INTERVIEW: Oisín Breen, Poet (by Hadley-James Hoyles)

Irish poet, academic, and journalist, Oisín Breen is the author of two collections of poetry. His latest collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was published by Beir Bua Press in January 2023.

Hadley-James Hoyles is a poet and educator. His pamphlet Songs of the Hen Ogledd was published by Wild Pressed Books in 2021.

Long-form poetry is seen as an intimidating prospect for may poets, and avoided by many for this very reason. What is it about long-form poetry that attracts you to it?

To be honest, I think, in part at least, that ‘intimidation’, comes down to what is a poem for? I’ve been curating a Twitter account (@WeeklyScribe) for Crowvus Literary Magazine this week, and one below the line commentator, Michael West, said the following:

Poetry expresses an idea or emotion. Freestanding, it does not have or need a story or setting or any of the other trappings. BAM! Slapped upside the head with something that would otherwise be esoteric, and we understand it, feel it, perfectly. Usually emotional.

I like this. It works for me, though for me, music is also a big part of it, sound, flavour … that regardless of whether you get every piece of esoteric referencing, or know every inch, that once done, the work lingers, it haunts … poetry, at its best haunts, I believe. It’s part of the reason I have so much disdain for four of the popular forms du jour, namely the post-it glib wisdom of the Rupi Kaur’s who all seem to use fortune cookies as their MO; the ‘spoken-word’ voice of the spoken word crew, who all just talk very fast about why they are particularly sad at some point in time (lyric poetry at its nadir, it turns out, becomes stand-up without the jokes); the extremely flat and terse MFA school that tries to be like O’Hara without being like O’Hara … I imagine them writing something like …

The cement was like cement
Cold – to touch – and I,
I was like cement.
I only knew how to keep
The building
Up.

And, to be honest, that makes me want to trap a poet in cement. The last of the four of my somewhat jestful targets of ire is the absurdly confessional … I get grief, hell I’ve known my share, but the public is not the artist’s therapy couch. A big chunk of what I read is best left either on the cutting room floor, or shared at group sessions using literature to heal trauma (of which I’m a huge fan! Art is a wonderful healer) … I guess the lines between the serious artist and the dilettante have blurred … It’s a bit like how I feel about artists like Hirst, who I see as an excellent craftsman, and leader of a design shop, but not an ‘artist’, per sé.

So … for me, poetry is something that haunts, that lingers, that hungers, and that creates new meanings for you … I believe it should tackle music, it should tackle belief, narrative, time, space, taste, sex, glutting, and the transcendental, the transformative … I believe it is not just the personal expression, the singer songwriter of the written word (ala Damien Rice, hugely popular for a while n the US, somewhat less so at home) – a position poetry seems to presently occupy rather awkwardly … I think it can reach higher. Think of the poems that last. They push boundaries, or capture the succinct as it expands out of denotation into connotation … They linger. They haunt.

So, the reason for this odd wee start of mine to this interview is to say that, well, what attracts me to long-form poetry is the same thing that attracts me to shorter forms, which I also write, namely song. (Speaking of song, what a title was Whitman’s ‘I sing the body electric,’ eh?)…

In long form work, I get to compose, sculpt, and breathe out a whole creation of parts. It is, I feel, to poetry, what the symphony is to classical composition, and I absolutely love creating these vast tapestries.

So, honestly, I guess, the intimidation side of things … I think that only happens if you, as a poet, have become fixated on the single instance, single viewing, single sight, that a lot of writing groups push for… the whole ‘bottle of Lucozade at a bus stop as someone counts change’ kind of vision of poetry (not that you can’t find a poem in that, I’m mulling a long-form work on a tech boffin in a basement shop, specifically the Eastern European guy who ran ScotComp in Edinburgh, but has sadly closed … best tech guy in town he was); whereas I think that starting in and staying in the ordinary alone ignores the strength of what poetry can do, and every medium has strengths possessed by no other.

Long form work lets ideas percolate, distil, stew, discuss, re-engage. It allows for motifs, play, and hell, it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

Daunting, I might agree, it is at first, but get a few under your belt and it’s an absolute hoot.

Reading them to audiences, that’s also a tricky proposition. I’ve had a mix of ‘My God, that was beautiful,’ to ‘Och, it’s that crazy bastard!’, so who knows.

