THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:HE MUST have one of the most recognised faces in Ireland – as plump-cheeked as a baby, with those dimples like quotation marks around a ready smile – yet when I meet the poet, professor and pundit Brendan Kennelly in Dublin's Westin Hotel, he is sitting unnoticed in the corner of the room, alone.
The man I remember from my university days was a warm-voiced, engaging academic, a man about college, our celebrity professor, threading through students as he strolled around campus as if it belonged to him, as if he belonged.
But Kennelly is now 73, retired from academia three years, and initially it seems as if his voice, his larger than lifeness, his room-swallowing character, have been slowly diminishing since for want of use.
“University is a strange form of intimacy, isn’t it?” he remarks when I remind him that I was once a student of his in Trinity College Dublin. “You get to know your fellow lecturers, your fellow students, when you go as a student and you go as a lecturer. And in no time at all you’re a stranger.” He pauses, and the sadness of this notion – of becoming a stranger in his one-time stomping ground – is defined only by the levity he injects as he slips into the colloquial: “I’m a stranger here myself, as they say.”
Yet though Brendan Kennelly is a smaller figure than I might recall, his eyes a little rheumier, his voice a little softer, he is no stranger here in the heart of the city that has been his home since he left his native Co Kerry at the age of 17. Such is the easy intimacy he invites that though he may find a quiet corner in a new hotel, people still stop him on the street to address him, strangers looking to pass the time of day with the beloved poet of the people.
“This very morning,” he tells me with a smile, and there’s a persistent Kerry turn of phrase that no amount of Trinners could stamp out, “a student of 40 years ago, she came up to me just coming out of the college and she said ‘You know what? When you’re lookin’ down at the ground like that you’re very doleful, and then when you look up you’re smilin’.” He grins, that big boyish grin that conveys the wonder he still finds in strangers, and yet there’s more to this apparently unconnected observation than mere anecdote. For Kennelly is both things over the course of a morning of tea and biscuits, doleful and smilin’ in equal measure.
Encounters with past students clearly delight him, the legacy of close to five decades teaching in the English department at Trinity College Dublin. As a teacher he was unconventional: I recall him buying rounds for a whole tutorial class of students, and assignments that had us writing our own stories to be learned by heart and recounted to fellow students in a darkened classroom.
Yet three years ago, he gave it all up. “I retired,” he says simply. “And it had a shocking effect on me. I just worked and worked and worked and worked, and suddenly I was out in exile.” Adjusting was difficult as the long days – Kennelly is an early riser – stretched before him. “It was all new. Suddenly you woke up, and thought ‘God, I’ve nothing to do today. What class can I give? What meeting is there on? Where can I go? Where are the essays?’.”
Though he had prepared, he thought, for retirement, the reality was not at all what he had expected. “That’s the nature of experience,” he admits. “You don’t know. The future is a bank of secrets, isn’t it? And you can try to shape it, you can try to steal some of the secrets, as it were. But no, it’s full of surprises, secrets, and that’s what I found.”
What he found, he tells me, is that he had time on his hands, a phrase that from him seems a lonely kind of liberation. But it's a loneliness that brought him other occupation, giving rise to his latest book of poems, Reservoir Voices, as he explains in its introduction: "To surrender to loneliness is to admit new presences, new voices, into that abject emptiness."
Even as he speaks of his loneliness, he does it through poetry, quoting his own poem Connection in its entirety to explain the contradictory human needs for solitude and connection. "Self knows that self is not enough," he begins, and Kennelly is suddenly in his element, his unmistakable, expressive voice giving presence to the words he wrote more than three decades ago. This is the personality I recall, as immediately he draws a connection, right through his staggering body of poetry – he has written more than 30 books – to the most recent publication. "That was what I was doing in Reservoir Voices," he explains. "Stepping out of the self. Because loneliness can be too self-obsessed. I don't like that." He is disarmingly open about the intensity of the loneliness and depression he fell into while on a semester in Boston College in 2007 and the space it created in him which allowed the voices of the title to speak. And voices, for Kennelly, are all.
“Everything has a voice. The poet is used only to let the voices speak,” he says, marking carefully his distance from the first person pronoun that appears in every poem in this new collection. Voices are something he returns to many times over the course of what he refers to as our “chat”. He pays tribute to those that come to him over the airwaves in the long hours he spends listening to the radio, taking off the voices of the characters in his stories that speak in tones and accents varied, and recalling the voices that have given him his poetry over the years. “[I gave a voice to] Cromwell, I gave a voice to Judas.” And then, though laughing at the admission that listening to voices in his head has led some to consider him “bonkers”, he insists: “I have always heard them.”
