Éireann Lorsung [photo credit: David Torralva] works in a field of images, objects, movement, and texts, and especially in the overlap between printmaking and poetry. Her publications include
The Century, winner of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Her book, and
Music for Landing Planes By, named a 'new and noteworthy collection' by
Poets & Writers.
Pattern-book (2025) is newly out from Carcanet Press, and Milkweed Editions will publish
Pink Theory! in 2026. She is a 2016 NEA Fellow and held the 2025 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.
[Éireann Lorsung reads in Dublin at Books Upstairs on Sunday, July 13 at 2pm with Canadian writers rob mclennan and Christine McNair, and Irish poet Christodoulos Makris]1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?My first book,
Music For Landing Planes By, was also my MFA thesis (in a revised form), and that it was published at all that changed my life—or, really, what I understood to be possible for me. My teacher at the University of Minnesota,
William Reichard, had had us write post-MFA publication trajectories as part of our thesis class. I had very sincerely written that I planned to make a dozen copies of my manuscript and leave them on public buses, benches, and in the grocery store. This was the extent of my interest in publication at the time. To his credit, Bill knew me well enough to know that I was totally serious, and he sent my manuscript to Milkweed without my knowledge. (I have no qualms about this. I would not have submitted the manuscript on my own, possibly ever.) Without Bill, I doubt I would have had a first book, which means I would not have had my second or third collections with Milkweed either. I am certain I would still be writing and publishing in all kinds of forms—making books myself, publishing other people—but my sense of myself as participating in literature in public would likely be very different. Bill's generosity and perceptiveness opened a path for me I would not have known was there, or how to open, for myself.
My most recent collection,
Pattern-book, is in some ways very close to
Music For Landing Planes By. It's different from the intervening two collections which are in some ways more rangey. Pattern-book contains mostly short poems (≤ two pages). Most of these are in the lyric tradition that was given to me as the primary tradition of anglophone poetry when I was a student. Like that first book, I can see my attraction to and tendency to think using image in this new collection. I also see certain religious principles—wonder at bigness and complexity, the preciousness of living things—at work in both books. This collection is different from my first collection, though, in part because time has passed and I have lived away from the city where I was brought up (though Minneapolis still figures prominently in these poems). I can now also understand my writing reflectively and contextually in ways I couldn't when I was a younger writer, and I think this has allowed me to structure the new book in more intricate ways; I can rely on my acuity of perception as well as on the intuition that years of reading gave me.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?My parents gave me poetry alongside visual art and music and things to eat and places to go, one of many ordinary beautiful things that should be and can be democratically available. We had some children's poetry books, and when I was in high school my dad gave me his copy of
Edna St Vincent Millay's Poems Selected for Young People. But books were just around. My dad taught special ed and had done a teaching Master's and so he had the books from that in the house—he had loved and still revered his poetry teacher—and so I read
Understanding Poetry and other such textbooks when I was in high school as well. We didn't have a ton of money, but we did have great access to the public library, to public museums like the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and to music both on the radio and in our house. So poetry was just a normal part of life, one more thing that was possible.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?I am always "collecting data"—literally collecting instances of plants or weather or bus routes, among other things. And I am always assembling poems and other things from that data and from observations and impressions. Projects are less things I begin and more things I realize are happening when I put a frame around some of the things that are already ongoing. Because I am writing all the time—not very much at a time, but in a more or less continuous way—by the time my brain catches up and begins to suggest forms or 'project' ideas, the work is almost always there in pieces. So things come slowly and then happen quickly. That means tracing a single draft is, at least in the last five or ten years, less straightforward. And in fact I'm interested in the way the same phrase, image, idea may recur across poems or other work, without ever getting "used up".
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?As above, I tend to be-writing and then realize certain conceptual or formal likenesses that are taking place. I generally then respond to these, amplifying or complementing them. Once I have a book in mind, it often helps me reframe and reposition individual poems—ones I had thought were definitely in may be sorted out by a given frame, and others brought in. For example, when I was writing
The Century, one working title was
Mother Country, Fatherland, and then I had a number of poems in the manuscript that more directly thought about family structures. Those are almost all gone in the book that ended up being published—not because I didn't like them, but because the focusing idea in the book shifted and they no longer did what I wanted the book to do. I do think about books as forms in themselves, and though I don't write toward a book necessarily, I do revise toward the book once I know what it is, meaning thinking about what poems go in, in what order, and why.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?I love to read. I love to perform. To me, speaking poems in public is an essential part of writing/publishing. What I read, and how, depends on what the audience is, where we are, what time of day it is. I like to think about performance as yet another way of revising the poems or the book—a separate, but related, project. Reading aloud to others is about equal to the thrill of being translated, to me. Audiences are a true gift.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?Yes, I am trying to figure out how language does what it does. I am also interested in charisma: how can the writing convince the world to look (not necessarily
at the writing but at the world)? What are the uses of charisma on the page and how does it appear? And I am also trying to see what it's like to work in as narrow a circumference as I can, and, relatedly, how to insist that nothing is beneath notice. I am trying to ask myself to stay with things I might be tempted to say have been resolved, or can be taken for granted. I am trying to ask myself, "how do you know?" when I say, "I know".
