Remembering Thomas Kinsella

Sunday May 8, 2022 – 2pm

Registration Required – use this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZApf-GpqTwpE9QBzsJ92os8X53FdKo3E0zv

Thomas Kinsella (4 May 1928 – 22 December 2021) was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher.

He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s and, around the same time, translated early Irish poetry into English. In the 1960s, he moved to the United States to teach English at universities including Temple University, where he started Temple’s Irish studies program.

His sensitive lyrics deal with primal aspects of the human experience, often in a specifically Irish context. He began serving in the Irish civil service in 1946, and in the early 1950s he met Liam Miller, the founder of the Doleman Press, which published much of Kinsella’s poetry beginning in 1952. In 1965 he left the Irish civil service and took a position as a writer in residence at Southern Illinois University in 1965 and at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1970.

Kinsella founded his own publishing company, the Peppercanister Press, in Dublin in 1972, which allowed him to publish pamphlets and individual poems in limited editions without relying on submissions to journals or magazines. Kinsella’s first poem to be published through his press was Butcher’s Dozen about Bloody Sunday, in which 13 demonstrators were killed by British troops in Londonderry (Derry), Northern Ireland, and the ensuing tribunal. Numerous collections of Kinsella’s poems were released, including Collected Poems, 1956–2000), Selected Poems, Fat Master, and Late Poems; the latter was published by Carcanet Press, which released several of his works in the early 21st century.