Poetry and Emotion

Peter Sirr

And as fellow poet – and partner to Enda Wyley – Peter Sirr points out, for many poets: ”Real life can be the work. Wallace Stevens, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, used to write most of his poems on his walk through Hartford, Connecticut to his job as Vice-President of the Insurance Company where he worked. Everything he wrote was in his walk to his job.” Nevertheless, ”You have to cultivate the life from which poetry can come.” For Sirr, this life also started in teaching, before his talent as a linguist pushed him towards translation, although it is only in recent years that he has been able to devote himself to his work more fully.

This doesn’t mean that he is suddenly cranking out a poem a day: ”Holding back and not writing and the silence between poems is as important as the writing. You have to be a daily communicant in some way with the art of poetry and other poems and that quality of attention that you give to the world.”