Matt Kirkham’s The Lost Museums (Lagan, 2006) won the Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland.  He followed this up in 2011 with the Templar pamphlet Aged Fourteen My Grandfather Runs Away to Sea, and the collection The Dumbo Octopus (Templar, 2016).  His latest collection, Thirty-Seven Theorems of Incompleteness, tells the story of the marriage of Kurt and Adele Gödel.

Moyra Donaldson: Hi Matt – thank you for agreeing to this interview. I’ve known and enjoyed your work for a long time now, and was delighted to see your new collection, Thirty-Seven Theorems of Incompleteness come out in 2019 from Templar Press. The poems are a journey through the marriage of logician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele, as well as the events of the twentieth century that framed their lives. It has been described as having both ‘complex beauty and profundity’. Like previous collections, for example, The Lost Museums, also from Templar, the book has an overarching concept and theme. Is this something that you enjoy doing, concentrating your gaze on one thing at a time?

Matt Kirkham: Thanks Moyra for the invitation, and for your kind comments. 

Just thinking about some work by writers based in and around Belfast recently, thinking of The Tipping Line by Paul Maddern, of Gail McConnell’s Fothermather and Fourteen, and then there’s If All The World And Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton – great work, very different, all dealing with personal experience and writing their way through it. Then there’s your own Blood Horses, and my Thirty-Seven Theorems, more researched, historical, biographical rather than autobiographical – of course you do put your own direct experience of life and death with horses into your work. 

My point is that it’s not that unusual for poets to write their way into something and out the other end. But it’s not at all the same for me, researching something biographical and by and large abstracting myself from the work, as it is for these poets who I admire as they write about their life experience and what they are carrying. I recognise the urgency, the drive, but to date I’ve not been able to myself, not to the same extent sustained through one collection. 

So when I write this love story, this poetry collection, and then it’s got the historical and mathematical references and the various poetic forms in there, it strikes people as unusual, even if they are used to poets writing collections on a theme. This collection lives in the love story of Kurt and Adele, which as involving two very contrasting characters (on the surface at least) I was very much drawn to. With the new collection I have tried to inhabit these two personas, even to the extent of trying to memorise the poems for public readings in order to make Kurt and Adele more immediately present for the listener, a first for me.

MD: You have confessed to ‘having an unhealthy interest in maths. Succinct, symmetrical, elegant, with its own flowing logic’. You have also talked about your interest in discovering how these ideas might apply to poetry. Can you say more about this? I’m interested in the fact that the new collection begins with a quote from Kafka, The Trial – Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.

MK: I love the places where maths, art, poetry, music, logic overlap, and where one discipline acts as the foil for another. For example I love reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter talks about parallels between those three, and then at one point about Gödel and Kafka - both German-speaking Bohemians by birth; both had a profound impact on how we look at logic and reality.  The quote, which – spoiler alert - is just about Joseph K’s last thought before he dies in The Trial, spoke to me about this Kafkaesque quality both to Gödel’s work, his ideas about logic, and to his life. 

MD: Your love of form and your ability to use form is evident in all of your books. It is as if you enjoy setting yourself challenges. For instance, in your pamphlet, Aged Fourteen My Grandfather Runs Away To Sea, the first line of each poem echoes the last line of the one before. In your new collection the same kind of formal complexity can be seen in poems such as The Chinese Room Argument and After Lottie Reinger, yet it never feels forced. Is form something that comes naturally to you? Do you start a poem with its form in mind, or does it evolve in the writing?  Is this another place where your love of maths influences your poetry and your thinking?

MK: I’m always a novice when I write, an apprentice, a beginner. I write poetry in order to better understand poetry, its beauty and its logic. I don’t think it’s necessarily mathematical, though ideas of completeness and rounding things of run through maths and poetry. As far as poetry goes form can be a way of finding completeness. A working title for the collection was On the Incompleteness of Formal Systems, directly lifted from Kurt Gödel’s work. That phrase was there to remind me of the limits of form, how I can’t start with a form and then try to squeeze the poem into it. Thinking of poets whose work I love who use form so well, say Muldoon, and it never seems forced. And I never want to forget what Frank O’Hara said about how a poem should not be between two pages, but between two people.

In writing and reading over and re-drafting I get to a point where the poem tells you what it is. I don’t start out with a form, a given form, in mind. I mean, you mention The Chinese Room Argument, which is a mirror poem, in two stanzas with the second stanza holding, repeating the lines of the first but in reverse order. An early version of that one was published online with a very different form, and then I revisited it after a few months and it was clear that the poem was about the back-and-forth of communication, a love poem about the difficulties of love in a way, and so the poem itself had to go back, put itself into reverse, reflect on itself.

And then After Lotte Reiniger – Lotte Reiniger was a pioneer of film animation, a contemporary of Kurt and Adele, making black-on-white silhouette animated films in the mid twentieth century, so in writing a poem about Kurt thinking about seeing one of those films with Adele and thinking about her and their love for each other and the difficult times they has seen and how time affects their relationship, the poem’s urges were somehow to be built up and then cut back again, with all that repetition of lines.

There’s also a playfulness to poetic form. Poetry needs to be serious fun. One thing I don’t get is people who buy books before readings and then follow the poem on the page as the poet performs it. I love it when you get like halfway through listening to a poem and realise it’s a rhyming sonnet or a villanelle or a sestina, as that’s a mark of the poet’s craft in writing and performing a piece which sounds so natural and transcends the form. See if you’re reading it on the page as the poet performs it, you’re missing out on that. 

MD: It’s important to say that your love of nature and family is also evident in your poetry. How does day to day life influence your subject matter and your process? I know that you are a teacher, a stressful and demanding job. Is your job separate to your writing?

MK: Yes, you could look at say Jean Bleakney who will use her knowledge of horticulture in her poetic work. Then you get poets, and I’d include myself here, who have day jobs and who work day in day out with people and I suppose out of professional respect don’t exploit these people as source material.  But then we think it’s OK to do that with those nearest and dearest to us. Whenever I have done that I do ask myself why. Is it something to do with poetry’s roots in the domains of the sacred, or is it that maybe most poetry is ultimately love poetry in one form or another, and so demands honesty and immediacy? Which gives an urgency, given the state of the world, the literal state of the world, to poetry that responds to nature? You’ve asked me a question and I’m asking questions in reply which I’m not going to answer as  I’m not sure I can. 

MD: Now that Kurt and Adele are out in the world, what are you working on next?

MK: Ah, well, I’m working on reading as much good poetry as I can.  If I am writing it won’t surprise you that I’ll be writing without recourse to traditional form and writing one poem only about one thing and then moving on! Following from your last question, I think writing about family and writing as a sentient being on a threatened planet will come through. But I just want to keep learning what poetry is about.

Right now I’m working on a show with Bethany Ashley for the Science Festival about literature and science.

Thanks for your questions, Moyra, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re up to next!