little segment of orange,

mostly because he didn't want to have to negotiate a seed. But I know that I wrote this poem, one of those 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, to point out the kind of question, maybe, of that first line, because it'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 to happen when I think about —again, maybe not spirituality, but something closer to the Christian experience that I've been aware of, or some of that— is this sense of what this afterlife is, of thinking of something like heaven, as well, as a kind of capitalist system, in some ways. But it's, you know, it's increasingly baffled me, which is, "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 perfectly well talked about, but I guess this sense that, you know, as a concept, the afterlife works with a certain kind of scarcity. It has a supply-and- demand model in some

ways. Where is it peopled? Where is it resourced? It's the living, and I think it takes the poem, then, to try and work through what that thought is and to try and rationalize what ... I mean in some ways, it's kind of a provocative opening line, but, I mean, one of those odd moments of 20 minutes' work where you look up and something's there. Seán Hewitt: And it's done, and there's a poem, the page is

printed. I wondered about the—I'm not sure "addressee" is the right word of this poem—but the source of power that might allow these things to be possible is in this poem. Do you imagine an addressee? Is it the reader? It's a good question. I suppose when I think of an addressee, I do, I think, I think of something slightly more

dramatic. I mean, if there's this risk of an inevitability, if I may say it, I'm I'm talking to whoever will listen, is one thing, but also I'm talking to the people I know and like and love, you know, talking to my friends. So I feel as though 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: Do you think that's a kind of growing sense, though, as you have written more poems, or perhaps, you know, have a firmer bedrock in in your own poems, that you you feel, know sort of worth in taking a risk. Or, "you know what? I'm just gonna say it like I want I'm aware of the risk, certainly, as I've suggested, to say." some instances where the speaker of this poem quite shy about the things they're saying. They keep kind of undercutting themselves in

some ways. But I find it, I find it easier to be plain in some ways. I mean, I'm still kind of looking— as many of us are, I think— for that desirable, lucid, clean lyric sort of voice, which is technically not something most people can do to start 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 hopefully not too unreasonable things, and to offer something at least in some way interesting or compelling or

Seán Hewitt: Yeah, well, I mean, this poem certainly does that. You thoughtful. have chosen a very interesting second poem. Before we get to it, I just want to talk to you a little bit about American poetry. It seems that you know, you mention American poets relatively often in in relation to your own work. And why do 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 maybe would be handed out to you at university or that you'd find so easily in a library. 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 different enough. I mean, the fact that I live in Northern Ireland, and have, means that, you know, Ireland and

the United Kingdom, they are very familiar Englishes to me. I mean, the English of Britain is not that interesting or different, because it's basically my English too. So there's, there's something about the American English— and American poetry more generally— but there's something about that English on the first instance that feels kind of

foreign and feels exotic and feels different. Yeah, so that's always a very interesting thing to me, and I find myself looking in that direction, well, because there's, there's a huge amount of it, there's a huge amount of incredibly interesting writing, but has always been the case, and I do find myself hunting it in some ways. I mean, I kind of love the thrill of finding a collection I haven't found before

in a bookshop. But I'm always, I'm always looking, I guess, for, for this kind of thrilling example of poetry that seems to chime with me and with my intellect and with my instincts. Seán Hewitt: 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 that we don't seem to get much access to. I'm fascinated by the way that you hunt down poets. You know, do

you read a lot online? Do you subscribe to U.S. magazines? How do you go about finding them? I did used to subscribe to to a couple, Poetry magazine being the main one, but largely through recommendations, I guess. I mean, it's one of the great advantages of having a job

like I do, which is teaching creative writing. You have colleagues and students and visitors and all kinds of people who are saying, "Hey, did you read this?" Or "Did you see this?" And you know, it's a great pleasure, I think, to be able to do that for other people, especially for students. I mean, to kind of shock them into something, shock them with something you love, is a is a really nice privilege to have.

Seán Hewitt: Yeah, well, there's no better thing for a writer than to be shocked out of, or shocked in recognition of of some amazing thing that you kind of feel that you should have known about all along. We're going to take a quick break, but afterwards, you're going to introduce me to another U.S. poet, I think, Yes, Seán Hewitt: Who I hadn't heard of before. And this one's at least nominally about a yak. So thank you. We'll take a little break.

