Victoria Kennefick

Abstract

Victoria Kennefick Victoria Kennefick and Kelly Sullivan victoria kennefick’s debut collection Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, 2021) won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. A University College Dublin/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023, Victoria is a poetry editor for the online journal bath magg. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke with Victoria Kennefick via Zoom on 24 February 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: Do you remember when you first encountered Seamus Heaney’s poetry? Was it in a school course or was it on your own? victoria kennefick: I remember the moment clearly and so viscer-ally. I went to a very small national school in Shanagarry, Co. Cork, with three grades in the same room together. It was a very intense and crazy environment. We did a lot of Irish and maths, so whenever we moved into English I was thrilled, especially if we read poetry. And we did quite a lot of poetry. I distinctly remember the day that we read “Mid-Term Break.” I must have been ten or eleven and can still remember where the poem was on the page in the book and the picture that was next to it. When a teacher read it aloud to us, the other classes that were supposed to be working away on other topics stopped what they were doing to listen. I remember being incredibly moved by the extent of the loss in the poem. Later, when I realized that it was Heaney’s own brother, [End Page 218] I understood what a profound effect that must have had on him as a boy. “Mid-Term Break” has always an important poem in Heaney’s oeuvre because it’s the one that most Irish people know after encountering it in primary school. It offers insight into Heaney’s beginnings as a poet because of its focus on a life altering event for a sensitive child. I believe this sudden awareness of mortality in addition to the intensity of living in Northern Ireland must have changed his trajectory about what he was going to do with his life—about how life can shift on a penny. The poem broke my heart and still does each time I read it. sullivan: When you were in school and reading Heaney, were you also writing poetry? Did you think of yourself as a poet then? kennefick: I’m glad you asked the question as if it was a normal thing to feel like a poet—because it didn’t feel normal to me. I didn’t understand who I was, but once I could understand language and certainly once I could hold a pen, I felt as if I were a poet. Writing poetry was the only job I wanted or could do [laughter] although it didn’t seem to be a viable one. And yet there were all these poets. I felt I was in this lost liminal space. Both my mother’s and father’s families learned poems by rote as children and were always spouting bits of Shakespeare and long poems like “Ode to a Nightingale,” a serious undertaking to recite aloud. So poetry was very much part of the fabric of my experience even if I couldn’t see where I could slot it in on a practical level. When I read “Mid-Term Break” and when I encountered more of Heaney’s work, I felt a sense of recognition—a sense that he was a sensitive “child poet” too. And I believed that he stepped into that role through the terrible experience of his brother’s dying. I also felt a sense of duty towards commemoration—toward honoring a particular moment; even as a child that responsibility Heaney shows resonated with me. sullivan: When did you first start publishing poems? kennefick: It took me a while to publish poems because I didn’t know how [laughter], and as a young...