Yet it is Kennelly’s own voice that makes being around him such a pleasure: as recognisable as his open face, his voice has a music that is all the more evident as he recites poem after poem over the course of the morning. As he warms to the task, gone is the unfamiliar diffidence glimpsed as our talk began. Kennelly settles in, his focus sharpens the longer we engage, and soon it is clear that the slightly absent old man that began the interview has receded, making way for a keen and charismatic poet and philosopher.
His recall is impressive: sheafs of verse trip off his tongue, and he even remembers details of the moments when inspiration struck. He remembers back to national school in Ballylongford, and he remembers a particular secondary school teacher – “Jane Agnes McKenna,” he pronounces with pride – who taught him French, Irish, Latin and Greek culture, “two pounds a term,” and instilled in the young Kennelly a love of literature that shaped his life.
When he won a sizership, donated by a landlord in North Kerry who “paid for the education of the peasantry”, he came up to Trinity, a young 17-year-old suddenly landed in the big city. “Sure, I didn’t know what they were saying, and they didn’t know what I was saying either.”
It’s the “rural gossoon in the big smoke” story that he makes into such a performance, but it’s easy to forget how much truth there is in his own self-caricature. Yet stories of his life “filling pints” in the local pub in Kerry before he left it all behind for academia provide scattered reminders of the world he grew up in, tales of life in the 1940s and 1950s that reveal how much has changed since then. He remembers a man in his parish who was notable for having once, if only briefly, possessed a five-pound note. “Money was so rare,” he says, noting how different things are now. I remind him of an interview he gave 10 years ago where he said, somewhat presciently, that Ireland was “on the brink of a religion of materialism,” and the smile comes out again. “Now we’re back to the old shtory!”
Yet things have not quite come full circle, and Kennelly points out that the students who pass through Trinity’s arch these days are a different breed to the wide-eyed Kerryman he was himself. “I wouldn’t say students are devoted to the material,” he says. “They have inherited the world that we gave them. But they expect more, because this is what they were reared with.”
Yet it is their confidence that most impresses him, and gives him hope for the future. “They have it in them to work for a better society, so they won’t lose their own status.” It may sound cynical, but Kennelly believes they will adapt to their changing reality with ease. “I believe they can cope,” he says simply. “You know they’re in control of the whole thing.”
Yet Kennelly appears wistful for another world, a world he has polished in stories and anecdotes of people – poets, politicians – who are gone. He has not forgotten his own youth, and how he too once “dismissed all the old poets”, but provides in his recollections of this time a link to those that went before him, such as Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh. “Kavanagh was broke . . . I remember meeting him in a hotel once in Wicklow Street and he was shy, but I think he wanted me to help out some way, to maybe get him a room in the college. I didn’t.” There is regret in his voice. “I was only a young fellow. He just sat there.”
Other tales have a happier outcome, such as his encounter with WH Auden at a college in Pennsylvania, where he disputed the English poet’s famous line “poetry makes nothing happen”.
“I think it does make things happen, and I said it to Auden himself,” he grins mischievously, recalling the dinner hosted by the Quaker college, where a shortage of wine prompted Auden to address him: “‘If you’re from Ireland, you must have whiskey on your person.’ As a matter of fact, at the time, I was drinking a drop,” recalls Kennelly, who has been sober for more than two decades, but had a bottle of whiskey squirrelled about his person on the night he met Auden. “‘Now would you do me a favour, would you go into the toilet and leave it behind the loo, and I’ll pick it up and I’ll give it back to you,’” was Auden’s response on hearing this. “So he did just that,” says Kennelly, giggling at the recollection. “And the following morning he sent down three bottles of Jack Daniels.”
Politicians too get the Kennelly treatment as he conjures up the late Charles J Haughey in a sentence: “He’d ring up and say, ‘God, all these heads around me are boring the arse off me, come on up and talk a bit of poetry to me.’”
Yet despite requests that he become involved in politics over the years, Kennelly’s political life never extended beyond reading poems to a former taoiseach. “They wanted me to go for it, for president of Ireland,” he muses, but says he always said no for one reason: “[As president] I couldn’t walk the streets, and I do love the streets of Dublin.”