Cathy & Peter Halstead: We hope you're enjoying this second season of The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We're the founders Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our goal is to make great poetry more accessible to everyone, and we do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film

series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thank you so much for listening. Seán Hewitt: Stephen Sexton, welcome back to The Glimpse. So, before the break, you were telling us about how you go about finding

American poets and what they mean to you in your work. And you have chosen here a poem by the poet Oni Buchanan, and it's called "The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia." Can you tell us a little bit about how you found it, or when you found it, and why you've chosen it? I can. So I came across this poem, I think, about 10 years ago, at this point, in an anthology called Legitimate Dangers, which is a big, hefty book of American poetry. It was in a

sort of Fulbright class. We had a Fulbright Scholar taking a creative writing class, and this was one of the poems in that. We're going to talk about this poem, and I'm very excited to do so. I mean, this is one of the ones that I was talking about that I love sharing with people. But I want to also offer the 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 time I read it, it's really one of those rare things that I get pretty much the same feeling now as I, as I did the first time I read it. You know, it activates something in me that many things don't, and very special things do, which is, "I know what

this feels like. I'm not sure I know 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: Would you read it for us? The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia At first I spent hours gazing at the black and white horse in the farthest pasture. He was so far away, so tiny between the fence slats, and even then I knew all he cared about was his mane and that his tail was properly braided. He never so much as galloped in my

direction. Even the flies that edged 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 dry cistern in the middle of the forest and dry leaves where the other yaks could play until leaves stuck out of their hair and they looked like shrubs. In my dream they lived in the cistern and each morning looked out with periscopes before scrambling up the concrete walls to search in the forest for sprouting

trees. In winter I realized that for the other yaks it was fall all year round, and that it had to be fall, because otherwise they couldn't roll in the leaves to look like shrubs, and there had to be a cistern because otherwise they couldn't huddle in the pitch black, and I knew then that I had forgotten what a yak looks like, though I am a yak, and I knew then that I had been away for a long Seán Hewitt: 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. I know you said you hadn't settled on a firm idea of it, but what were some of the ideas that have gone through your head about it? Yeah, I mean, I think there's maybe a couple that lend themselves more obviously than others. I mean, one is a kind of romantic relationship that, an unrequited one, is fairly you know, obviously what's happening in the first stanza between a yak and a

horse. I don't know if yaks and horses frequently have affection for each other. I don't know, but that 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 think of something that also means a lot to me is, you know, the Marianne Moore phrase about "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," which I guess take to mean that sense that you carry that real feeling, that real punctum, or whatever it is, that kind of moves you, and you put it somewhere else into an imaginary space.

So I'm inclined to think, think of this as a fairly confessional poem, let's say, where the speaker or the author maybe, has decided to articulate this, this sort of love affair through a yak and a horse. And that's kind of unkind, because it says quite frequently that this is about a yak, and I think it does the poem a disservice to demand that we treat it for its human concerns. So I think there's that, but really, where I think what is so strange about the poem is we

have a fairly concrete premise. You know, it's fairly well set. The images are very clear, and, you know, kind of there's even a little close up. I think it feels filmic in some ways to me. But so much of the poem is a kind of dream sequence, a kind of dream logic. I mean, it starts, you know, about a third in, and pretty much carries most of the way through. And I don't know what is happening. I know what it feels like. Seán Hewitt: Yeah, the dream sequence is a very strange one, in

a way. I found myself for a while googling cisterns and various images of cisterns, and they're really beautiful, kind of Moroccan

cisterns, and there are more functional concrete systems. But all the while, in my head, I suppose, I was wondering, "Why are they in a cistern?" You know, "Where does this aspect of of the dream come from?" And I suppose in some ways, it might be a poem that seems to me about a desire to provoke a search for meaning in symbols or ideas, because these things become important to the poem, and so we try to define some sort of logical importance for them

in a way that we might try and read a dream, you know, we might try and put logic on it. And often, you know, when dreams are recounted, they're relatively boring to people that weren't inside the dream or that, or they seem kind of illogical and pointless sometimes. But in this poem there's, there's definitely a sense of resonance

that it might be gesturing towards something. To me, it seemed to be a poem about community or affinity with people who you may feel you have left behind and not recognizing yourself anymore, that I perhaps read it in a in a more melancholy way, that it seems to be not being able to recognize yourself, even if you could see yourself. There's something quite unsettling about forgetting what one looks like.

I feel that alienation completely in it. I mean, that seems in some ways to be, maybe not the ultimate, but one of, one of the ultimate kinds of of alienation is, you know, to be not the horse certainly, but now no longer the yak either. I mean, the other way of reading it as a possibility, I think, is one about emigration or immigration is one. I mean, I don't think we would consider the yak to be native to Batesville, Virginia, but there's

something quite specific about the poem naming this place. There's a sense of forgetting what one is. I mean, this is a creature. Suddenly at the end of this poem, it's between two, at least two sets of identities. And there's something about this, this kind of act of longing that has in some ways been responsible for this disintegration of self, maybe? That the object has been sought so long that the

subject has been effaced in some way by that longing. Which I think is quite a human feeling and I think most of us could go some of the way to understanding that feeling. Seán Hewitt: 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 and white horse in the farthest pasture." And then we start this dream, which moves through the seasons "In winter, I realized for the other yaks it was fall all year

round, and it had to be fall." And then the dream takes us so far that by the time we get to the end, either we've been inside the dream for a very long time, or the yak has been away for so long that that everything is distant from them. Do you know what I mean? It seems to be kind of a weird braiding of time happening in this poem. No, I agree. Seán Hewitt: Yeah. So, so much so that when we get to the end, we almost feel like we've been away for a very long time.

