Pádraig Ó Tuama

speaker

1,142 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 18 Sep

Pádraig Ó Tuama’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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Poetry Unbound · Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Kimberly Campanello part 2 of 2 · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, you like the idea that language changes things.

Yeah, I mean, years ago I wrote a poem called The Poet is Priest, which I'll send you and I'll never publish it because I'm kind of embarrassed as to how far I took the metaphor.

I am interested, though, in what it is we're looking for in public language of something that can bear witness, some kind of rite of passage.

Not to try to say it'll all be okay, but to somehow create a container of language that can be a holding point.

And that that can almost like a public therapy.

And I don't think of poetry as public therapy, but I sometimes think that language can do the work that can give us a container for being able to hold the shape of our life.

And that I think can be a very powerful thing.

That was one of the things that I found so compelling in your mother baby home is that it was a, the performance of it is a container for honoring all of these, all of the records that are there and all of the ages and the names of these poor young people, these babies.

And then all of the unnamed, the people who, you know, the mothers who had no choice within the context of this and no information.

So to my mind, it felt like a funeral rite, as well as a rite of rage for a society.

And in that way, you felt like a priest of fury when I saw you do it.

And the theatre of it too, because even in this devastating piece you read, and also in the early piece you read from Inferno, you know, you're very careful in how you modulate your voice.

There's a real journey in terms of the volume and the tone with which you speak or recite.

Yeah, for sure.

I wonder, is there something of the Lucille Clifton, you know, that extraordinary poem, Won't You Celebrate With Me, What I've Shaped Into a Kind of Life?

which is in many ways a very short and terse response to Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, which goes on for, you know, pages and pages.

I love that too.

But I love Lucille Clifton's sonnet response to it almost and sonnet summation of it, you know, and it finishes, we made a Poetry Unbound episode about it in the first season.

Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.

That there's a way within which poetry is calling people to listen to the best way of giving art and language to their life.

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