Florida Review at UCF

Summer 34.1 Preview

Our summer issue features great new fiction by Erin Flanagan, Kodi Scheer, Jonathan Bohr Heinen, and Meghan Kenny; poetry by Eamon Grennan, Sabra Loomis, Teresa Leo, and Jane Hilberry among many others; nonfiction by Patricia Foster, Marcia Aldrich, Tyler Enfield, and Lili Wright; a graphic narrative (comic) by Kurt Parsons; Young Voices Award winner Alex Norcia’s fiction, as well as five book reviews. Read an excerpt from our interview with Eamon Grennan.


Featured Poet: Eamon Grennan

Eamon Grennan is an Irish citizen, born and raised in Dublin. He attended University College, Dublin, and came to the United States in 1964 to study at Harvard University where he received his Ph.D. He taught at Vassar College from 1974 until his retirement in 2004, returning to Ireland in the summers and when on leaves from teaching.

His books of poetry include What Light There Is & Other Poems, Twelve Poems, As If It Matters, So It Goes, Relations: New & Selected Poems, Still Life with Waterfall, The Quick of It, and Matter of Fact. He has also published a collection of essays on Twentieth century Irish poetry, Facing the Music, and two books of translations: Leopardi: Selected Poems and (with Rachel Kitzinger) Oedipus at Colonus. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and Still Life with Waterfall received the 2003 Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Interview with Eamon Grennan (sample)

Don Stap spoke with Eamon Grennan at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida on the morning of October 20, 2008.

FR: In “Detail,” the last poem in Still Life with Waterfall, you’re talking about watching a robin chasing a finch when all of a sudden a sparrow hawk comes in from nowhere and “plucks like a ripe fruit the stopped robin.” And a few lines later the poem ends with:

…and I began to understand
how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small
elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth
strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.

Is that what you’re talking about?

Grennan: Yeah, absolutely. That poem became a little “ars poetica” for me, at least, when I wrote it. It was out in Provincetown that I actually saw this thing. But it is trying to suggest the little journey you take getting into a poem, which is trying to open a space for important things to take place and find language. That’s the “terrible truth.” You know, that’s love, or any strange thing, any big thing that happens to you. It’s the attempt to say that making poems is being stereophonic or binocular so you’re trying to attend to the music and let the big truth strike and be carried off. You’re trying to pay attention to the aesthetics, but let them be invaded, you know? Let the formalist aspect be invaded by something else. If it works, it’s great.

FR: Are your poems journeys of discovery?

Grennan: Yes, I think this is important. There’s a lot of poems out there and they’re perfectly good poems, but they’re not in the process of discovery. They have discovered what they want to say before it’s said, and they lay it out. I’m more drawn towards letting the thing meander and finding out what have I discovered—like a walk you take without knowing what you’ll discover, and you just walk. It’s just kind of keeping your eyes open.

FR: If you get the revelation as the writer, the reader gets it too.

Grennan: That’s right.