Hell, I may be wrong about everything and Rupi Kaur really is tantamount to bliss…

2) When writing your long-form work, do you have any sense of connection between your poems, or do they form distinct worlds in of themselves?

Hmmm … this might be a shorter answer.

There’s always connection in terms of what I don’t want to do (repetition between work), and a continuous feeling of flowering between compositions; but, ultimately, no.

Each, I hope, is a distinct world with a beginning, a middle, an end, and a purpose. I have tried, when the long-forms are fortunate enough to make it to book form (and hopefully my work-in-progress, which is itself book length, will make it that far, too), to get them all to blend and work together, but each is a standalone piece.

3) Do you ever find yourself creating overlaps across your poems, be they particular characters, spaces, moments in time?

I probably have done. I know, for sure, there’s a sense that one of the poems in a collection I’m currently shopping around to publishers is a companion piece to ‘Dublin and the Loose Footwork of Deity’ from my debut, Flowers, All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries and Fruits Forgotten, published by Dreich in 2020, as lockdown began (that’s a story in itself, how that all went) … but to be honest, while I like the work, both works, it actually irks me a little that they talk so much to each other, only slightly, but you know … So no, I definitely try to avoid repeating these moments too much, though, as a human, obviously there’ll be some degree of it.

4) Irish writing has seen many approaches to recurring, and deeply reverberating, subject matter for many decades now. Do you find yourself conscious of your identity as an Irish writer, and does it bring you any sense of responsibility to write as an Irishman about topics which can evoke such strong reactions across your readership?

Ach Christ, it’s a pleasure to even be able to walk along the same path as the forebears … Lordy, from Boland to Yeats, Heaney to Joyce, your Becketts and all … The playwrights galore, the wits like Wilde, or even back to himself, to Swift … The gothic writing of Stoker … The hilarity (with seriousness) of O’Brien, or the ridiculous mostly B-list, but at times tip-top over sexed prose of Donleavy (Irish-American in the most 50/50 split I’ve yet seen) … Hell, I’m actually related (somehow, though I don’t know how exactly, but the family insists) to Katherine Tynan, so no matter what I do, I’ll never be the most published in my family, she wrote what (*goes to check Wikipedia*) too many books and collections to count, probably a hundred … one hundred collections, lord.

But, to the question, firstly, it’s a huge pleasure to be able to be a part of that oeuvre, even in my smallest, tiniest way. It’s an honour, too.

Then, am I conscious of my identity as an Irish writer … Probably more so because I live in Britain, and much as the British would like to pretend isn’t the case, there’s still a lot of lurking anti-Irish sentiment, especially in more polite society, that they really do like to pretend isn’t there.

So, being a post-colonial subject, in the land of our coloniser, I’m certainly aware of it, and probably more fighty, more prickly because of it, and getting more so with age; where, when younger I’d maybe have tried to laugh certain behaviours off, or go ‘it was only…’, now I’m quite happy to take it on. (To be fair, plenty of the British have begun to realize why we won’t wear poppies, and why we didn’t give a rats ass about the dead queen.)

But, at the same time, really, as an ‘Irish’ writer, does it influence choices I make or don’t make?

No, not really. I love that I’m somewhat of a stylist from a country of stylists. I do love our canon. I adore it to be honest, and feel privileged to feel it in my bones. Our myths, too… Ah they’re wonderful – as an aside, a while back I was teaching at the University of Edinburgh, and I polled my students over two classes, and it was fascinating to see that only the post-colonial subjects and the Scandinavian felt that myth was integral in the founding of their being … I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t have a long and continuous feeling in my own heart and bones of dialogue with our stories, rooted in the flesh.

