An Interview with Oisín Breen by D.M. Rice
Sybil has been growing and developing quietly in the shadows. It’s not just our first print release, but the scope of our submitting authors and readership. What was once confined to whispers among locals of the greater San Marcos area has become something of an entirely different stripe. And just this month we’ve received nearly 100 submissions for the first time ever! That might previously be the amount we receive over multiple months, and although it doesn’t compare to what some organizations receive on the regular, our growing scope has necessitated some functional changes in how we dealt with stuff like donations and visual art. It has also been evident in the cvs of the authors who send us work. You can find among them pushcart noms, accomplished professors, and so many accomplished artists and activists. We are continually thrilled and grateful to be able to publish less commonly known writers in equal measure, and to give these voices the space to exist alongside each other, without being in conflict or creating hierarchies.
This has also meant, however, that we have grown to move at the speed of “contemporary lit mag,” which as we all know can be a bit protracted even at the best of times. So this interview with Oisín Breen, while being a mark of the now-international scope of our humble publication, is also a testament to a prolonged epistolary exchange between myself in the author, which dates back to 2022. Like Sybil itself, and like this long-in-the-making conversation, I read (via a cursory google search) that lilies also take root and multiply “especially if they are growing in a sheltered spot in fertile well-drained soil.” I would like to think of our journal as a ‘sheltered spot in fertile well-drained soil’ in the lit world, if we had to place ourselves somewhere. That we have had some press should not detract from the fact that we are an incredibly small operation, running on the goodwill of both our readers and submitting authors, without whom we couldn’t exist. To the same ends, I have at all points attempted to call attention to the dates surrounding my conversation with Breen, both to emphasise the process of our conversation, but also to couch the comments within their particular moment in time. Although the general tone of our conversation was easy-going, and affable even, understanding that it took so long to coalesce (even as world events continued, and continue, to whirl out of control in the background) is a sort of necessity for reading our conversation in context. This is a record and an archive, as much as it is intended to call attention to Oisín’s commendable publication, recently reprinted by Downingfield Press, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín.
Oisín first contacted us in October of 2021. He introduced himself as “a poet, part-time academic in narratological complexity, and financial journalist” from Dublin, and sent in five poems, among them Touch, which we finally published in August of 2022. His poems were slowly picked up through the winter months (always a good sign) and he wrote a well-meaning follow up, early May 2022, asking if the remaining pieces were still under consideration. His email is curt and professional, but he also uses a :) emoji, which is disarming. But he is very kind throughout the process, promising to send more work in the future. In the same email chain, he asks if we might be able to raise awareness of his collection, which at that time was out with Bierbua Press. This was in Jan of 2023, and we had aspirations of doing this sort of thing for writers published on the site, and interviews with certain persons in this regard. They get in touch at the beginning of the month, and by the end of it I have returned their correspondence, asking if they would like to do a “short profile and answer a few questions for promotional purposes,” as we had done previously. This was all well and good in theory. The idea has legs, but gets put on the back burner. By the end of February, they are sending polite reminders of this plan, which would be simple enough to execute, but when? The next message that comes in is July 16, 2023, and tells me that the “publisher that had launched and released my second collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, unexpectedly folded in pretty wildly odd circumstances and orphaned most of the writers, many of whom had their work out just a few short months” but that he had managed to find a publisher to get his book out. This, of course, piqued my attention. In my reply, about two weeks later, I am ingratiating at my own expense, writing that “things are so hectic right now. We're doing everything we can just to keep the website going.” and adding “I think an interview, especially concerning this strange publishing story (which I believe is not altogether uncommon, sadly, in this publishing climate) would be quite fruitful.” I realized that it would be much better if I had actually read this book for these purposes, and asked for a copy, noting that we typically did “short, punchy” interviews, but were flexible. Two days later a long reply came in, Oisín is eager, aware of the struggle involved in the whole process, but elated about the prospects of the text itself, telling me his collection has “been reviewed by a lot of small-to-mid-size journals, all of which have termed it excellent, a few bigger places, too, including the Scotsman, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and World Literature Today.” One reviewer calls him “the best Irish poet currently writing in English,” a modern poetry professor comments that "Oisín Breen is writing at a pitch few other poets of his generation can muster. The dynamism and control of register, rhetoric, rhythm, is consistently a marvel.” He says that he “liked the sound of punchy” re this interview, but it was preceded by a long description of the collection iteslf, shared here in its entirety:
Of the work, Music, language, and the relationship between love, loss, meaning, and identity shape the collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, which carries two longer-form works, alongside a series of shorter naturalistic pieces that take common subjects, from the rearing of ducklings to young lust, then subvert them by employing an atypical gaze. Of the two longer pieces, the title work, Lilies, infuses the ancient Irish myth, Tochmarc Etine, into a contemporary story of motherloss, ageing, and sexual awakening. The second, Ana Rua, is an avant-garde incantation of love.
