What It Means to Be Alive

A conversation with the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama about belief, sacramental presence, the birds, the kitchen, Jesus, Persephone, and hope

February 7, 2025
Grand Rapids, Mich.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to sit for a while and talk with Pádraig Ó Tuama, the Irish poet and host of the celebrated podcast “Poetry Unbound.”

Pádraig is so lovely. He is also scary smart. I admire his thoughtfulness, and in particular, his incisive yet gentle way of perceiving—and appreciating—the world. Last week, he released not one but two new books of poetry, Kitchen Hymns and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other. Below you’ll find a lightly edited excerpt from our chat.

In other news, there’s one more Goodreads giveaway of Good Soil, which you can enter here. And don’t forget to check the tour dates for the book tour. I’d love to see you.

All my best,
Jeff

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A Conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama

A confession: I feel like a bit of a rube when it comes to poetry. I’ve felt uncomfortable with it ever since ninth-grade English class, when we were forced to write poetry. What counsel might you have for someone like me, who’s maybe a bit afraid of poetry—that I might not get it, or might get it wrong, or not have the keys to unlock whatever it is that I’m supposed to unlock?

First of all, you don't have to like poetry. You can live a rich life without it. But I do think, at a shock or a grief or a change or a joy, there can be a desire to turn to something that's going to give a bit of a companionship in language. And I think we all experience poetry, even if we say we don’t. Most people love music in one form or another. While that isn't formally poetry, it's not too far from it either. It's language with inherent musicality, and there's meaning and repeated themes. There are some songs you'll turn off because you know it'll upset you or remind you of something. So we have all of these associations with what language in form does. I do think we're surrounded by it.

Ultimately, the point of engaging with a poem is to see what happens within you as you engage, rather than thinking, Can I say exactly what the poet meant? The poet probably couldn't say exactly what the poet meant. Art is doing something much bigger than the artistic project as defined by the original artist.

Why do you write poems?

I need to. I turned to writing poems when I was 11, and I haven't stopped. We were reading poetry from the age of five to 17 in school, in two languages. It's mandatory; there's no avoidance of it in the Irish curriculum. I think there was only once, maybe twice, in all my years in school, where we had to write it, though. So just because there's a high familiarity with poetry in Irish schools, it doesn't necessarily mean everybody's writing it.

I wrote a poem about a dog initially. Some of it was just the play of the rhyme and the meter and the silliness. It was about a 10-foot dog. But of course, within the context of that, I was exploring something unexpected—a large dog, but also, finding myself enjoying writing poetry and not doing it for homework. So I just kept on going.

You’re often described as poet as well as a theologian. I'm curious about the landscape of faith you were brought up in.

I was born in 1975, at the tail end of a very Catholic Ireland. My very devout parents went to Mass every weekend, as did we; for the last many, many years, they've gone to Mass every day.

Ireland was changing, and there were critical voices emerging. But the role of the priest in the parish, and the bishop, the archbishop, and the cardinal in the context of the country, was important. What they had to say carried weight. If somebody had been interviewed on a television program, for instance, and the bishop said that was inappropriate, or a cardinal said that was outside the bounds, it would have been reported on. People were pushing the bounds of that, but what the hierarchy had to say was still important. And of course, there were still a lot of priests and nuns around, some of whom were doing diabolical things, and some of whom were doing extraordinary, courageous things—and all of whom were working for a system that, like all systems, demeans and depletes and demands. And it hadn't occurred to me that politics and culture and life and art and all of those things were separate from religion.

Your new collection of poetry is called Kitchen Hymns. I’m curious: What is the kitchen to you? There’s not much cooking in this book.

“Kitchen hymns” is a phrase used to refer to the hymns that people would have sung at home in Irish. They weren't in Latin, so therefore they couldn't have been sung in the chapel. In a certain sense, they refer to what it is that's sacred, but in domestic settings, and the umbrella of that appealed to me enormously: What could it gather in? The kitchen is a stand-in for a certain kind of everyday confessional that's absent sacramental presence, but fully present with a human one. What is it that we all have to say to each other, or ourselves, about what it means to be alive?

“A Kitchen Interior,” John George Mulvany, late 18th/early 19th century, oil on panel. From the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland

You say “absent sacramental presence.” Do you mean that in the strict Catholic sense?

I do, I suppose. “Sacrament” is something tangible, that can be touched. I've moved far away from any kind of doctrinal demand upon myself, but I think I'm sacramental to the core of my bones. That's just part of the remnant of having been brought up in such a highly Catholic environment like I was.

Perhaps another remnant is the wrestling with belief that permeates Kitchen Hymns. You’ve got all these poems entitled “Do You Believe in God?”. And the word “believe” appears again and again.

