Stephen Sexton

Abstract

Stephen Sexton Stephen Sexton and Kelly Sullivan stephen sexton’s first book If All the World and Love Were Young received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Sexton was also awarded the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020; he won the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Both collections will be published by Wake Forest University Press in 2023. ________ Kelly Sullivan interviewed Stephen Sexton over Zoom on 13 February 2023. This is an edited and shortened version of that conversation. kelly sullivan: I know you grew up in the north of Ireland. I’m wondering if you remember when you first encountered Seamus Heaney’s poetry? stephen sexton: It would have been as a teenager, and I’m guessing I was probably fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I know that we were looking at chiefly early works, the Death of a Naturalist poems. sullivan: Were you already interested in poetry at that point? Or was that a later development for you? sexton: I think I was. English classes were the ones I liked most, but I don’t know if I was interested in poetry, as such. When I was much younger—it was probably busy-work in class as a little kid—we were told to write a poem. And I distinctly remember the feeling of doing that: the feeling of talking myself to the end of the line, having to find a rhyme, and loving the search through my vocabulary for that rhyme. But by the time I got to Heaney in my teens, it’s probably fair to say I was more interested in poetry as something I wrote—as [End Page 171] the experience of making, rather than earnestly thinking about other people’s work. So I was aware of his poems, but not properly, not in a mature way. sullivan: Were you also reading Ciaran Carson and other writers at that time? Or was it just whatever was on the course at the moment that you were absorbing? sexton: I‘d say mostly what was on the course. I was reading a lot—pretty much all of the Goosebumps horror novel series by R. L. Stein. But I imagine with poetry I probably wasn’t reading anything that wasn’t on the course. We read fairly standard work in the curriculum—maybe Wilfred Owen, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin. I was talking to my colleague Leontia Flynn recently about Larkin, who was in Belfast for some time. We talked about this strange feeling that, perhaps embarrassingly, we were more drawn to Larkin than to Heaney. Certainly at that age when I was reading poetry, Larkin was much more thrilling to me. There was something about his tidiness— not exactly foreignness. But something about Heaney’s writing seemed supremely local in a way that was too close for me to see it properly then. I grew up in the countryside, so those poems didn’t feel like objects of artifice, and I couldn’t really see them as poems. I saw them as out the window. Philip Larkin was not out the window. He was something different. sullivan: It’s interesting that you felt too close to Heaney’s world. Where did you grow up? sexton: I grew up in County Down, nine miles exactly from Belfast, but crucially it was countryside. We lived in a house in the country surrounded by farms. There were cows at the back window and the natural world was really present. Although none of us were farmers, we were surrounded by farmers. sullivan: I’m also curious about your sense of Heaney’s presence within the poetry world. You did a Ph.D. at Queen’s. You are at the Seamus Heaney Centre for creative writing there. Were you there at the time of Heaney’s death? [End Page 172] sexton: I did an M.A. here from 2011 to 2012. And then I continued on with a Ph.D. immediately after...