Kevin Kiely

Kevin Kiely (born 2 June 1953) is a poet, critic, author and playwright whose writings and public statements have met with controversy and also with support.

Kiely was born on 2 June 1953 in Warrenpoint, County Down, Northern Ireland.

His grandfather's brother was the Olympian John Jesus Flanagan, inventor of the hammer for Slazenger America as used in the Olympic Games, and three-times record-breaking gold medallist.

Kiely's childhood was spent in many parts of Ireland, due to his father's work as manager with the Munster & Leinster Bank.

Aged 7, he was sent to Wimbledon, London to his aunt.

In 1963 on the death of his father, John Francis Kiely, he was in the care of his guardian and uncle, Edward Vaughan-Neil who sent him to Mt St. Joseph’s Abbey, Roscrea where he was a boarder from 1966 to 1969.

He completed his education in Blackrock College, Dublin, from 1969 to 1971.

He became a field study technician for Smedley HP in Cambridgeshire 1973–1975 and wandered in Europe working part-time at various jobs while reading in the national libraries of many countries, but otherwise mainly residing in Paris and London.

Kiely attended University College Galway in 1976, participating on the Art Council-funded National Writers Workshop, taught Literature in Colegio Xaloc, Barcelona and was made an honorary fellow of Iowa University in 1983.

Kiely co-edited The Belle, a counter-cultural magazine, with Maurice Scully from 1978 to 1979.

He moved from Dublin to Spain where he taught at Colegio Xaloc and gave public lectures on poetry and literature.

Kiely received Arts Council Literature Bursary Awards for his writings in 1980, 1989, 1990, 1998, 1999, 2004, A Bisto Award in 2005 and The Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry 2006.

Kiely had begun reviewing poetry and literature, first with John Mulcahy's Hibernia, and later for various publications including The Examiner and Books Ireland.

Quintesse, published in 1982 in Dublin by Co-Op Books, found a New York publisher in 1985.

During this period he was invited to the University of Iowa on the International Writing Programme Fellowship working with the American poet Paul Engel as well as poets Gary Snyder, Marvin Bell and Jorie Graham.

Mere Mortals, an experimental pastiche of the post-Joycean novel, was published in 1989 in Dublin.

With publication of the biography of Francis Stuart author of the Penguin Classic Black List, Section H one of twenty-five novels, Kiely found support and condemnation because of Stuart’s conflicted life including the Second World War era in Berlin broadcasting at Haus des Rundfunks which had earned him the scandalous epithet the Irish Lord Haw-Haw.

While the book was extensively reviewed, the long existing controversy over Stuart became amplified into further controversy.

The book titled Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast came out in Ireland and America, and Kiely's stance was seen by some as "diplomatic" whereas some others suggested that Kiely was "not writing the book that more opinionated readers, eager to prove Stuart's lapses, would have demanded."

Kiely's plays, Multiple Indiscretions (1997) and Children of No Importance (2000), have been produced by RTÉ as well as "In This Supreme Hour" at the Derry Playhouse in 2016.

He is also a successful novelist for young readers.

He became New Writing Editor and later Literary Editor (2000–2005) on Books Ireland at the invitation of its founder, Jeremy Cecil Addis, in 1995.

He writes extensive and controversial criticism in Hibernia, Irish Examiner, The Democrat Arts Page, Irish Studies Review, Honest Ulsterman, Fortnight, Books Ireland, The London Magazine, The Irish Book Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Times, Irish Arts Review, Irish Literary Review, Idaho Arts Quarterly, Humanities (DC), Village Magazine: politics and culture, The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Robert Frost Review and MAKE IT NEW.

Kiely's poetry criticism is not just confined to homegrown Irish publishing which he has extensively commented on in many reviews and surveys.

He questioned the pervasively state-funded poetry scene amidst the arts in general "amidst cliques and cabals", and made public the lack of accountability of many arts institutions.

He launched vociferous and persistent criticism of institutions such as Aosdána, which he feels are anathema to the identity and autonomy of the serious artist.

His statements about the Arts Council's Aosdána reflect the wider concern along with other artists such as Robert Ballagh in relation to public funding channels devoid of accountability.

He holds a Masters in Literature from Trinity College in 2005 and a PhD from University College Dublin in 2009.

Kiely's poetry such as the collection Breakfast with Sylvia, published in 2005 received the Kavanagh Fellowship in 2006, was highly praised in America and Ireland by leading poets, ‘Kiely has a reputation as strong in Europe and the US as it is here'.

The portrait of Kevin Kiely by Maeve McCarthy RHA gained the Ireland-US Council Portrait Award in 2006.

Besides book publication and work in many anthologies, his poetry has appeared in The Edinburgh Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Adrift (New York), Foolscap (London), Oasis (London), Acumen (UK), Other Poetry (UK), Cyphers, The Literary Review (New Jersey), Chapman (Scotland), Southword, Cork Literary Review, The Black Mountain Review, The Shop, Fortnight, Storm (Scotland), Touchstone (UK), Stony Thursday Book, Idaho Arts Quarterly, The Journal: Cumbria (UK), Decanto (UK), The Poetry Bus, The Sunday Independent, Revival Literary Journal, Red Poetry (Wales), Irish American Post, The Minetta Review (New York), Wild Violet Magazine, Pinched (London), Underground Press, (New York), SPRING: the journal of the ee cummings society, The Laughing Dog (US), ANU/A New Ulster 38, New Poetry International, Café Review (USA), Village: politics and culture, Pratik.

A Horse Called El Dorado won the CBI Bisto Award in 2006.

His doctoral thesis on John L. Sweeney: Patron of Poetry at Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room gained him an American Fulbright Award in 2007, enabling years of full-time lecturing at American universities including Boise State University and the University of Idaho, and research at Harvard.

The doctoral thesis formed the basis of Harvard’s Patron: Jack of All Poets an A-Z critical study of modernist American poets associated with The Edward Woodberry Poetry Room Harvard University.

His literary criticism reached national news when he reviewed President Michael D. Higgins' Selected Poems in 2012 calling his poems "crimes against literature".

Paul Durcan, quoted by The Irish Central, defended Michael D. Higgins, who, in his view, "has an absolute commitment to the spirit of poetry."

SOS Lusitania (2013) is a novel about war, politics and conspiracy theory was the One Book One Community Choice in the Centenary Year of the Lusitania for 2015 during The Remember the Lusitania Project.

The re-issue of the revised edition of the Stuart biography in 2017 alongside Geoffrey Elliott's biography of John Lodwick brought to public attention the Stuart-Lodwick association of writers who took different sides in WWII and thereafter formed an ideological friendship.

His most recent adult fiction is The Welkinn Complex, which exposes psychiatric practice and the pharmaceutical industry, while UCD Belfield Metaphysical: a retrospective is a collection of poems published in 2017.

Sweeney as Irish-American millionaire and patron, greatly contributed in terms of patronage to poets E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and many others which Kiely prefigured in various essays discussing poets and their patrons before the publication of Harvard's Patron: Jack of All Poets (2018).