Not all of the poems are autobiographical, and I'm not the speaker in all of the poems; there are plenty of other speakers in the book. One of the poems describes a whole bunch of Baptists, mostly who came down from the north of Ireland, and they would, by and large, have considered themselves British, not Irish, because they were from this place that was partitioned in 1921 by the British. They used to talk about going on mission trips to Ireland. I have so many problems with all of the words in that—political as well as theological. But they would often ask people, “Do you believe in God?” With the absolute assumption that that person didn’t.

There's something about the strangeness of that question, of the arrogance of that question. I happened to make friends with a bunch of them. They were mostly 16, 17 years old, stopping people on the street in a very Catholic Ireland—people who'd lived through all kinds of things and had all kinds of sophisticated reasons to love or loathe God—and thinking that, somehow, they'd be able to say something that they'd learned in a preparatory class for how to convert Catholic heathen to the true faith.

I'm sure you had Catholic people doing the same thing in other places. But I was always struck by that strange question: “Do you believe in God?” What does it mean to believe in God? I, for a long time, tried. I became less and less interested, as decades went by, in thinking that the question of involvement in religion should rest on what my intellectual assent was or wasn't, or what I could explain. It felt like a very Enlightenment project to think that religion depended upon my capacity to explain or convince or convert or recruit. So I wanted to examine that question.

I think there are 15 poems in the book entitled, “Do You Believe in God?” Most of the poems respond to an abstract question with a tangible narrative. I was interested in exploring the word “you,” because “Do you believe in God?” is an invitation to conversation. What's the quality of the word “you” that passes between two people if one person asks that question of another? If the quality of the word “you” is truly meant, something really interesting might occur, whereas, if you just see somebody as a byproduct on the pathway to recruitment, well, then, that's a failure of language and a failure of human connectivity.

You say belief is assent, or requires explanation, which seems an intellectual thing. I don't always think of belief as that.

Some of it is practice, and some of it is tradition, and some of it is, you know— Forgive me for saying this: In liberal circles, there can be a kind of a trendy apologetics to try to wrap things into some kind of coherent narrative. Some of that is an intellectual assertion. Some of it is trying to provide some artistic framing and/or containment for the human experience. But some of it is just about trying to be damned clever, and that's a failure, I think, when you're in actual conversation with a human person.

Meaning that the cleverness somehow closes off something—

It means that the person is just a pawn, a tool to be used, so that you can say: And then I said this to them, and then they said this to me, and I said this back to them. It ultimately is a form of manipulation. There isn't much curiosity from the person who's asking, because they're convinced that they know what their next move is going to be. It's a game of chess, and I'm so uninterested in games of chess when it comes to questions that have to do with being alive.

You just said what you're not interested in. What are you interested in?

I'm very interested in what happens when we begin to ask serious questions about what it means to be alive, and what system of arrangement you put in, and what seems transcendent to you, and what you turn to when someone's asked, “Do you believe in God?” If I were to ask you, “Jeff, do you believe in God?”, what tangible story would you tell, not to try to convince or convert, but just to say, “Here's how my unconscious just brings something up today”? What is it that happens when you ask the question and then listen to yourself and see what's there?

Speaking of listening: You seem to be listening, in quite a few of these poems, to birds. The birds kept showing up again again. I don't know whether they're little prophets or conversation partners, but there were song thrushes in multiple poems, and long-tailed tits show up, and owls. What's with the birds?

I love birds. This book has been six years in the writing, but lots of it was written in the countryside, much of it during the Coronavirus pandemic. So there was simply a lot of time to look at birds. I learned about which ones eat from the ground and which ones are bullies and which ones can hang upside down. I just find them delightful.

There's something otherworldly about them too—or maybe not otherworldly, but this worldly, but they are not subject to certain questions that we are. The book ends with this untitled poem, but it’s also called “Missae,” from which we get the words “mission” and “Mass.” It's a kind of an order: “Go.” And the poem is praising all of these other living, breathing beings and their lack of interest in the questions of why, or who, or how.

—

[untitled/missæ]

I bless myself in the name
of the deer and ox,
the heron and the hare,
evangelists of land and wood
and air. The fox as well, that red
predator of chickens, prey of cars.
And the salmon and the trout
sleeping in the reeds.
When the wren wakes, I’ll ask
her blessing, and if she comes out
she’ll bring it. The squirrel buries
when she thinks no one else can
see. I bless myself in her secrecy.
There’s a fieldmouse I’ve seen
scampering at dusk, picking up the seeds
dropped by the finches and the tits
throughout the day. Some nest of frenzy
waits her kindness and her pluck.
I go in the name of all of them,
their chaos and their industry,
their replacements, their population,
their forgettable ways, their untame natures,
their ignorance of why,
or how, or who.

