Cork poet Greg Delanty: 'I made sure that anything I got, I never f****d up'
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CORK-BORN poet and scholar Greg Delanty agrees that he has a relatively charmed life. The sixty-year old professor and poet-in-residence at St Michael’s College, Vermont, has a house in Derrynane, Co Kerry,
“It was paid for by poetry money. How many people can say that?” he asks, mischievously. Sipping from a pint of stout in a Cork hotel on a visit to launch his latest collection, Delanty cuts a dash in a pink shirt and crimson-coloured waistcoat.
The National Library of Ireland “gave me a lot of money for my papers up to 2010. Then I sold my papers from 2010 to 2015 to UCC. They gave me a great amount of money.”
Delanty doesn’t want to sound like a bean counter. He says he has worked hard to get to where he is today. And he has come far since he was a boy with undiagnosed dyslexia, who was considered “stupid” because he couldn’t spell.
Nobody gets anything without a struggle. But I made sure that anything I got, I never f****d up because I know I don’t have any more chances. For sure, it’s a charmed life. But I made it charmed.
US-based Irish novelist, Colum McCann, has described Delanty as the voice of the Irish in America. That sounds like quite a responsibility. Delanty, who has been poet-in-residence at St Michael’s College for 30 years, is pleased with the accolade.
He writes about exile a lot, especially in his early books such as American Wake and in more contemporary books. “I tackle what it’s like being in a country that you’re not from and what that feels like. Also, it’s a general metaphor for all of us, being in exile, whether we’re at home or away. It’s all figurative.”
Are we all in a state of exile? “I suppose we are. We’re all fairly miserable most of the time, suffering from low level discontent. We’re all trying to feel a bit better, in exile from a sense of not being at home in ourselves.”
CERTAIN TYPE
Home for Delanty, growing up, was Turner’s Cross and the Kinsale Road. He says he has a Blarney Street accent which he absorbed from his late mother who was from there. His late father worked as a compositor in the printing business.
He was lovely. The world we were in was the Eagle Printing Company and Eglinton swimming pool. My father would take me swimming every morning at 7am.
The young Delanty watched his father setting words. “I swore I’d set words like him some day. I wasn’t really good at school so I wouldn’t have dreamed of being a writer. In fact, nobody could dream of me being anything. I spent a lot of time in Eagle Printing, working in a summer job there when I was 13.”
However, Delanty’s experience at Colaiste Chríost Rí wasn’t all negative. “I had a great English teacher, John O’Shea. I used to look forward to hearing him read. I remember distinctly thinking that rhyming was magic. I couldn’t believe how anyone could do it. It never entered my mind that I would do it later in life.”
Delanty repeated the Leaving Certificate which allowed him to pursue an arts degree at UCC. He was taught by poets, Sean Lucey and John Montague. Asked when he started writing poetry, he says : “It’s a bit of a mystery. I loved the sound of words. I loved Bob Dylan. I remember when I was 13 going into a tape swapping place on the Coal Quay. I didn’t know any singers. I just picked half a dozen tapes and went home. One of them was Highway 61 Revisited. I was hooked. I thought Desolation Row was fantastic. I wondered how Dylan did it and there was the mystery of his voice. Then I became a Dylanite.”
Delanty, who published his first poems in the Cork Examiner, always tries “to change the note from book to book whereas some poets sound the same all the way through. I try to change the note the way Dylan does.”
It is a matter of great pride for Delanty that he and Dylan share the same critic. The US-based British academic and literary critic, Christopher Ricks, casts an astute eye over the work of both artists before they unleash their respective poetry and lyrics into the world.
I love that. I’m only one step away from meeting Dylan. I’ve tried to but I can’t. He’s very private. If I met him, all I would say to him is ‘thank you. I mean me and a million others'.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS
As well as being an award-winning poet, Delanty is a dedicated environmentalist. He ran for election in Vermont on a green ticket during the time of George W Bush. He didn’t expect to get as many votes as he did - 18,000 - but was never intent on being a politician. “It was just to make people know that the Green party was there.”
He was arrested some years ago outside the White House “fighting the fossil fuel industry”. Delanty, who sometimes writes about global warming and other environmental issues, lives according to his beliefs. “I have no fossil fuels in my house; no gas, no oil, only solar energy. I gave up my car. I cycle everywhere, even in the middle of winter.”
When Donald Trump comes up in conversation, Delanty comes across as almost personally affronted by the American president. “I just have to get through it and hope he doesn’t use nuclear weapons... I do think he’s evil. It’s unspeakable.”
Delanty’s news and current affairs intake is filtered from sources he carefully chooses. “I haven’t looked at the news on television or read a newspaper for about two years. It’s so depressing that it will destroy you. I just work away myself.”
But Delanty isn’t subsumed by gloom. He speaks fondly and humorously about his 17-year-old son, Dan. “The last thing Dan will do is write poems. I used to threaten to punish him by saying that if he didn’t behave, I’d have to take him to a poetry reading. And if he was really bad, I’d threaten to read a poem about him at a reading!”
Delanty is proud that he has stayed true to what he wanted to do from the beginning, working with words — albeit in a more esoteric way than he ever thought possible.
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