An Interview | Finding a Speaking Voice: Colm Tóibín’s “Vinegar Hill”

“I have been telling you this for days,” reads the first line of Colm Tóibín’s poem, “Morning.” Though the speaker’s message is never disclosed, it represents one of many instances in​​ Vinegar Hill​​ where the transparency of Tóibín’s language and his playful memoirist’s outlook are enough to arrest attention.​​ 

Most of the poems in this debut collection unfurl as anecdotes, revealing in an otherwise stripped-down register the accounts, asides, and layered moments of observation of an Irish and County Wexford native, in and through his travels and engagements with art. They combine the precise language and syntax of Tóibín’s​​ novels​​ with the kind of conversational nonchalance you find in Frank O’Hara, while displaying their own set of stylistic and formal markers. There are the storyteller’s delineations of detail around a voice in time, whether that voice is remembering public events and figures, observing paintings, or pruning a narrative down to poetic episodes—without “blathering,” as Tóibín puts it, or leaving too much context behind. There are the quips about and frequent qualification of what is said. The extensive, swaying lines skirting prose; or in counterpoint, those in shorter poems that seem to work by a principle of omission, hanging references, enjambing suspensefully as they resist interpretation.

Before our interview, I began thinking that Tóibín’s “speaking voice,” in establishing an intimate frame of address for his poems, also contains and steers the nuances of his verse, much in the same way it would our dialogue.​​ I’d turned to his critical study of Elizabeth Bishop and dug up a few nuggets of poetic insight that, suited to his own lines, describe the voice in question: 

“neither ornament nor exaltation” 

“led by clarity, by precise description, by briskness of feeling” 

“something between a casual diary entry and something chiseled into truth” 

Tóibín would confess to me that the often light, anecdotal movement of his poems—both the long-lined narratives and the terse episodic lyrics—is not part of any preconceived aesthetic. It’s simply the tone his voice relies on to record the occasions for which it has been called up, occasions alternately lived and imagined, drawn from memory and seen at a remove. “The sound fine-tuned,” he concludes in “Morning,” enacting the description, “the end of something, taut, exact.”  

In the course of our conversation, Tóibín and I touch on a variety of subjects, including Irish politics, gay saunas, Expressionist painting, and the influence of Ashbery, Binchy, and Bishop on his captivating new book from Beacon Press,​​ Vinegar Hill.

——

Luciano Grigera Naón:​​ Several poems in this collection seem to devise their own ways of retelling an anecdote, like in “Variations on a Scene from Maeve Binchy.” As its title suggests, this poem is propelled less by​​ what has​​ happened​​ to the protagonist​​ in Binchy’s novel—the story’s resolution—than by​​ how it could​​ have​​ happened, the “variations,” the act of reimagining those chancey, incidental details of everyday life that texture each possible scenario. How​​ might this play with circumstance and narrative detail inform your creative process differently as a poet than as a novelist? 

Colm Tóibín:​​ There are a few poems in the book that are sort of anecdotes that I would tell whenever I had an audience; in other words, that Maeve story was one I loved, and one day I was listening to the radio and Maeve came on and she was reading her story, and people were always telling me how good she was, and how she sold millions, and Barbara Bush loved her, and like: Why can’t​​ I​​ be like that? And I thought I should​​ learn​​ from Maeve—and so I’d tell everyone the story, you know, about the woman who lives alone in Dublin, visiting Rome, and finds the restaurant where—oh my god—there are her long-lost relatives from Sicily! And I just suddenly realized that if I wrote that, it would be so filled with doleful detail; it would be so filled with defeat… and I kept thinking about all of the horrible things that would happen that evening: her Irish students would get drunk; they would not turn up for the next day’s field trip outing; the restaurant would be [...] you know, it was a joke of mine—how Maeve made it so cheerful and uplifting, whereas I would just not.

And one day it occurred to me that I should write that down. I mean, what would it​​ look like​​ if I wrote that down? And with a lot of the poems, I simply wrote them down, keeping the line, enjoying myself in writing these sort of “anti-poems,” where the poem is really prose and it’s just divided sometimes. But then every so often I wanted to put in something that just seemed more poem than prose, meaning: something in the rhythm of certain lines that had a sort of catch in their throat—not much, and not noticeably. Mainly I was trying to show three different new ways of seeing that story and realized that you could do infinite numbers. And if you make it too comically prosaic you sort of lose it. You have to make it at least adhere to some of the “rules” of poetry:​​ that the lines are roughly the same length and that there’s an important capitalization at the beginning of each line that lends a sense of formality to something so informal. It’s an anecdote that sure doesn’t look like one; it doesn’t read like one. Yet it seems to be moving all confidently as though it were a poem.

