“Like Only a Woman or Ghost,” “Prelude: A Vague Inheritance,” and “Valentine’s Day in Kinsale” by George Looney appeared in Issue 38 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
These four poems are all from a manuscript titled The Indefinite Clarity of Sky: Poems of Kinsale, which I started around twenty years ago during my first sabbatical. I continued working on it during my following sabbatical. I consider it completed now. My inspiration for the collection was Richard Hugo’s The Right Madness on Skye, in which he spent time on the Isle of Skye which is a Scottish island. Hugo was Scottish. I decided I wanted to write poems that were set in Kinsale, Ireland, a place my ancestors came from, and that brought together aspects of the landscape and local lore of Kinsale with the landscape and lore of southern Ohio, where I grew up. I settled on using sestets for all the poems, which range in length from one sestet to six sestets.
What was the most difficult aspect in creating this set?
Trying to give authentic voice to the landscape and lore and people of Kinsale. And I didn’t want the poems to read like the ramblings of a tourist, but rather the musings of someone who both does and doesn’t belong to the place. As Whitman might say, I wanted to be both in and out of Kinsale, and watching and wondering at it.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Human Figures by Nancy Eimers.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Al Maginnes. But neither of us drink anymore, both having enjoyed the drink just a bit too much.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m currently at work on two collections, one further along than the other. That one is titled Conversations with the Visible: The Caravaggio Poems, and is a collection of what I refer to as my “decadent” poems, in that each is ten lines long with each line having precisely ten syllables. And the poems are ekphrastic poems based on paintings by Caravaggio. This will be, if it is ever published, my second collection of ekphrastic poems, the previous being What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations (obviously ekphrastic poems based on the paintings of William Turner), which won the 2018 Red Mountain Poetry Prize . The other manuscript includes at least twelve, and possibly more, “Thoughts on” poems, which are elegies, of a sort.
Our thanks to George for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “New Year,” “Spiral,” and “Father” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/new-poetry-from-george-looney.
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George Looney’s books include the recently-released The Visibility of Things Long Submerged which won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award, and The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible which won The Cider Press Review Editors’ Poetry Prize, Ode to the Earth in Translation, a collection of stories, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award, The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020, the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award-winning What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, the novel Report from a Place of Burning which was co-winner of The Leapfrog Press Fiction Award, Meditations Before the Windows Fail, the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through, Monks Beginning to Waltz, and A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness. He founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, serves as editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and was co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.