Tim Costello is a poet living in Donnybrook.

How did you first become interested in writing poetry?
My interest in writing poetry came from a need to create a record of emotional atmospheres that I felt only poetry was capable of. Though I could possibly point to earlier attempts to write, or engagements with other people’s poetic work, it was only as this need emerged that I seriously began to write poetry as opposed to verse and gained some insight into the larger poetic tradition.

How does poetry differ from verse?
Poetry is an attempt either to penetrate or to reflect reality while verse is the representation of what someone feels either poetry or reality ‘should’ be. A young girl plays being a mother with dolls, invoking the feelings within herself of how she imagines motherhood should be. However, when she grows up, she may well have a real infant to take care of who, unlike a doll, cries and demands attention at times that may not be convenient.

And yet, the process of real motherhood is much more emotionally fulfilling than playing with dolls. Verse is playing with dolls to poetry’s motherhood. Of course, this distinction to a certain extent is an arbitrary personal one, though I believe that there is an essential difference of a moral order between the works of poets like T.S. Eliot and Gottfried Benn, and one who, in my opinion, is a versemaker like Alan Ginsberg.

And why do you consider Ginsberg a versemaker?
In my opinion, his is essentially a religious poetry, in that it represents how people ‘should’ feel as opposed to how they really do feel. Poetry deals with ‘concrete’ facts and feelings arising from those; hence, Yeats’s admitted struggle between his attachment to neo-platonic philosophy and his vocation as a poet, which involved dwelling on immediate experiences as opposed to transcendent principles.

What poets have you read who have influenced your own writing?
Firstly, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), not in terms of technique, but his devotion to reality, which drew out from the often sordid atmosphere of the Paris of his day, its native beauty. Unlike the romantics, who were experimental in form but reactionary in content– I don’t mean politically reactionary, but in that they remained under the spell of classical or pastoral themes, largely ignoring the new world that was arising out of the industrial revolution.

Could you give an example?
Yes, but it is impossible to get the full sense of what I mean unless you read a poem in its entirety. A poem is an organic whole in which parts cannot be taken out without their mutilation. I feel very uneasy about quoting parts of poems.

I agree, but it would be good to give our readers a taste of what you mean, even if they can’t have the entire feast.

OK– from Baudelaire, ‘The Seven Old Men’:
Suddenly I saw an old man, in rags,
Of the same yellow as the rainy sky,
His aspect would have made alms rain down
Except for the wicked gleam in his eye.

Baudelaire was a conservative classicist in form, but drew the inspiration for most of his work from the actual day-to-day reality of his times. However, in my own poetry, I feel form should never be arbitrary but should be made to serve the purpose of expressing the truth of the poem’s content. I do not believe as long as this is remembered that form should be a topic for polemical debate.

The poet who has influenced me probably the most is the Austrian expressionist poet, Georg Trakl (1887-1914). I like the way Trakl develops an emotional atmosphere purely by presenting various images that by their own power invoke the mood and allow the truth he seeks to express to emerge organically from the scene, as in ‘Helian’:

When autumn rises
The grove is a sight of sober clarity.
Along the red walls we loiter at ease
And the round eyes follow the flight of birds.
In the evening pale water gathers in the dregs of burial urns.

How and when do you write poetry?
People say that a poem is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. But without being inspired, there is nothing to perspire over. For me at least, the initial inspiration is everything, and if it doesn’t come, then I am incapable of producing any poetry.

Usually, a line or a phrase will come to me during the course of a day, and the poem will slowly emerge from and around that, rather than from a theme. I am unable to write or at least write well about what I am experiencing in the moment or too recently to have an emotional distance from it.

Often I find that the poems of mine that I am most fond of are the ones written with the most emotional intensity– not necessarily the best, or the poems which appeal most to others. In fact, from a purely artistic point of view, they are usually my worst work.

Poetry, however, at the end of the day is an art, and serves a greater end than the sentimental satisfaction of the poet. The fact that someone puts anything down on paper or indeed forms any impression or expression into language implies a wish to communicate.

That which we are in the middle of or very close to often we cannot understand properly– it is only when we have an emotional distance from an event or feeling that we can comprehend it enough to be able to fashion an expression of it into art.

The purpose of poetry is to increase human understanding.

Tim’s poem ‘In Place of Vengeance’ appears on the poetry page.