LG:​​ Anecdotes, and observations occurring in them, also frame your ekphrases on paintings by Emily Kngwarreye and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. In one poem, the ochre-black markings from Kngwarreye’s indigenous Australian landscape come to appear misplaced, along with their ancient tradition, in the speaker’s incommensurably younger Dublin home. In the other, the speaker visits the church of San Polo and fixates on the “even paler” blue that defines Tiepolo’s sky in his​​ Stations of the Cross​​ against his father’s famed renditions of it in the next room. To what extent are the occasions of seeing these paintings, the anecdotes intervening in or intervened by the depicted scenes, directing your commentaries on art?

CT:​​ I think the relationship is personal. With the Tiepolo poem, I thought that Tiepolo, the father, had done these​​ Stations of the Cross​​ and said to myself: “How odd that he had done these paintings,” which looked so unlike what he was famous for. Just luckily, I was with a scholar that evening—he didn’t catch me out—he just said: “Oh, you mean the son?” And I thought: “Oh fuck the son; that’s the son!” And once I knew that, I thought this was the most interesting idea: that the son was also painting the blue sky, though of course it was his father’s pale blue skies that were so famous. So what did​​ he​​ do? And that just got me going on the whole idea of that distinction. 

As for the Kngwarreye painting… I own that painting, and I brought it back from Australia. I’ve written a monograph on Emily Kngwarreye; she’s one of the greatest indigenous painters and didn’t start working until she was about eighty because she couldn’t get canvas. It’s a famous, almost iconic image in Australia, and she did many versions of it: black lines on ochre. I just happened to get it before everyone else realized how important it was, and I have it in Dublin between two windows. So the poem comments on how odd it is to have something painted from that extraordinary history that she was working from, that extraordinary knowledge of land and light, going back thousands of years and into this country of Ireland that seems strangely new compared to indigenous life in Australia. And it’s such a different landscape in any case. So really the poem is about me looking at the painting and thinking: “I should send that painting back to Australia where it belongs; it doesn’t belong in this room.”

There’s another poem I just want to draw your attention to because it was one of the times when I thought that “anecdotal thing” was really getting in the way, and that I should stop. There’s a poem called “Anton Webern in Barcelona.” What happened was that Webern came to Barcelona to conduct Berg’s Violin Concerto in 1936, and for some reason he couldn’t do it. He locked himself and the conductor’s score up in a room, and couldn’t be extracted. He eventually did conduct the piece in London soon afterwards, but on that night in Barcelona, having worked so hard to set this concert up, he didn’t do it. And he had deliberately accompanied an American-Jewish violinist through Germany to show him that no harm could come to anyone Jewish in Germany (because Webern, unlike Shoenberg or Berg, was certainly flirting with the Nazis). So the poem stems from this idea that Webern insisted on taking the violinist to Barcelona through Germany, while everyone else who​​ was coming from Vienna would go through Switzerland. Now, with all of this information (I’ve been thinking about and listening to this Violin Concerto for years), I eventually got it down to the poem’s current form, which as you said in your email sort of “resists interpretation,” rather than serving as an account of the story in clunkily-made stanzas. What I’m doing is trying to pare the account back into a set of images that might do more, in fact. So, you know, you have to be very careful with that “anecdotal thing” because you can start sounding garrulous. 

LG:​​ It’d be interesting, in that light, to turn to a more explicit political context in this book. I’m thinking of the poem “I Ran Away,” which recounts your experience in Dublin fleeing from officers of Ireland’s counter-terrorist Special Detective Unit, formerly known as the Special Branch, under suspicion of being some sort of poet-conspirator:

  I knew I should have explained that I ran

  Because within all of us hides a latent guilt

  That waits to be woken by Branchmen real or false.

  What made me run, though, to tell the truth,

  Was that I was simply afraid of my shite.

  No point in evoking hidden darknesses,

  Or atavistic, primal forms of shame.