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?I think the role of the writer should be like the role of the bus driver, librarian, teacher, grocery store worker, post officer, etc.: to do what you do as fully as possible, with as deep a sense of being among other people whose lives are as real and precious as your own as possible. To be attentive and to care for others' attentiveness. To take time and to make a world in which others can also take time.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?I think this depends on the editor. I know that being read with care and precision is one of the greatest gifts—and so rare. I recently had the experience of being
copy-edited by the Kenyon Review editors and it was so thorough and so attentive to every detail. It felt like having a very good doctor. They really had figured out what I meant and caught tiny gradations of meaning that I hadn't been able to. In general I find working with editors—who tend to be readers who are both committed and open at the same time—a very welcome thing.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?Don't rush.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose to the graphic essay)? What do you see as the appeal?Generally very easy, but also perhaps not so much about appeal or even decision anymore. I have gotten to a point where I can kind of sense what the texture of the idea is and what kind of form it will want. Sometimes this gets revised in the making, or I reprise the idea in another form or genre. But generally the ideas come with their forms and genre demands attached.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?Right now I don't have a writing routine in the standard sense (a certain duration of writing on a regular schedule). We have had a very unsettled few years—since 2020, really—and I deal with unsettledness by establishing short-term constraints that I can respond to. For example, from March of 2023 through March of 2024, I wrote an essay every week and posted it online in a public space. I also keep running notes, added to almost daily on my walk to work and on errands, where I track plant and animal life as well as weather and encounters with human beings—these are for a longer-term project that I don't yet know the form of. When I have a deadline, I get that work done in a number of short stints—usually I can write an essay in a few sittings, and revise in a few more. But I long for a time when I know we will not be moving, I know that we have stable employment, and I can imagine just writing for an hour every day. I struggle to do that when I feel like there are so many things up in the air. Like a lot people probably, my day generally begins by looking at the texts I've gotten overnight. I try to read on paper after that, and not to look at news or Bluesky until after breakfast.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?Repeating something I've already done is one of my go-to methods for unsticking myself.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?Soda bread or brownies baking; Lemon Pledge (dusting fluid).
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?Yes to all of these! And philosophy as well. I don't know how to make work except to be looking at pictures, reading books and papers and poems, listening to lectures, walking around in the world, listening to music. Of course this means that some of the things I make don't act "like poems"; I have had people tell me, on several occasions, that my poems are "too philosophical" to be poems (no), or that they "have no form" (no), or that my wide focus means my life "doesn't make sense" (also no). But I understand that my breadth of interests and inputs means that I am not always making things in ways that are recognizable, including to myself. I make them to find out what they might be.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?People writing now:
Christina Sharpe, whose
In The Wake is a central text for method and also poetics for me; her
Ordinary Notes is also in my pantheon.
Kiese Laymon—he is able to say clearly what he means, and I love the chapter called "Meager" in
Heavy especially. He seems to have a real commitment to transparency and to know what he values and why. I admire that.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, similarly, for her clarity and commitments, and also for the way she writes sociology for a broad audience without giving in to the (false) idea that that audience can't handle complexity.
Gillian Allnutt, the living writer I feel is closest to
Dickinson.
Kate Zambreno, whose
Heroines and
To Write as if Already Dead are precious to me.
Leslie Marmon Silko for
Ceremony, one of the most perfect books in the world.
Thomas A. Clark, whose work with his wife
Laurie Clark I find a beautiful model of an artist's life, and whose
Farm By The Shore is a delight from start to finish. Similarly, the life-work of
Erica Van Horn and
Simon Cutts, who run
Coracle Press—and whose 'writing' extends to the deeply creative acts of housemaking and housekeeping—is very inspirational to me.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?I would like to own a house and be able to live in one place for a decade at least. I'd like to be able to paint the walls and plant some fruit trees and get used to staying. And I would like to have steady and consistent access to healthcare.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?I would love to be an orchestra conductor. If I weren't writing—but I can't imagine a life where I was not making poems and other things—I am sure I would be teaching. Teaching is and always has been the primary way I think of my occupation.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?It was there, it was free, and it could be done anytime. And reading alone and with others always felt good.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?Lara Pawson's Spent Light. Films: in the theater,
Perfect Days. At home,
Before Sunrise.
20 - What are you currently working on?A book dealing with the artist
Corita Kent, for whom teaching was as important as her art practice, about teaching and artmaking and the worlds that collaboration opens up for both. I'm also working on things to do with others—workshops making concrete poems using screenprinting; a series of banner-making sessions that lead to public processions.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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