I came to be a poet by accident. I did loads of different things before that, from building sites and bar jobs and sales jobs. Being a poet is a surprise to myself: I thought I’d be an engineer. But when I was 15 or 16, I started to learn to play guitar and I started to write a few songs. I heard about an open-mic night, which I went along to out of curiosity. Then I heard about Poetry Night and went along to it. Poetry Night challenged my perception of what poetry was and what a poet could be. All of a sudden, poets became my friends.
In my early 20s I wrote a poem called Ticking Clock. When I read it in public, it was the first time I thought, All right, there’s something here. I got a different reaction from the audience. I didn’t realise that what I wrote could connect with people and resonate. My biggest inspiration is probably Pat Ingoldsby. His poetry is different to mine, but Pat made a huge difference to my life. He gave me huge encouragement. Pat was a poet of the people. When I work in schools, I often bring his books in. When I found out about his passing, I was in Bordeaux, getting a bus to San Sebastián to walk the Camino, but I turned around and flew back to Dublin to attend his funeral.
I only discovered I was dyslexic at around 32, when I was in second year in college as a mature student. Now that I have been labelled, as it were, I’m less embarrassed asking for help. Before I probably would have had a degree of embarrassment or shame: now I’ve been liberated from that. If somebody’s got an issue, they’re more the asshole. Going to open-mics and poetry nights, where poetry is an oral art form and I’m speaking the words, I don’t need to worry too much about spelling or punctuation. I can just deliver the lines the way I see fit.
Dublin inspires me all the time. Dublin was my hometown for 39 years and I feel incredibly connected to the city. Now that I live in Wexford town, Wexford is informing my art. I moved here about 4½ years ago, and I love it here. I’m connecting with the community, with musicians and poets and actors, and that’s been a revelation. I’ve got a mortgage on a place here, and that’s taken away some of that anxiety that so much of the nation is going through. I still have my anxieties, but I should be able to afford to keep this roof over my head even on a bad year.
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I don’t have a proper routine. Do I sit at a desk and write? I probably should but I don’t. I like to walk: if I’m out walking, ideas will flow. Then I jot things down on my phone. Or I might find a bench and work. Commissions are a different beast in that you have a deadline and a brief. With my most recent commission, Talk to Me, for the Dublin City Culture Company, I was sent 534 documents from their Tea & Chats community groups over the past 10 years, from knitting clubs to boxing clubs to Traveller groups. Those chats informed the piece: there’s isolation and people feel disconnected with the way the city is changing. The poem begins: “Dublin, where sarcasm comes cheap and shelter costs peace/Where the chasm between the haves and the nots keeps getting deep.”
In some ways, Talk to Me is informed by a poem I wrote 10 years ago called Dublin You Are. That poem changed my life. Bizarre to say that, but it did. The opportunities that came my way because of that poem: people asked me to recite it in all sorts of different environments. It was amazing, the way it took me around the world. So many people don’t come across poetry in their ordinary lives, but that poem penetrated, and the same is true of the new work. It’s poetry for a different generation or demographic, and that’s important. On Instagram, I’ve got a lot of feedback and direct messages about what the poem means to people, and voice notes where people are in tears. It’s nice to know you’ve moved somebody. Maybe the reason why some of the work does resonate is that I’m just holding a mirror up to the city, trying to tell the truth.
I’m not interested in ivory towers. Sometimes I get invited to fancy events, but the most important work is in the schools. I’m a bit older now, so some of the kids that I’ve been teaching over the years, you start to see them at festivals and events that you’re part of, or that they’re performing at, and that’s a huge inspiration to me. Ultimately all that celebrity stuff doesn’t matter. The job of the poet is to hand the fire on.
[ Stephen James Smith: ‘Sometimes you also need a fallow period’Opens in new window ]
In conversation with Nadine O’Regan. This interview is a part of a series talking to well-known people about their lives and relationship with Ireland. Stephen James Smith’s new work, Talk to Me, was commissioned by Dublin City Council Culture Company