I find in these lines a dismissal of the gravitas, and even the drama, that other Irish poets like Yeats, Heany, and Longly have taken up when addressing their political realities, whether symbolically or by means of epic narratives. Are you​​ steering away from that more earnest approach? And under the irony, what could have possibly made you run?

CT:​​ Oh, well, first I think the poem is stolen from the method of saying something and then refining it further, which is what Elizabeth Bishop does. And it’s that whole idea at work each time she says something and then qualifies herself—she might go “or no, it was more…” It’s really that idea of trying some high tone about, you know, fear, and then going: “that’s actually not true.” And you go back to Bishop seeing that you really mustn’t hide the truth in poems—poems require you to tell the truth, and you often say, reading a line, “is that line true?” “No, no that’s not​​ exactly​​ right, that’s not​​ exactly​​ what it was.” And in that case, I thought it was a good way—it was a sort of game almost—of setting yourself up as making a high remark and then just bringing it down to a sort of Irish demotic (“afraid of my shite”). In other words, a way of bringing it right down to fact and of finding a tone for that fact.

It’s also laughing at the whole idea of fighting for freedom. You see, the title of the poem is important because “I Ran Away” was written in big letters on gable-ends of houses in Belfast in 1971 to taunt the IRA back into violence. It meant: “the British army is attacking us, the Protestants are attacking us… What are you guys doing?” I-R-A, I Ran Away. It’s always mentioned, you know, that that powerful taunt was used politically to get the IRA to start the campaign again. 

And, I mean, why would I run? I’m playing with the idea that there was something I was ashamed of—maybe homosexual shame, Catholic shame, a primal “all of our shame.” Like someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., you know? It’s out of those Kafkian explorations of the urban​​ “known” figure who feels he did something; that even if they don’t know what he did, he “did do it.” Gregora Samsa, Joseph K., all of those Kafka figures. And then I realize: no, no, it’s not a moment out of Kafka—stop that stuff about “a moment out of Kafka…” That instance of shame, expressed in a really light way that suggests it’s a joke, is of something hidden that belongs to what they call, you know, the modern, urban male figures walking alone in a German Expressionist painting. 

LG:​​ I’d say that throughout​​ Vinegar Hill,​​ Dublin and your hometown of Enniscorthy are at once within the public’s purview and outside of it—as the sites of a local’s private experiences, memories, and meditations. And I love how this duality arises in the collection’s title poem: “The hill is above all that, / Intractable, unknowable, serene,” where “that” can be taken to mean “History” in the previous line, the Irish rebels’ legendary defeat in the battle of Vinegar Hill two centuries before. And yet the military references and metaphors return; the poem fails to strip the hill of its mythology… So how exactly do “place” and familiar geographies feature in this book?

CT:​​ The title poem does fail, and I think that’s precisely the point. I’m saying the hill is above all that, but it isn’t. No matter what you do, the military imagery comes back; something as innocent as clouds becomes almost a strategic move in a battlefield. Without knowing, almost, the poem has to dissolve… “Vinegar Hill” is different from the other poems in that, you know, our house looked at it, and it’s in ballads, and it’s historical—and actually for us it was normal, and then sometimes it wasn’t.

And you see, I’ve written almost nothing about Dublin in any of my novels or short stories. But now that I’m in New York or Los Angeles, I can write about it​​ because I’ve lost it, so that things that seemed normal and part of the day now look like the past. And I can sort of put a shape on them. The poems “Dublin: Saturday, 23 May, 2015” and “Dead Cinemas” are examples of this; anyone who’s my age knows where the dead cinemas are and knows where the gay hideouts were. These places had the same thing in common: they were sort of added on or secret, and then they just disappeared. And all of the extraordinary swirling energy that was around them was just gone, except of course in people’s memories. For the first poem, I thought I’d create two characters who’d have something else to think about on that day everyone was celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage: a strange, lost past that made them feel some sadness and nostalgia, instead of the newly-gained freedom burning in them. It was the nostalgia of having to slip down streets undetected and navigate the hidden gay saunas that existed before. This first poem is much more political and comments on how you can’t just make things right by referendum; you can’t just erase fifty years of deep repression and go cheering in Dublin Castle by the government.

