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It should come as no surprise that once again, the Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Endowed Chair in Irish Studies is being held by a poet. What is interesting is that this year, no one but two poets are sharing the chair: Vona Groarke and Conor O’Callaghan. The couple, who are married, are team-teaching two courses.

“Inside Out and Outside In” is the literature course. Groarke and O’Callaghan alternate the weekly classes, so that each component proceeds at fortnightly intervals and complements the other thematically and chronologically. With exile and emigration as themes, Groarke is focusing on the “Insight Out” component, examining Irish writers living abroad (whether by exile or choice) from Oliver Goldsmith in the eighteenth century to more recent poets such as Louis MacNiece, Derek Mahon and Evan Boland, and most recently Eamon Grennan (2002 Heimbold Chair), Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heeney, Thomas Kinsella and others considering how living outside their homeland influenced their work.

Callaghan handles the “Outside In” side, which looks at non-Irish poets who lived for substantial periods in Ireland, such as John Berryman, Philip Larkin and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and their time in Ireland informed their poetry. Callaghan also looks at other foreign poets who have written about Ireland either from afar or from first hand experience. These include Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke and Joseph Brodsky, among others.

Both poets also facilitate a writing course, which Groarke recently described as “fun” thanks to the students, whom she characterized as having “a sound knowledge of literature and also enquiring, lively minds.” In addition, they will give a reading of their work on Thursday evening, March 25, beginn ing at approximately 6:00 p.m. in the President’s Lounge of the Connelly Center.

Prolific poets, enthusiastic educators

Vona (short for Veronica) Groarke is a graduate of Trinity College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and history as well as a certificate in heritage management. She has published three collections of poetry in Ireland through Gallery Press, Dublin: Shale (1994). Other People’s Houses (1999) and Flight (2002). A few weeks ago, Wake Forest University Press published Flight and Other Poems, which includes all of Flight collection, along with selections from her first two books.

Ask to describe her poetry, she answered that it was in the lyric tradition. “It engages a lot of language and the possibility of individual words,” she said. “I suppose it is a bit tight but I would be influenced people like Heeney, Muldoon, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill and William Lake.”
She writes solely in English and reflected on the way Irish poets learned to use that language. “It has to do in a way with the colonial past and the fact that Ireland acquired English through force in the nineteenth century. Ireland also chose English for materialistic reasons. If they were going to emigrate they needed English instead of an obscure language like Irish. Because English was acquired out of a combination of political and economic forces, I think what happened was that it became a badge of something that was not pleasant or palatable. The Irish people, being in some sense subversive and having a great capacity for irony, combined the two to turn the English language into a tool against English colonizers.”

O’Callaghan, who comes from Dundalk, holds a master’s degree in philosophy Trinity. In addition to pieces and criticisms in many journals and other publications, he has published several collections of poetry, including A History of Rain (1993), Seatown (1999), both from Gallery Press, and Seatown and Earlier Poems, from Wake Forest University Press (2000).
Asked how he found the idea of holding the Heimbold Chair, O’Callaghan said that it gave him a wonderful opportunity to deal with non-Irish writers whom he admired. Among those who interested him is the American John Berryman, who was, in O’Callaghan’s words, “obsessed” with William Butler Yeats. “He [Berryman] came to Ireland as a doctoral student in the 1930s and had a pint and spoke to Yeats,” O’Callaghan said. “He gave a cigarette to him and wrote to a friend afterwards, ‘Immortality is mine. Yeats has taken a cigarette off me.’ He came back to Dublin to confront the ghost Yeats and spent 18 or boozy months in Dublin. I do think that landscape of Ireland is inscribed in the latter half of the Dream Songs in a way that really isn’t read into that much.”

Both Groarke and O’Callaghan expressed their delight with the reception that they have received from the University community and are looking forward to exploring Philadelphia. They said, however, they were surprised that more students don’t take advantage of the city’s proximity and cultural opportunities. They are considering taking their students into center city for a class.