NPR's On Being Features Poet David Whyte

In conversation with On Being's Krista Tippett, poet and philosopher David Whyte discusses his Irish accent. "My accent is a movable frontier, I think. I grew up with an Irish accent in the house through my mother and all the usual Irish sayings and imaginings and then spent quite a bit of time in Ireland and then came to the States in my adulthood. So I think my accent’s about 40 miles off the coast of County Clare, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic." More, from there: 

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Would you explain for people who don’t know that you talk about growing up — it was your mother who was Irish, right, and your father was from Yorkshire — and that there was this interplay in you between imaginative Irish and the grounded Yorkshire.

Mr. Whyte: Yes, Ireland has its own kind of grounding. But it’s grounded in the imagination and in subverting the foundations of everyday life. And Yorkshire is very much here in the world, very workaday. But sometimes Yorkshire is so grounded, it’s surreal, and it comes out — it turns into its opposite. Yorkshire’s a place where the Industrial Revolution started in the world. But it’s also the place of Emily Brontë’s moors, the wildness of the Dales — quite remote places. I remember, when I was seven or eight years old, realizing that I wasn’t supposed to choose between the two places, even though they were so different. I was supposed to live out my life. Nowadays, I would put words into my mouth as a seven-year-old and say I was supposed to live out the conversation between them both. But something felt, physically, very close. Of course, my work as a poet and philosopher has matured into working with what I call “the conversational nature of reality,” which is the fact that we don’t get to choose so often between things we hope we can choose between.

Learn more at On Being.