There was a problem. The arc collection promised was not attached. But still the interview is beginning to form. On August 5th I ask the first two questions: they reply the same day: “`Long long night DM, love your words. Quick question, when you mention death of the author is that re: Roland Barthes, or more general?” It’s a great point. Here I was using buzzwords figuratively when there was the real historical material, which was somewhere off in the distance. The question needed a more developed scope, became a follow-up question, even an argument. We started a google doc. It was curious to find my initial question had been broken up into sections:
1) How is it that you heard about Sybil in the first place?
Honestly, it was during one of those moments when, as a writer, you’re looking to find places that work well with you, that seem to have a similar approach and attitude, and that seem to have the right vibe to the work you’re looking for. So, I believe it was, via Twitter, perhaps a post? And then a dig, and there we have it.
We were grateful for your submission, because it seemed to happen at a time when the profile of Sybil itself was being elevated from a local to internationally read publication, which is quite exciting.
Amen! It’s a hard thing to pull off, so chapeau.
Reading over the blurbs for Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, it makes sense that your work that is grounded in sexuality made it onto the site, that being a subject which we have frequently published to date. Were you aware of this when you submitted?
I was indeed, and, well, actually recently there’s been some discussion in public fora on the discussion, including, if I recall correctly, Becky Tuch’s newsletters…
I have plenty of work, of course, that is not sited in the sexual, or in the sensual… In Lilies, there is, for instance, a piece literally about ducks and duck trauma, yet I do enjoy the incorporation of the sensual in art, and the often total disconnection of sensuality in poetics is a strange phenomenon, considering it’s an integral part of our species’ being.
Indeed, even when it is actually discussed… it is done so either with irony, or with the kind of detachedness that brings to mind Prufrock and ether… when sex, love, touch, taste, want, desire, flavour, diversity, hunger… all these things… they are integral to us. I recall the best ever heckler I had at a performance, it was upstairs in the International Bar in Dublin, and I was reading the October section from Lilies as part of a headline set, and mid-way through, as I quickly paused to sip water – the long-form pieces take endurance – a lad in the crowd, he barked, ‘you bastard, I’m sitting here with the lads and you’ve given me a fucking hard-on’... To be honest, I laughed quite heartily, but I also absolutely adored hearing this… It meant, in a sense, I’d done my job.
One last note on this is that a lot of writers often derided for their floweriness, Durrell, Lawrence, Joyce… sensuality was integral to them, and a lot of writers, contemporary and otherwise, praised for the sparseness of their detail.. Their work is utterly without sensuality… It’s interesting.
2) What has been your experience been, getting Lilies... published, and then republished? What do you think that this says about the state of literary writing, and the world of publishing in general? Are concerns about the 'death of the author' justifiable in this era of automated writing and divestment from education in the humanities?
Getting Lilies published… Well, much like any other early career, I think I still count as an early career writer, though when does one become a mid-career writer, is it to do with journal publications? Or book publications? Or who’s publishing you? But how-and-ever, much like any early career writer, it’s always a tricky thing. You simply have to stay tough, and grit out the fact that time and again work you believe in will not be the right fit, that is, until it is. So it was very much the same with Lilies. It probably got about 10 rejections as a full manuscript, so, actually pretty swift, really, when it comes down to it.
Of course, I was over the moon when I first knew it would come out. The promises made were lovely, the buzz around the newish but then-seemingly set for great things publisher was phenomenal, and hell, it all looked rosy. Equally, with my first book I felt utter joy, a kind of ‘finally!’, and with the second, I felt like, ah, yes, there we go, I am actually a writer now, if that makes any sense at all.
So, that was phenomenal.
The afterwards? Well, to be honest, a lot of it sucked. The book was published without notice to me on the day, communications fell apart, marketing was not met, support was not met, and the editor then decided to stop publishing, but keep the work alive (a pledge), then suddenly closed the press, literally just to do other things, despite its use of a print-on-demand service, which was free, and having published work – some as close as three months before the ‘closure’. So it was handled very very very badly. I think everyone recognizes this, and I think we all learned from it.
But, ultimately, it was all to the good.