—
Much of your life has been about navigating conflict—conflict in the church, in your soul, in society. And I found flashes of conflict—maybe friction... is that a better word?—in some of these poems. One that I made a note of was the poem “Who Do You Say I Am?”
—

Who Do You Say I Am?

Who do you say I am? he asked.

You are such a
narcissist, she said.

Did you know him? he said.Am I like him?

Yes, she said. Like you
he believed in things worth dying for,
and he died alone. Echo was left empty.
Deaths like that
are meaningless. Sacrifice is not salvation.
Beauty fades, purpose too.
And certitude.

I believe you, he said.

I don’t think you do, she said.

—

I love that little bit where it says, “I believe you, he said./ I don't think you do, she said.” Because it felt so true to life.

That's a conversation between Jesus and Persephone. She has been leaving hell every spring for eternity, and it's his first time. They meet just outside the gates and fall in love and trust each other with questions. But while she's drawn to him, she's also wary of him, because he is so new to all of this. He has finally begun to be in a situation where he isn't trying to dictate other people's lives. He's kind of accepted his own lostness, and he's desperate to find a new system. And when he says to her, “I believe you,” she's, in a certain sense, doing him a kindness by saying, “I don't think you do,” just pushing him back to his own interiority, rather than allowing him to desperately move from one god to another.

In many ways, the conversational poems, the whole way throughout this book, are about things that happen when you're left with going, Oh, what do I do now? And how attractive that can be, and how creative that can be, in the context of people who are good to each other, as Jesus and Persephone are. They are good to each other—and that brings about all kinds of conflict.

In the midst of conflict, in the midst of tension, often people feel threat and fear and insecurity. Your curiosity and your posture, especially nowadays, they seem quite uncommon, maybe countercultural—soft when so much of the world feels hard, and tender when so much of the world feels calloused. I'm wondering where this tenderness, this softness, comes from.

Grief is a great teacher, not that I'd ever look for it. When someone you love dies, you're left in the unknowing. At the heart of it, there is so much in the book, and in my life, that is interested in learning the intelligence of grief. Not because I'm interested in being dour or trying to keep us all down—I’m not. I love fun. I love joy. But fun and joy and grief are all great companions.

When do you first remember paying attention to grief in your own life?

I grew up in a lot of violence. I grew up in terrible, terrible violence, and so I was paying attention to grief before I knew that it was what it was.

There’s a word in your book I’d never come across before—and I do love when I'm reading a piece of writing, and I come across new words. What is a hellpsalm?

I did a pontifical undergrad in theology, and I scored the highest that the school saw in an examination on hell. My supervisor, he was a scholar of John's Gospel, and he called me into his office, and he said, “How is it that you did so well on this exam?” I said, “Well, I'm a fan of Dante's Inferno.” And he said, “This is an inappropriate score to get.” I was a moderate-to-fine student in general, but he was shocked that I did so very well on one exam.

When I got around charismatic evangelicalism, I was told I had devils in me and was put through exorcisms. And some people would say, If you're gay, you're going to die—die of AIDS and go to hell. These are the terrible things people would say. For so many of us who have been on the sharp end of language like that, there's an invitation in there to think about hell and to think about the devil. So I began thinking about Jesus of Nazareth in hell, and what it would be like if he had turned agnostic in there and turned away from certitude. What would he say?

The hellpsalms are poems that are squashed down the bottom of a page. They are in the voice of somebody who is feeling lost in themselves, and I suppose there's an intelligence in there to say, Well, won't we all feel like that at some point? And what will you say when you're there? And what might you discover there, not that there's any purpose behind any of this, but what might, nonetheless, you find to cling on to?

I wrote about 100 of these hellpsalms at the end of 2020. A close friend I'd had since I was 11 died suddenly at the start of COVID, and then another two people that I knew died. Then I lost eight years of work on the computer during an awful upgrading snafu. It was awful. and I couldn't bear to look at the screen because I thought, I'm starting all over again? My God! What?

So I kept my eyes closed, and I started to write all of these psalms, and I called them hellpsalms.

“The Descent into Hell,” unknown artist, 17th century. From the collection of the Benaki Museum

Are they meant to be in the voice of Jesus?

Some kind of Jesus.

Human suffering has been the cause for philosophical inquiry for millennia, and this is just a humble, probably inadequate attempt to also add my own words into the conversation. It’s an attempt to step into the mind and language of somebody who is going, “I thought I was doing my best already, and I didn't think my expectations were too high.” To hear what lament sounds like there interested me.

One of the things in these hellpsalms is that I was trying to explore what it would be like if somebody were to say things without the pressure from anybody to bring resolve to it, to say, “Oh, but here's how you should change your mind,” or, “Here's how it'll all work out together.”

