Behind the Poetry: At Irish Times Kate Dempsey Talks About Her Full-Length Poetry Debut

Irish poet, Kate Dempsey, introduces readers to her debut collection of poetry, The Space Between, at Irish Times. It's a long time coming! The earliest poem dates back fifteen years; the most recent Dempsey composed a year ago. More:

The title of my debut poetry collection, The Space Between, is taken from a line of my poem, Reaching Agreement.

Your lips move but I’m hearing
the way you taste the space between your words,
phrasing so there’s something more than silence,
an emphasis pregnant with promise.

I chose this as a title because I think that a poem is more than the sum of its words. And a person is more than the words her or she is saying. The meaning is in the space between.

I have been to a lot of readings in Dublin and around the country – there are lots of festivals and events if you keep your eyes and ears open. This poem was inspired by a reading in a warm room with a good-looking novelist. I found myself drifting off, listening not to what he was saying, but how he was saying it, his body language and obvious passion with which he delivered it.

Once I’d chosen The Space Between for the title, I realised that there were lots of spaces between things that I was exploring in my poems. I have poems that look at the space between parents and children, between lovers, between friends. I spent a lovely hour once in the coffee-shop at the Horse and Jockey watching and listening to a group of elderly ladies who obviously met up frequently for a chat and catch up, enjoying a coffee and a slice of cake. I wanted to celebrate that in a poem, that long-standing friendship and support and pleasure. How wonderful to have that to look forward to. It’s not all dementia and loss.

I run the Poetry Divas, a collective of women poets, with Tríona Walsh, Barbara Smith and Maeve O’Sullivan. We read our poetry at events and festival and love to blur the wobbly boundary between page and stage. We are well published but strongly believe that poems are meant to be heard as well as read. We alternate and work off each other, so I’ll read the poem such as An Agreeable Afternoon and someone else will have a poem with cake as clothes. And then someone else will have a poem about a coat or baby clothes and so on. It’s infectious how each poem can chime into the next.

The most recent poem in the collection, Unintentional Installation, was written when I was in Dingle last year with the Poetry Divas. We had a gig at Feile na Bealtaine. We went for a walk in the rain to an art exhibition in the monsignor’s garden and there was this wheelbarrow... so I wrote this riff on the William Carlos Williams poem, The Red Wheelbarrow. [...]

Nice to hear about the making of poems, in poets's own words. Learn more about Kate Dempsey's work at Irish Times.