LG:​​ There’s also a mystifying series of shorter pieces toward the beginning of​​ Vinegar Hill. Some read as lyrics with hidden contexts; some like vignettes pretending​​ to culminate in an unexpected turn; and others, such as “Thunder All Night,” “From the Catalan,” and “Morning,” barely hold together as scenes and unfold instead as sequences of images, abstract statements, and diary-like snippets. Moving in and out of each of these “poetic episodes,” for lack of a better term, I was most compelled by what was left unsaid, by expressive traces of some undisclosed meaning or situation. How did you come to write this kind of poem? 

CT:​​ Between the ages of twenty and fifty, I was in a poem-free zone. I delivered the novel,​​ The Master,​​ at the beginning of 2003 after extensive revisions, and so I’d been living in the printed word very intensely for a long time, until it was gone. And out of that vacuum came my first short stories and then these short poems that I hadn’t been able to write before. I’d keep doing this with poetry for about the next ten years—these very obscure verses that all depend on a single memory, image, or occasion. I could even put down the date in which the experience occurred in them if I wanted. 

But I left these poems on my computer and didn’t bother doing anything with them. It was around this time that I began writing the ones that I showed John Mcauliffe at Carcanet, and he said that he liked them—I didn’t know that anyone could​​ like​​ them. I mean, I just thought they were private, almost. Their origin was private and perhaps their meaning was hidden. But I did feel that the emotion in them would be shared as something handed over from the poem to the reader. Anyway, now I’m trying to go back to them because I feel that I’ve told enough anecdotes, blathered too much, chattered too much, explained too much.

LG:​​ At times “the art [you] favor has a hint of risk,” to borrow from your poem “The Torturer’s Art.” In that poem, the torturer is a figurative painter. If​​ you​​ were the torturer, I’d say these shorter pieces operate as the equivalent in language to a kind of dynamic “action-painting.” Do you ever conceive of line and stanza breaks as mere “gestures,” as opportunities for handling suspense and contingency?

CT:​​ I suppose there is an argument always going on between Picasso and Juan Gris over how much untidiness, how much action you put in—or how much​​ line you work with. And I suppose I favor the line. So, yeah, I did want some of those short poems to have the same feeling of a small painting done in the 50s by, you know, someone like Willem de Kooning. 

I should explain the method behind these poems to you. I write in longhand, normally, but the poems are written straight onto a laptop, and no drafts are kept. If something isn’t working, it​​ goes;​​ if something is added, it’s​​ added. So each time I have what I want as a finished poem. And then each time I go back to it I realize: “it’s not right” or “there’s something wrong with it.” And I want to slash this or that, I want to get it out, I want to erase it, so that it’s never there again. I have no recourse after that moment to go back to the edit to figure out if there’s a line I should put back in. When something goes, it​​ must go.​​ So you’re proceeding all the time as though you’re working on a canvas. If something is covered, it’s really hard to uncover it. That’s how all of these poems are made, without any keeping of drafts.

LG:​​ So it’s a radical practice, really, a kind of revision “in real time…”

CT:​​ Oh yeah! I mean, “high risk” is a stupid thing to talk about when you’re writing. If I take out a line, it’s never going to be available to me again. In the last few lines of “From the Catalan,” for instance, I just lose it. Anything at all goes (you know, John Ashbery)... “Wisdom has strange, green echoes.” I have absolutely no idea what that line means. I just liked it and put it in; I mean, it has a sound I liked. And really the last couple of lines—“There was something I lost that time / Over there beyond the crowd that gathered”—were in the inconsequential business of thinking of words that could be thrown onto the poem to complete it. It just so happened that there were a lot of big demonstrations in Barcelona where a crowd would gather.

Ashbery got so much from watching the Expressionist painters and thinking about the whole idea of adding a color abstractly after another. But he also tended himself not to draw conclusions easily. It was an attitude of not having respect for anything, not even the idea of a finished poem. And yes, as you’ve said, the idea of the poem as a repository for whatever comes to mind; the musings, “the extreme austerity of an almost empty mind,” as Ashbery says in “And​​ Ut Pictura Poesis​​ is her Name…” 

I mean, people talk about a “voice”—it does mean something. Between the ages of twelve and twenty, I was trying to write a poem that I felt should be about something important and filled with similes, and symbols, and imagery—and it had never struck me that if I had gone to some seminar with someone I could have maybe freed my voice to say: “Could you write a poem like someone speaking?” “And how do you speak?” “What tone do you take when you speak?” And ultimately,​​ Why don’t you write that?​​ (whispers). So it took me all these years to come to a moment where I could actually be light in a poem.