The sadness and frustration over what happened, well, it got me furious, and I’m pretty damn motivated when I’m irritated. So, the moment I found out (I was heading to the cinema after a bite in a delightfully odd Indian on Lothian Road in Edinburgh, Nutans), well, I put it to one side, and spent the night with my lady happily, until time for sleep, then stayed up a few hours on my own with a coffee, beginning the ‘campaign,’ which, for my part, began and wholly included contacting publishers, trying to sell the BBP back-catalogue, or at least get the works saved that could be saved… I also contacted as many of the ex-BBP authors I knew, and then some whipped into action themselves (one founded an advocacy social presence, for instance), and we all worked together to keep ourselves in the loop. As a result of all this, a huge number of the works, some of the most interesting avant-garde Irish work out there at the time, was saved, from John Sexton’s to Nathannael O’Reilly’s, from Marian Christie’s, to Jeremy Hawkins’ and Teo Eve’s. Chapeau indeed…
Moreover, a few publishers also stepped in, though they could not save our work, to take new work from the stable in an act of support, and deary me… that was wonderful.
For me, this meant Downingfield (@Downingfield) and its editor Mitchell swooped in and have done me truly proud :) Delighted with what we’ve achieved so far. It also meant, well… I was truly fortunate to speak with Jessie Lendennie at Salmon, and am utterly delighted that a real big art project of mine, the Kerygma will be released in 2025 through Salmon, a press I’ve admired for literally decades. I remember seeing Salmon books growing up 🙂
As to what this says about the state of literary writing? The world of publishing in general?
Ach, honestly I don’t think it says too much that’s new… There are always bad actors in sub-industries like poetry that lack the same level of scrutiny that bigger markets get as a result of their scale… You end up with weird conflicts of interest (Submittable owning poetry journals, Submittable not cancelling journals that are defunct but pulling funds… fake journals… bizarre takeovers… It’s worth reading Becky Tuch’s exposés on a few of these…) You end up with really well meaning publishers that are totally out of date in some ways and the understanding of what is needed to sell books shifts, or you end up with publishers not listing through Ingram et al. so it’s hard to sell, or you end up with publishers that don’t know how to manage various processes… and that’s on one side… equally, you end up with writers who do no promo… the amount of time I’ve spoken with press-owners … lordy… and the sign writers who actually just don’t promote the work bar attending a reading… as if their work will sell by default… So that’s a lot of issues… Beyond this there’s problems with publishers being run for vanity or to push forward a career as a concept then dumped (I’d argue BBP was one of these), and a lot more issues similar to this, and that’s before we even get into the problem of competitions and the fact that they claim to represent certain causes, yet literally prioritize those willing to pay to enter… pay-for-play is a big problem… I could wax lyrical on these issues all day.
Then, the flip-side, however, is that the state of literary writing is also phenomenal in terms of the number of people eager to try, eager to read, eager to push… poetry has a chance, as does literary writing, to really surge again. To me, I’m afraid, this also does mean we need to move beyond the era of the confessional writer, of the solipsistic writer, of the stand-up comedian without jokes that is the slam scene… and get back to writing-as-art (but also with performers who actually perform, who don’t just mumble, who speak loudly, with passion, and who absolutely don’t stare at telephones while reading)... Indeed, I find the ‘accessibility’ crowd insult readers, as if complex turns of phrase, or daring efforts are essentially impossible for the lower stratae to understand, so we must dumb ourselves down… Hogwash.
The real positive though, in the face of challenges, and issues, and ups and downs… is the resilience and the community. Internationally there is a wonderful community of excellent publishers, excellent journals – I’m avoiding naming names, not because I can’t, there’s so many, but just not to leave anyone out :) – amazing writers… and it’s wonderful to be a part of, to see so many artists making the art they love because they must and they do…
Now, on the death of the author and automated writing…
3) Are concerns about the 'death of the author' justifiable in this era of automated writing and divestment from education in the humanities? In this context we're talking more generally about the precarity of life as a poet.
Interesting. I’d wager, honestly, no. I’m familiar with how large-language-models work, and they’re wholly based on probabilities. There’s no I in this ‘AI’, it’s simply artificial predictive mimesis, and it’s an awful awful writer. It will be a long time before they learn how to make one that knows how to write beauty. A long time indeed (and yes, I’ve spoken to experts on this one, as part of my professional work). Will AI replace authors? Ach, I mean, yeah it will replace Buzzfeed listicle writers, but, then, who reads those things? It will replace meaningless generic placements of buzzwords… okay… Hell it could probably have replaced Rupi Kaur twenty years ago, and again, who cares. So ultimately, while LLMs can and will replace basic function, they are not higher order intelligences, or intelligent in any way, so I’m not concerned. Hell, even at the height of the recent ‘AI’ buzz, several companies replaced marketers with AI, then weeks later, rehired the marketers. It’s a sham. It’s inaccurate, biased, and, even worse, totally unnecessary, too. The fact that we’ve handed Silicon Valley Bros, and we all know they’re not exactly the ideal arbiters of taste, morals, sense, sensuality, or interest… hah, it’s wild.