As to responsibility, though, this is perhaps where I must get a tad trite. I don’t believe in the idea that a writer has a responsibility to anyone. I’m very much of the art is art is art is art school… Art is for being art. I’m no didact, and I know there’s a strain of contemporary culture erring toward the neo-Victorian, of the same kind of attitude that wrapped up believing its certainty of moral absolutes with some absurdly ridiculous moves… I mean, rewriting the end to King Lear? That was hilarious in hindsight … crazy Victorians (though I’ve always wanted to visit the great and beautiful London sewer system (Crossness pumping station I think it is). They had a lot right (work that spanned and lasted generations), and a lot wrong, mostly on the moral front. Today’s lot have a lot right (equality, freedom, breaking down barriers of access, recognizing individuality, recognizing the right to be who you across dividing lines, like gender, that decades ago no one in mainstream society ever thought of), but their prudishness, their reflexive policing of discourse even when experimental, that I find distasteful, and to be fair, it’s my own generation doing it, so I’m probably guilty too, somehow. So, the TLDR answer on responsibility is no, I don’t think an artist should ever worry about being responsible at all. If the art demands irresponsibility, do it. If it demands terse calm, do it. If it wants to dress up like a crow and sing a song, do it… It’s art, it isn’t an absolute final statement on a matter. It is something to lift, to inspire, to bring dread, to criticize, to hate, to love, it is an artifact, but not an answer. Art is always inter-mediate, a between, a space for comings and goings, and it absolutely never has a final say. Thank God, art will never have an ending.

5) Your poetry often takes on eclectic and experimental characteristics. Do you find experimental poetry to be a rewarding pursuit as an artist, and if so, what inspires you to take up the challenge of experimental poetry?

Yup. Oh lord this really will be a short answer.

I definitely agree it takes on those characteristics (though mostly I just want to get the right words/notes in order with the next right words/notes so that all together they go toward hitting that mmhmmm/yeah/linger/blue note way), as I think, well, why not use everything that works to make something sing, rather than stay in a lane. I’ve got work that proses, work that concretes, work that goes traditional. Honestly, I always find it surprising every single writer isn’t always doing whatever they think the text needs. There are a load who do, and I love that!

I also find it very inspiring to read stuff like this, from the Modernists (lately I’m wondering why we aren’t calling this ‘a renaissance’ period… really everything… ah!) to the contemporary…

Two wee experimentally minded things still open to the reader I’d recommend are: Olga Ravn’s prose-poetry sci-fi collection, The Employees, and From Fibs to Fractals, Exploring Mathematical Forms in Poetry, by Marian Christie.

So I take up the ‘challenge’, so to speak, because the work tells me to. If I don’t, it gets angry at me.

6) What would you define as the greatest distinction between your second collection and your debut?

It’s ‘better’? Technically at least, I think I’ve improved. The oddity of being a writer is that you’re always working a few years behind, between publicity and what you’re doing. There are things in Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín that I would do differently now. I think what I’m currently doing with my work in progress the Kerygma … well I think it blows Lilies away in some regards … Ditto Lilies to Flowers … but I still think each collection stands and is enjoyable and pleasing and sounds lovely on the tongue and the ear, and that each carries honey and wit and fire … But the greatest distinction between the two books? They’re about different things, and I’m that bit much more advanced in the craft this time around?

7) Do you have any writing habits that you fall into, or have settled with, that you feel contribute to your individual style? If so, what could you give as an example?

I’ve noted it elsewhere, but I keep a wee animal rescue of lost fragments of poems and prose and snippets and ideas and even sometimes a phrase I overhear, and I keep them all in a document I call riffings. They linger there, and sometimes I make collages out of them.

Beyond that, perhaps the fact that I very consciously do ‘still life’ poems, focusing on particular topics I decide, then research and research until the details mesh into coherence as song…

My longer form work, I suppose that’s a habit, too.

But no, I don’t think there’s a habit that contributes to how I write, other than loving to do so in cafés.

8) Being based in Scotland, you are able to experience the differences in the dynamics of the literary scene in that country to that of your own, and possibly even others you have lived in. What would you most like to see the Scottish scene include which is currently absent?