It has long been his great love, this daily meandering, the bardic wanderings that bring him into close and physical contact with the city he loves. Yet even his walking habits have been forced into change in recent years, an encounter with an addict one day making him suddenly aware and fearful of the dangers it entailed. “I gave it up when I was walking one day up Amiens Street and I bumped into a lad accidentally, but I turned to him and said ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ He says ‘You’re f***ing lucky you said you’re sorry,’ and I saw the look in his eyes.” It’s a look that has haunted Kennelly, who says “the drug people” have forced him off the streets, particularly in the early hours that he loves best. “That’s their time.”
Yet he hasn't entirely stopped his walks, though he limits their scope to areas around the college where he still lives. "Walking brings a new kind of interest in life and in people, in memory, and above all in poetry," he explains, telling me he accompanies himself on walks by saying entire poems, sometimes out loud, as he goes. Cue another recitation, this time from Ó Raifteirí, whose poem Cill Aodaingets the full treatment both in Irish and in its English translation. "It's great to be walking and to say it to yourself," says Kennelly when he's done with Ó Raifteirí. "It gives you life."
His walking, though curtailed, still puts him in daily contact with the people of Dublin, and “the wonderful wit of the Dubliner”. People still approach him constantly, he says proudly, “mostly elderly people, you know, a lot of elderly women”. Women have always been drawn to Kennelly, and there is still much of the old charmer in him, though his explanation of his continued popularity with the female of the species is simply that “they love an old chat”.
And Brendan Kennelly is a great man for a chat, with an unnerving ability to draw you out in conversation, to get you talking. “I always loved to listen, and I think it’s the most fertile form of inspiration, listening.”
His contact with others, with those who approach him as he walks around Trinity College, with the “great friends” he clearly holds dear, with his three grand-daughters – “I know I kind of amuse them, rather in the sense that a familiar old crumbling building does” – is what has given him poetry, and what clearly energises him still. It’s an energy he transmits too, an energy that, quoting Blake, he defines as “eternal delight”.
Though he admits to a fear of boredom – “that I might bore other people, or they might bore me” – there’s a delight in Kennelly that is infectious, a kind of fervent joy for all his professions of tiredness. “I think we should try to be interesting to each other, but not overtly, not aggressively trying to be interesting, but to always appreciate that element of strangeness and mystery in the other,” he says, and then brings it all back – all this talk of human contact and the distance and proximity of other people – to poetry. “That combination of otherness and selfhood, you have to have both for poetry.”
And though his teaching may be at an end, at least in official terms, the poetry is still coming, with Reservoir Voicestestimony to the fact that his work is not yet done. His passion for words, for poetry, for the careful articulation of the human condition, comes through loud and clear, as clear as his call for inspiration. "I'd love to write more," he says, throwing his eyes up to the glass ceiling of the hotel's atrium, in a not-quite-mock appeal to a higher power for more poems. "I wish they'd come to me."
So far they have kept coming, book after book, to a man who finds poetry in everything, including the Masses that he still attends. “You always hear something new,” he says, comparing his experiences of Mass to his experiences of a poem. “‘Rid us from all anxiety.’ I like that one.” Which brings him to the final line of the Mass, “Go now, love and serve.” He lingers on its meaning, on the words love and serve and, once more, it all comes back to poetry.
“There is that sense of giving a poem to somebody else, that is a kind of service.” To illustrate this notion of service, he recites a poem that he wrote after he underwent a quadruple bypass more than a decade ago – a poem, he tells me proudly, that has been named as her favourite by none other than Meryl Streep.
“Begin again to the summoning birds,” he says, and that melodious voice is again clear and commanding as our interview comes to an end. Brendan Kennelly, no stranger to endings (a marriage, an affiliation with alcohol and an academic career) and the restarts that follow, is off again. “Though we live in a world that dreams of ending/ that always seems about to give in/ something that will not acknowledge conclusion/ insists that we forever begin.”
Brendan Kennelly's new book, Reservoir Voices, is published by Bloodaxe Books on May 28th
As part of Dublin Writers’ Festival,
Brendan Kennelly will give a reading in The Abbey Theatre on June 7th at 3pm
“Everything has a voice. The poet is used only to let the voices speak’ . . . Yet Kennelly’s voice makes being around him pleasure: as recognisable as his face, his voice has a music that is all the more evident as he recites poem after poem