Fifty ways

to love a text

Dear friends,

This week, I travelled back to Ireland, and after a few days in Belfast, I drove to Cork, for the poetry festival in this, my home city. Long drives are a delicious opportunity for playlists: a mix of politics podcasts, a literary endeavour or two, and then, when I found myself tired of speech, I put on a CD I’ve owned for years: Negotiations and Love Songs, a compilation of some of Paul Simon’s earlier solo work. 

Normally, I prefer to listen to each of the original CDs by itself, savouring the arrangement as if it’s a book of poetry curated to hold itself together. However, this CD is long and perfect for drives that go the length of Ireland. For a while — 90 minutes, perhaps — I was revisiting lyrics and melodies that stretch back to my teenage years when we had only a few CDs in the house, this being one of them.

I know almost all the words to almost every song. I know the melodies, the modifications to the ornamentations, and I know that the outfade of some songs incorporates some notes not yet heard in the song to that point. The loves and losses of life — “she comes back to tell me she’s gone” — are held together in ambivalences that are as devastating as they are elegant.

Near University of Melbourne, Australia, May 2025. Photo by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Such is the wonder of Paul Simon’s work that his lyrics often function like short stories, replete with characters whose yearnings echo, or undo, ours. “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” requires no context, the he/she dynamics amplifying drama, seduction and danger. Also, if you’ve never seen the Muppets magnificent version, which starts with Paul Simon punning that there must be “fifty ways to love your lever”, then you are in for a treat.

I can praise Paul Simon for a long time, and it’s true that his lyricism has influenced my poetry as much as anyone else. Once, in a remote retreat centre that I was sharing with only a very earnest and prudish missionary, I happened across a wonderful television documentary where Paul Simon went through every single lyric of his album Graceland.

We didn’t have much to say to each other, the missionary and me, so we watched it together. When Paul Simon spoke about “I’ve got a short little span of attention” from “You Can Call Me Al”, he looked at the camera and said, “That’s a penis joke.” I swallowed a laugh; my missionary companion harrumphed. I worried she was going to turn the show off. She didn’t. And I learnt that dick jokes can belong in fine lines of literature. Amazeballs.  

I’ve lived my life in conversation with these texts, these hymns, these shapes of a life. Foreign to me, local to me, I’ve found ways into and out of these songs as decades have gone by. 

That’s my question for you these days: What artist has been a soundtrack for your life? 

Many thanks, friends.

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Poetry in the World

A list of events: In Ireland (Dublin, Listowel) and online

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May 20, Dublin, Ireland

I’ll be reading at the International Literature Festival Dublin (ILFD). Information here.

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May 29, Listowel, County Kerry, Ireland

I’ll be reading at Listowel Writers’ Week. Information here.

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June 2, 3, 9, 10, online

I’ll be teaching an online four-session course (6-9 p.m., ET) with Union Theological College; it’s called “Tools of Narrative Theology” and explores literary readings of Biblical texts. You can register here. And if you have any questions, you can send them via the email on the course page (find it under the “CONTACT” heading).