Southword Poetry Podcast · Munster Literature Centre

John W. Sexton: Visions at Templeglantine

·1 hr 6 min·2 clips

You are a light full of a fathomless grief. You are a bright point in the night.

Sexton's work is treated as an atmosphere. James starts by trying to pin down the odd space these poems make: dreamlike, flexible, but never sloppy. The comparison is David Lynch, though the point is not just strangeness. It is that subconscious pressure comes through the craft and still keeps its mystery. Performance changes the poems too. James says Sexton can sound intimidating, almost menacing, when he reads, while seeming gentle in person. That gap gives the public voice a charge. The interview then gets into the making of the work. Sexton talks about writer's block and the arrival of Jack Bray Kurtingstall, a persona with a character and personality of his own. The useful part is the seriousness of it. Jack could write because Sexton let him feel separate, and that distance opened the way for hundreds of poems. A persona, in Sexton's telling, cannot be treated like a trick. It has to be given enough room to do the work. Poetry stays slippery here. Sexton's brief definition turns on paradox: name it too firmly and it starts to vanish. Jack lasted two years, and in that time he loosened something in Sexton's practice. Sexton could write as Jack and as himself again. The life story matters too. He describes himself as self-educated, someone who left a law degree behind for poetry. Ted Hughes enters as an influence, and the talk of modern poetry and translation makes the practice feel less private, more open to other voices and permissions. The closing poem brings the vision back down into objects: lift, body, charger, chocolates, earbuds, folding curtains. Ordinary things, but not quite ordinary once the poem has hold of them.

As heard by us

A slow, haunted conversation about poetry, persona, and the craft that keeps mystery intact.

John Sexton comes across as a poet drawn to incantation, dream logic, and a faint edge of menace. The discussion traces that mood back to craft, showing how his poems seem to work below ordinary thought while still staying anchored in language, imagery, and rhythm.

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Press play if you want John W. Sexton framed as a poet of dream logic and high craft.

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