THE CHARLES A. HEIMBOLD JR. CHAIR

Stephen Sexton is an award-winning Northern Irish poet and lecturer at the renowned Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. His pamphlet of poems Oils was the 2014 Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet . He is the author of two books of poems – If All the World and Love Were Young, published in 2019 and Cheryl’s Destinies, published in 2021. He is a recipient of multiple awards, which include winning the 2016 National Poetry Competition, the 2018 Eric Gregory Award, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection in 2019, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020.
Stephen Sexton has been part of the Seamus Heaney Centre since he was eighteen years old, initially working there, and then as a student completing his Master’s degree in 2012 and a PhD immediately after. His PhD thesis analyzed the processes of elegy and translation in Anne Carson’s book Nox, making the argument that elegy and translation represented similar processes of transformation of a subject and a text. Stephen has been teaching creative writing at the Centre for six years. Named after Northern Ireland’s most famous poet, the Seamus Heaney Centre opened in 2004 and has a legacy that carries a sense of an ethical responsibility on the writer’s part. When teaching poetry and poetics, Sexton emphasizes the responsibility of the language and the way that this shared resource is used as a component of community.
Stephen was ten years old in 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement brought a formal end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Later in life he realized that he was growing up in a time that he did not understand, and he became aware of a profound generational divide between himself and his parents, explaining that there is a “kind of ghostly history that is all around you, but you can’t access it in the same way that other people can, so as a consequence, it doesn’t necessarily show up in my writing.” In his book, If All the World and Love Were Young, which happens to be set in 1998, a poem directly addresses the Omagh bombing – the deadliest incident of the Troubles and one that he remembers hearing about on the radio and seeing on television. But beyond that, the book is an interesting blend of childhood memories that uses the analogy of a nineties Nintendo videogame, Mario Brothers , to dig into Stephen’s more personal experiences. What started out as an intentionally funny book about Super Mario World turned into a process of childhood recollections about the house that he grew up in and memories of his mother. During this project, the two worlds started to land together in a way that Stephen did not anticipate, which he found quite bewildering. In his words, “there is a book that’s pretending to be about Mario, and as a matter of fact, it’s about something else entirely.”
Stephen’s more recent book of poems, Cheryl’s Destinies, was written during the COVID lockdown, when he was feeling a profound disconnectedness from other people. Desiring to bring together the improbable and the sensitive, he wrote a section of poems imagining a collaboration between the authors of two great works – Siamese Dream, the 1993 album by the Smashing Pumpkins and “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” a poem by W. B. Yeats, first published in 1899. For Stephen, it was a roundabout way of trying to write about the experience and feeling of lockdown without actually writing about this kind of tedious subject. And so, the book’s theme of being obsessed with and anxious about the future came through the conversations between two strangers separated by a century, Billy Corgan and W. B. Yeats. In these poems Corgan visits Yeats during the 1918 Spanish Flu – a time when Yeats and his wife were involved in automatic writing and mediumship, and the two artists talk about the difficulty of making art. Stephen’s book questions the role of a poet and the role of a medium, as they both perform a similar function -- to look at the world and to interpret it.
Stephen’s appreciation of poetry and his admiration for poets goes through different phases at different times. Some of the poets that he turns to frequently include Ciaran Carson and Sinead Morrissey, his PhD supervisors. Stephen finds the influence of their thinking as well as their works to be profound. He is always thrilled to read Anne Carson for the extraordinary ambits and trajectories of her work; Larry Levis for his incredible turns of phrase that never fails to suggest how vast and yet particular a narrative or a lyric could be; Matthew Seeney for his silliness and voice; Sylvia Plath, who always reminds Stephen how a poem is supposed to work; and of course Seamus Heaney’s invaluable, generous and generative example of how one might, with compassion and responsibility, approach a subject.
Stephen Sexton has visited Villanova University twice and looks forward to meeting more students, discussing their writing, and being part of the Villanova community this Spring.