The Daniel Tobin Profile
Date of Birth: Jan. 13, 1958
Place of Birth: Brooklyn
Spouse: Christine Casson
Residence: Dorchester, Mass.
Published Works: poetry, “Where the World is Made,” “Double Life,” “The Narrows,” “Second Things” (forthcoming Spring 2008); critical study, “Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney,” “Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge” (forthcoming 2007), “Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art” (forthcoming fall 2007).
Personal: Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College.
Awards: The “Discovery” / The Nation Award; Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize in Poetry; The Robert Penn Warren Award; The Robert Frost Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry; “The Narrows” finalist for Foreword Magazine’s poetry book of the year.What is your latest book?
“The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present” is the first major anthology of Irish American poetry and collects for the first time the work of over 200 Irish American poets, as well as poets whose work enjoins Irish American themes.
What is your writing routine? Are there any ideal conditions?
I suppose the ideal condition is plenty of time, but I’ve never had that. I’ve always written around a very busy job as a college professor and teacher. I am currently chair of the largest department of its kind in the country, which makes finding time for what Gary Snyder called “the real work” of writing even harder to come by. But I do work in snippets of time, keep a notebook of ideas and lines for poems and essays, occasionally write on the train to the office, in the evenings, on the weekends, whenever I can carve out the minutes and hours.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Writing is a practice like any art, so you do have to make time for it even around a busy schedule. You also have to read deeply and widely to discover writers whose work feeds your desire and your craft. Then its practice and persistence – the writing life is a vocation. It also helps immensely to have a community of fellow writers who you trust to support you and challenge you.
Name three books that are memorable in terms of your reading pleasure.
Three is hard: I’ll say “The Collected Poems” of William Butler Yeats, Joyce’s “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
What book are you currently reading?
I’m reading three: Milkos Radnoti’s “Clouded Sky,” Seamus Heaney’s “District and Circle,” and John Skoyles “The Situation,” all books of poems.
Follow us on social media
Keep up to date with the latest news with The Irish Echo
Is there a book you wish you had written?
Hundreds. Let’s call it a three-way tie between Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Witness of Poetry,” W.H. Auden’s “The Dyer’s Hand,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Cold Spring.”
Name a book you were pleasantly surprised by.
I was pleasantly surprised to find so many poets whose work informed the making of the anthology I’ve edited over the past eight years or so – not one book or writer, then, but a great many in what was an unnoticed and diverse literary community.
The Daniel Tobin Profile
Date of Birth: Jan. 13, 1958
Place of Birth: Brooklyn
Spouse: Christine Casson
Residence: Dorchester, Mass.
Published Works: poetry, “Where the World is Made,” “Double Life,” “The Narrows,” “Second Things” (forthcoming Spring 2008); critical study, “Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney,” “Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge” (forthcoming 2007), “Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art” (forthcoming fall 2007).
Personal: Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College.
Awards: The “Discovery” / The Nation Award; Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize in Poetry; The Robert Penn Warren Award; The Robert Frost Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry; “The Narrows” finalist for Foreword Magazine’s poetry book of the year.
If you could meet one author, living or dead who would it be?
Right now I’d like to meet Teilhard de Chardin.
What book changed your life?
Seamus Heaney’s “Field Work” – it gave me access to my own path.
What is your favorite spot in Ireland?
That’s a toss up between The Sky Road, anywhere from Killary through the Maumturk Mountains, and Hag’s Head, as well as any good pub with friends, especially Mulligan’s, Hughes, The “51,” Kehoe’s and the Duke in Dublin, and McHugh’s in Liscannor.
You’re Irish if…
the smell of peat burning quickens your blood like a pheromone.