Ooh, and this is true for most countries’ poetry scenes that I’ve seen…

In no specific order, more poetry nights; less poets on each bill; no poet starting by going, oh I’m a little nervous; less personal melodrama on stage (I’m here for fun not to go ‘oh there there’); shorter nights with longer breaks — poetry organizers are rubbish at breaks, they keep trying to fit so many poets on the bill and no one actually enjoys that… 3 hours with 30 poets! Gah … Give me one poet for 20 minutes, or two if they’re early career poets, then give me a 35 minute break, do that three times, three to six poets over making it a roughly 1:2 ratio, one hour of poetry and one hour and forty of breaks — Uhm a willingness to accommodate more technology, visual stuff, projectors… A course for all poets to learn how to project their voices (I’m hard of hearing so this is particularly irksome), or, at least, microphones at all venues … a little less ‘niceness’ and a little more ‘roughness’… a lot of poetry nights are just a little middle class nowadays aren’t they? — a little, this is ‘Gary’, he’s struggled a little, but now his absolutely wondrous… I guess I just like a little more cigarette stains and whiskey in my poetry nights, a little more raucousness (because poetry is raucous) than safe and nice and gentle … Poetry communities are often very insular, too, (understandably at the moment, it’s hard to find/meet/mesh with poetic communities) … I’d sure like to see the poetry world get more support from bookshops … They really don’t do enough, especially the bigger ones (the UK has this Topping & Co. place, lauded for being a big indie brand that helps the locals, for instance, but all it does is book people from London plus one or two of the older biggest names … I know two publishers in Edinburgh approached them to host a night or sell indie books, the company flat out refused, wouldn’t even stock a flyer for an indie press launch) … What else would I like to see? More diction, by this I mean how the poets read, or at least play with diction, i.e. poets who don’t just read in a flat monotone … I mean, yeah, I did acting when I was a teenager, and I’m somewhat of an extrovert, but still, a little fire and brimstone never hurts.

Lastly, dare I say it, probably a little more variety from the poets. They don’t tend to play around a lot. One of my favourite pieces of performed poetry in recent moths was from Alan Gillis. He wrote a poem about a tomato, about looking at the tomato, and that was it. Rock solid, great fun, and delivered with huge wit, and a damn fine intonation.

9) Some poets come under fire for creating works which have been labelled as ‘obscure’ and ‘difficult’. Do you believe that poetry should be crafted to be accessible?

Absolutely not. I think the ‘accessibility’ crowd turned up what, 20, 30 years ago? Poetry sales have declined in many cases, which says all there needs to be said on their vision. Sadly many of them are very very very good at climbing institutional ladders, whereas, a lot of folk aren’t. I think they’re responsible for sucking the joy out of so much art, across the board.

If by accessible, we mean, everyone can take something from it, then I mean, sure, but that’s just the nature of being alive.

The idea that we should only use words that the ‘common person’ understands… I mean that’s downright insulting to both artist and, most of all, the ‘common person’. I wouldn’t ever even imagine saying it, it’s so downright classist. Oh the poor working oiks just won’t understand, give them poehhhhtry about bus stops and cans of Pepsi… Come off it … If it’s difficult, it’s difficult, not everyone loves Joyce, that’s fine, but the idea that art ‘ought’, that art ‘should’, like I said earlier about neo-Victorianism and didacticism. I’m categorically opposed to the idea that there are any ‘oughts’ when it comes to the moral or content aspects of art. I might hate what someone does, but they have a right to do it. Hell, they have a right to do it then argue against themselves later down the line … play, changing our minds, experimentation, difficulty, challenge … these are the actual point.

10) If you were allowed only one small section from your collection to show people, to give them a flavour of it, what line would you choose?

Hah!

Haven’t a clue whatsoever…

Glibly I’d be tempted to go with:

Mai- Mai-ha-ra-ma
Mai-ha-ra-ma-way-wahama
Mai-ha-ra-ma-way-wahama-whup-tama
Mai-ha-ra-ma-way-wahama-whup-tama-way

But that’s just me being ridiculous… Let’s have a look… Yes, probably this:

Her breath was susurrating leaves, and she chanted of the past:
An incantation to wallow in his skin:
An incantation of plucked pores, erubescent cheeks,
Of bucking, and shivering to the touch;
An incantation of hip pressed to hip,
Of the thirststruck, listing in the twilight;
An incantation of nothing else but having, and being had.
And she told me:

I have and I do, and I must have more and I do and I drink and I must, and still it is that I must drink and I do, I do, I do.

Then her chest burst with long twining branches full in a livery of simple greens, embroidered with the wicked pulsing of red filbert fruit in a crimson crown, and flowering aments in yellow hue.

And to a drumbeat of breathless water, she fell still.

My thanks indeed, by the by!