Let me ask you about one in particular. It's the one that goes, “I was no fool, but I wanted to love the world.” This one really touched me.

—

I was no fool, but I wanted to love the world. Of course I knew dragonflies are as brutal as they are beautiful, and I’d heard how baboons plan revenge with intelligence and cruelty. I’ve seen what tornadoes do, and emperors too. I know what it’s like to suffocate, sweat blood, betray and be betrayed. I’ve hummed the melodies of warpipes. I’ve been let down. But I wanted to believe it was possible to love the terrible world, love being alive, know that threat isn’t the only pursuit, that nightmares aren’t inevitable, and that courage is available especially in the worst moment. I liked the unexpected. Until it happened. I wanted to believe something mattered.

—

Yeah, I like that one.

“I wanted to believe it was possible to love the terrible world.” What does it mean to you to love the world?

To be alive to what's happening. I'm in Hell's Kitchen in New York at the moment, and in the room where I'm sitting right now, there's a shaft that goes down the center of the building so that there can be some kind of light. It's always a kind of a gray light. And I love looking at that gray light. It's very modest, even on a very sunshiny day. I like looking at what the light is doing. That's part of loving the world.

Later on, I need to go and buy some food because a friend is coming tomorrow night for some dinner, and I want to make a lamb stew the day before he arrives, so that it'll taste even better the day that we eat it. And that's part of loving the world.

There's some people who I want to write to, and that's part of loving the world.

All of those things—noticing the world, being in it, doing what you can—that's part of loving the world.

Your poem “The Book of Revelation” made me laugh.

—

The Book of Revelation

What’s your love language? he asked.
Dying, she replied.

No, no, he said. There’s five:
words of affirmation, touch, and gifts,
the fourth is time, and, damn, I forget the fifth,
I know it rhymes with purpose.

Where do you get this shit? she said. Anyway,
all of them. And death. Hunger too. And things I don’t have
the words for.

It doesn’t work like that, he said. In the book
you answer fifty questions and get results
by turning to the end.

You and your certitudes, she said.

Come on, come on, he said, just play along. Which one’s yours:
words, or touch, or time, or gifts, or—
service! yes, that’s the fifth.

Did you love your kids? she said.
Of course I did, he said.
How? she said. With words, or touch, or time,
or gifts? Or piles of knickers, jocks, and socks
left laundered on the landing?

Fine. You’ve made your point, he said.

If you want to know, mine is words of affirmation.
I bet you yours is time.

—

When I was doing my undergraduate studies, The Five Love Languages was inflicted on me on a regular basis.

Terrible book.

A friend once confronted me. She said that I wasn't being a good friend to her, because I knew what her love language was, but was refusing to use it. In this poem, you have these people talking about love languages, and the guy says, “What's your love language?” And the woman responds, “Leaving.” That made me laugh. [Note: We were discussing a slightly different version of the poem.]

Then she says, “Dying,” later on.

What inspired this poem?

It’s called the Book of Revelation because it’s about what's being revealed. She says, “What's with you and certitude, where do you get this shit?”, because she's again confronting him. This character on the far side of God is still trying to look for God, even though he has seen that that project is inadequate, and he needs to improve his way of thinking about what's going to help, but he also knows it, because later on, he says, “Come on, come on, just play along.” She's resistant and pushing back, but that's part of her love language too.

That's partly why I really like the Persephone voice in this book: She reminds me of some of the people who I love most in the world. They just say exactly what they think. They're not caught up in, Oh, God, am I going to hurt you? Am I going to offend you? Is that the wrong thing? I've spent a life being plagued by all those kinds of worries, so Persephone is somebody who I think I'd like to be like. She's free to say what she wants to say, rather than saying, Oh, there's this system. I like her capacity to push back. I like that she's alive to her own life rather than thinking how she might fit in with the system that somebody else came up with.

“The Abduction of Persephone,” Scarsellino, 16th century, oil on canvas

In one poem, you talk about hope, and there's capital H, hope, and then one of the characters calls “small hopes.” Where are you finding hope right now, whether capital H or small?

I don't know what to think about capital-H hope, but I certainly find evidence everywhere, and I need it, for small-h hope. The ways in which people go about things with courage: They make a brave statement. They ask a question. They initiate something spontaneous. They create a collaboration with somebody else.

A hope, when spoken of in the abstract, can often just seem like it's something that might happen in the future. But what I love about people's courage in the present moment is that it makes a different future happen. Whether or not they'd call themselves hopeful is secondary. What they are is creative and spontaneous and able to take a risk. And I find that really inspiring. I love being around people like that. That kind of energy motivates my life.

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Kitchen Hymns is now available wherever good books are sold. Please buy it. It’s lovely, just like Pádraig.