Certainly from the initial premise, maybe, of the poem, it feels, yeah, that you were offered. You might think, as a reader, a fairly straightforward kind of poem, but it does not go there. "In winter I realized that for the other yaks, it was fall all

year round, and that it had to be fall." That's the bit where my my senses can't really follow it, but I start to feel what's happening, and certainly the reputations towards the end of "yak" —I mean, one of the great pleasures of teaching this poem in a class, or having students look at it, is that you automatically gain the world record in 30 minutes for the number of times the word yak has been mentioned. And we might be going there ourselves at this moment.

Seán Hewitt: I wonder, you know we were speaking before, with regards to you and your poetry, about hopefully not knowing where you're going. Have you found anything about this poem seeping through into your own work? Almost certainly. I don't know if I can pinpoint it necessarily, but I think there's something about the manner. I mean, there's, I mean, there's kind of a strange formal sense to this poem. I mean, it's well managed in terms of lines and stanzas. I mean, it's

in, three eight-line stanzas. So there's, there is a logic: there's a formal logic that's working here. I think there's a sense of how the syntax works. It's this really wonderful—I mean, I think— "The love affair was over before it began," with this huge break in it, you know, it's funny. I think there's such a sense of voice that's coming through, I can almost see someone rolling their eyes, or a speaker rolling their eyes. "The love affair was over before it began."

So I think there's incredible things that are happening where the lines turn that entice me in some ways, and it's interesting, I think, for many of us looking at a poem like this, especially with training, or maybe an outsized influence from British and Irish poetry as it's maybe typically known. Well these are kind of— I don't know if you agree—but they sometimes seem like quite radical

line breaks and radical ideas. And I mean, it's one of the things that I want to avoid in my own work, is is getting too stuck to your fairly traditional sense of how lines should work. And this is just a different kind of formal logic, you know. It's its duty is to itself, to following its own patterns. And that's kind of an inspirational idea in some ways.

Seán Hewitt: Yeah. And it kind of, you know, comes back to the idea of being able to feel a sense of language without necessarily pinning language down to a strict meaning, even even in the mind of the poet, you know, to be able to say "the capital of heaven is the living," and have a sense of, of all the things that that might mean by the time you get to the end of the poem, but not to have nailed down one specific version that, that kind of puts the poem in a

straight jacket. And I think that that sort of sense of how to interact with knowing and unknowing within your own poem and to leave a space for unknowing is something that is common between this poem here and the poem you read for us at the start. I think in every instance of something that I'm writing, I mean, part of the ambition is that there is a connection with someone else. And one of the ways of doing that is,

first of all, making sure you leave a space for them. But I mean, people might also suggest that, I mean a function, a basic function of metaphor or of simile, is to provoke the sense that that a reader is involved in this. I mean, one of the things that simile or metaphor does is it sort of says, like, "Do you believe me? Like, are you with me? Like, do you buy this comparison?" And I think that very basic gesture says, like, "I hope you're there. I want you to be

involved in making meaning out of this." So I'm always hyper conscious of that in in the sense that I want other people to be involved. The risk, of course, is that you leave a gap so big that it is meaningless, and that's that's maybe part of the, part of the craft is leaving a space exactly the right size for the reader. Seán Hewitt: Speaking of which, what are you working on at the moment? Well, I'm trying to, trying to write more poems is

the, is the short answer. The poem that we looked at, I think, in some ways, is kind of emblematic of my my thinking recently, in some ways, is yeah, is thinking of these kind of two concepts. But I'm dismayed, I suppose, by any system that, that says that the end justifies the means, or that it'll all be, it'll all be okay, whatever it costs, or

that we believe in one sense of the future and not others. And I suppose I've been troubled by that problem in lots of ways, of the sense of the end justifying the means, which is, how you end up, you know, walking streets paved with gold. I think you you should ask how the gold got there. Seems like a reasonable place to start with. Seán Hewitt: Stephen Sexton, I cannot wait to read the new collection when all of these poems come 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 we get there. Thank you very much for for joining us on The Glimpse. Thank you, Seán, my pleasure. Seán Hewitt: Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host, Seán Hewitt. Stephen's poem, "The Capital of Heaven" was first published in The

Stinging Fly and aired with his permission. Oni Buchanan's poem, "The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia" was from What Animal published in 2003 and aired with permission from University of Georgia Press. Coming up next week, poet Parker Hibbett talks about their relationship to rhythm and poetry, the lyric eye and the impact of Joni Mitchell's artistic betrayal. Make sure to subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website

brinkerhoffpoetry.org/podcast. We'd also love to hear from you; drop us an email at the glimpse poetrypodcast@gmail.com The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I'm your host, Seán Hewitt. Our Senior Producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our Technical Director and Mixing Engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation's Executive Director, and our

co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening.