Grace Wilentz

Abstract

Grace Wilentz Grace Wilentz and Kelly Sullivan grace wilentz was born in New York City. She moved to Ireland in 2005 to study the Irish language and became an Irish citizen in 2015. Educated in the United States, England, and Ireland, she worked with Seamus Heaney while an undergraduate at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Harvard Advocate, the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and on RTÉ radio. Wilentz’s first collection, The Limit of Light (The Gallery Press, 2020) was named one of the best books of the year by the Irish Independent and the Irish Times. She was recently awarded a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. ________ Grace Wilentz and Kelly Sullivan spoke in person over lunch in Greenwich Village, New York, in November 2022 and completed the interview through written correspondence. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: I was going to start the conversation with a question about your real-life interactions with Seamus Heaney. I would love to hear more about that. When did you first work with him? grace wilentz: In the early 2000’s, after Heaney’s Electric Light was published, I was a young poet, interested in tuning in to what was happening in poetry globally. At the time I was making my way through Heaney’s work, but it would be another few years before I graduated from high school, went off to college, and had the opportunity to work with Heaney. In September 2003, I started at Harvard, and the following semester I enrolled in my first creative writing course with the poet Peter Richards. Heaney was a visiting professor at the time although he’d stopped teaching undergraduate workshops by then. I remember [End Page 198] that he lived in Adams House and was known not only for being approachable, but actively friendly. I was disappointed that Heaney wasn’t teaching undergraduates anymore although he would offer a reading or a talk to the wider university community. Though graduate students in the English Department quietly nicknamed him “famous Seamus,” a lot of students didn’t read contemporary poetry or necessarily know who he was. I remember economics and computer science majors with stories of Heaney carrying his tray from the buffet to the long tables in the Adams House dining hall and asking if he could join them for lunch. They had great chats with him, even if they only learned later who he was. The opportunity to work with Heaney came as a total surprise to me. But to tell that story, I need to back up a little and give some context to my own journey with Irish poetry. I have no Irish roots, but in my house growing up there was great respect for Irish writing. I grew up in Greenwich Village where my dad, Eli Wilentz, ran a bookstore during the beat scene called The 8th Street Bookshop—and with his brother Ted also set up two small presses, Corinth Books and Totem Press. They collaborated with LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, and together published first books and early work by Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Joans, Anne Waldman, and Jay Wright. My dad edited an important anthology about the beat scene, and the book-shop was really more than what we think of as a bookstore today. It was a cultural hub. They threw parties, and so he was friendly with many writers and also other artists like the Clancy Brothers. There are photographs taken by Fred McDarrah of Brendan Behan, Anais Nin, and Grace Paley at the bookstore’s readings and parties. In my dad’s view, W. B. Yeats was the poet. I remember he made a rubbing of Yeats’s grave when he travelled to Ireland, framing it for our house. So perhaps all that seeded my interest in Irish culture. The summer before I started university, I came across some of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems translated into English. Her work really spoke to me, especially her feminist reinterpretations of Irish myths and the...