Éadbhard Ó Duinn
by Gwendolyn M. Hicks
Fourteen Hills: You have a background in music composition and theory. How has the study of music informed your approach to poetry, and how you articulate the world?
Éadbhard Ó Duinn: I tend to look at text, particularly poetry, like a musical score, structurally and visually. It’s not simply linear–orchestral scores are read simultaneously vertically
and horizontally. Different parts, different themes and entrances, weaving together. In Honor(em) is particularly non-linear.
14H: Who are your favorite composers?
ÉÓD: A very diverse group. Stravinsky always tops my list. The trinity–Bach, Mozart, Beethoven–of course. The ethereal qualities of Poulenc and Satie. The palette of Dvorak and Ravel. Madrigal music–Dowland, De Lassus. Folk traditions, like Bulgarian and Scandinavian folk songs, where the boundaries between major and minor gets blurred, frequent use of dissonance, modal tonalities. Jazz artists like Charles Mingus and Coltrane. Kate Bush and Björk (my cousin Oddur was her first drummer). The post-punk/new wave–Suburban Lawns, Television, Talking Heads, Richard Hell.
14H: Do you see any similarities between your favorite composers and your favorite poets?
ÉÓD: A dichotomous play between intensity and irreverence seems to be a common thread. Risk taking. I’ve always been drawn to artists that are open to inspiration from all corners–the foragers.
14H: Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote?
ÉÓD: Not the very first, I don’t think, but some of the first attempts, sure. I’m sentimental, so I still have some old notebooks buried in storage, where they should stay. I tended to sway between maudlin romanticism and mythically-inspired flights of fancy. I listened to a lot of progressive rock in my teens, which I still love, but lyrics are rarely where prog-rock’s genius lies.
14H: Do you remember the first poem you ever loved?
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ÉÓD: So many. I loved poetry in grade school. Early favorites were certainly Poe and Emily Dickinson–they were unique, at times just odd, and that really appealed to me. I’m convinced my love of em-dashes comes from Dickinson; she is still the master of pauses. There were poets at every stage of my life that I became obsessed over—Rumi, Donald Hall, Anna Akhmatova, George Seferis, James Merrill (another CT native).
14H: What did the earliest version of “In Honor(em)” look like?
ÉÓD: The first draft? A big mess. No, honestly, it was sprawling, some ideas wandered too far afield. It became a little overwhelming at points.
14H: What were your first impressions of it?
ÉÓD: I was enthralled with the heart of it and hearing my voice quite clearly in it.
14H: What is your process like for composing a poem?
ÉÓD: Here’s where the music analogy really fits for me. With any larger piece, it starts with something small–a phrase, a question, a scene, sometimes just a word–just as a musical piece starts with a series of notes or a chord progression. I tend to sit with that fragment, let it breath, see what directions it takes me in, and then build on it.
14H: “In Honor(em)” is an expansive piece, covering vast swaths of time, image, and feeling. How long did it take you to write it?
ÉÓD: And the excerpt published in Fourteen Hills is just a third of the entire piece. Altogether, it was about nine months. I’m not a “word count” kind of writer. My daily writing routine often involves things other than strictly putting pen to page–a lot of quiet time, often reading other things, listening to music, going for a walk, going to the beach. Being in nature is always part of my creative routine. Gathering not just inspiration, but context and clues to where the piece wants to go.
14H: Can you speak to your craft process for a poem of this scope?
ÉÓD: Following on the last response, In Honor(em) started with the Latin quote that opens the poem. It’s an inscription from stone found in Switzerland — “In honor of the god of this house, Sucello Silvanus,” a combination of a local god and the Latin god of the woodlands. Then, a memory of myself in the woods behind my house, pouring an offering to local spirits and to my ancestors. From there it took off.
I also keep a journal of lines from other poets and authors that speak to me, as inspiration. Some of those lines felt as if they were in conversation with my poem as it grew. Eventually the idea of interspersing the lines as a “nested” cento took root.
14H: How do you choose what to keep and what to let go of? Does it fit? Sometimes that’s a subjective “gut feeling,” trusting your voice, and other times there are objective reasons–clarity, narrative structure.
ÉÓD: What do you hope readers will carry with them after reading “In Honor(em)?”
Curiosity. Questions. I hope it leads them to rabbit holes of their own. I hope they want to look at their memories through different frames and through clear eyes. That our stories are endless variations on a theme. I hope they find some comfort in knowing that we’re all healing, every day, in our own ways.
14H: What are the themes and/or images you find yourself returning to over and over again?
ÉÓD: I absolutely do. The themes are the same as so many poets–memory (and the nature of it), loss, love, childhood trauma, and conversely, childhood joy, nature and being. I use mythological references as touchstones, the ocean (I grew up on the shoreline), plants, dreams–these are always part of my vocabulary of images. The places that I’ve lived (the layouts, the streets, the colors and smells), are of particular fascination–how nostalgia colors and corrupts our memory. The struggle against forgetting pains me acutely.
14H: Do any of them appear in “In Honor(em)?”
ÉÓD: All of them.
14H: What inspires you today?
ÉÓD: My children. Their curiosity, energy, and their endurance. Educating people about wine (an aspect of my day job), it's incredibly rewarding to watch people delve into something that many find a daunting subject. Nature, as I said, its cycles and its deep time.
As far as current obsessions–Bach’s English Suites, the poet Paul Celan, the novels of Flann O’Brien, the paintings of Georg Baselitz.
Éadbhard Ó Duinn is a father of twins, a product of the New England shore, and he works with wine when not working with words. He studied Composition and Theory at the Hartt School of Music, and History at the University of Southern Maine. Winner of the Fourteen Hills 2025 Stacy Doris Memorial Prize in Poetry. Publications include Moonstone Press, LIMINAL SPACES, Vermillion, and the Poems-for-All mini chapbook series. He was also shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize in Poetry, 2024. Substack: @oduinn
Gwendolyn M. Hicks writes emails by day and fiction about feelings by night. They are an alumna of the Clarion Workshop and the Lambda Literary Retreat. Currently, they are earning their M.F.A. in Fiction at San Francisco State University, where they are Co-Lead Fiction Editor for Fourteen Hills. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Small Wonders, Heartlines Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Uncanny, and their poetry has been shortlisted for a Rhysling Award. They love green things, yearning, and making elaborate playlists.