A poem wants to change a perspective on the world. That is its ambition: An Interview with Pat Boran

Pat Boran attended the conference ‘Irish Itinerary 2018 (EFACIS): Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture’ at the University of La Rioja, Spain. The following interview took place there on 15 February 2018, and covered Spanish translations of his work, poetry writing, formal innovation, ecocriticism, Imagism, photography, friendship, Irish poetry and broadcasting. Boran offered a number of insightful responses and shared his most honest thoughts on aesthetics and motivations to write poetry. Portlaoise-born poet, writer and broadcaster Pat Boran currently lives in Dublin. He is an elected member of Aosdána, the Irish association which honours distinguished artistic work. He is one of the most widely acclaimed Irish poets of his generation. His work has been translated into several languages and received numerous awards. In 2008, he received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award of the University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota. He has published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose – among them The Next Life (2012), Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (2016), and A Man is Only as Good: A Pocket Selected Poems (2017), as well as the humorous memoir The Invisible Prison (2009) and the popular writers’ handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop. Besides these published works, Pat is a former presenter of The Poetry Programme and The Enchanted Way on RTÉ Radio 1, and works part-time as a literary editor of Dedalus Press. He has edited several anthologies of prose and poetry, for example, with Gerard Smyth, the anthology If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song, the Dublin: One City, One Book designated title for 2014, and, with Eugene O’Connell, The Deep Heart’s Core (2017).