What strange new world is this…
Education, you’re right, is a little more worrying, in the sense that without humanities education, poetry is harder and harder to spread, but then again, some of the greatest poets the world has ever seen, arguably most of the greatest, predate mass education. Poetry-as-form, poetry-as-music, poetry-as-art… I believe will always have a place. Poetry-as-platform for ideology? Probably not, that phase will likely pass. I’m very much on the Wildean side of the art-vs-politics side of things… sure art ‘is’ political in the sense that everything ‘is’ political, but I do not believe in didacticism, and I find the current trend toward requiring art to be didactic neo-Victorian, and tantamount to the horror-show of when they rewrote the ending to King Lear… I read for beauty and quality and that’s it… So yes, great moral writers are on my shelves, but so too are Hamsun, Pound and Celine, who write beautifully on the human condition, regardless of their abhorrent personal beliefs! 🙂
I guess I actually really do believe in the transformative elevatory potential of art, and I don’t see that dwindling, no matter!
But on precarity and poets? I don’t see that changing. Alas, for in my land, before colonisation and repeated (two big ones) genocide, we had poets far higher. The chief poet had to have the same status and quality of dwelling as the high king, poets were powerful… It’s… ah I wish we had what we had then, and that we could see what we had then would have become now. That’s one of the great tragedies of colonial monstrosities like the British Empire, the diversity of form and life they crushed.
But, yes, poets, I reckon, will, bar the odd mass produced sensation - i.e. where the work is irrelevant, all that matters is ‘buzz’, so Kaur, for instance – remain mostly low earners in terms of what they make from their work, for now… I’d love to be wrong, but I see a hugely successful poetry career as being one where one gets ones work out there, and maybe gets a nice wee pension plan in the end :)
[It was ‘death of the novel’ that was in my mind! The near metonymic equation of ‘author’ with ‘book’ in this context perhaps betrays my biases, but I only meant to get to the heart of the question Breen talked around anyways. It was a generous and well-intentioned approach to the question. Getting these answers typed out was a lengthy process (by now we’re in Sept 2023), and multiple rounds of reminders on both of our parts, both for continuing the conversation and sending over the arc, which came with these questions being addressed. We had already made more substance than any of our interviews when I noticed that the follow up question was also broken up:]
4) I enjoy the invitation to imagine the discussion of automated writing and literary precarity more generally (which may or may not be a unique historical condition, there's some great literature about this) in the context of the death of the author you mention (Barthes).
Me too, and quite right, I was just talking about Gissing’s New Grub Street the other day.
How the author's personality is and isn't mediated into a work in literary analysis and discourse about writing more generally is quite the subject to ponder, wouldn't you say?
Absolutely. I think Stanley Fish nailed it though, when he said that contra to much belief there is an actual final text, but, like a logarithm, or the neo-Mohist paradigm of the reaching-never-reaches, it is unapproachable in its fullness… So there is an ‘author’ version of the text, but not actually knowable. Lord, given the fallibility of memory, I don’t think I know the authorial version of Lilies any longer. I plant Easter eggs in books, too, and I doubt anyone will find half of them, and I certainly won’t remember them.
But my stance… the author’s personality, given word choice, subject choice, style choice, well it’s hard-coded in and mediated into a work. My take on Barthes’, not very original I know, is that he’s right on the text being rewritten and written (throw in a dollop of Derrida here, through differance), by the reader… sure… but that the absolutist stance is also equally wrong, as it pretty much always tends to be… I’m a big believer in Epicurus’ chestnut of ‘everything in moderation, including moderation’... But, then flipping it again, I think any analyst stating, what John meant to say in paragraph X, is opening themselves up to vast criticism… intentionality is not knowable on a total basis. I also don’t think the author’s personality actually matters when it comes to the quality of the work. Each work is an artifact.
If there is a death of the author, the seeming social-media-ification of literature makes the presumptions about the writer's personality more porous than Barthes advocates for. Or is the situation perhaps more complicated than that?
No, I think you’re quite right, at least in terms of personality.
I don’t think social media impacts the writer’s writing, in the sense of some sort of great multiplicitous ‘ur-writer’ bleeding into porous texts, no, or rather, that’s not true, now that I think about it, I think it’s entirely untrue for writers such as myself, who prioritize art, and have hard plans as to their work, and do not use their work as a platform for their ideology, or for their personality… But for writers whose writing is all about the confession? Who write, as is trendy, I, I, I…? You’re probably dead right actually… I note this all the time, trends, popular discourses, they flip-flop on fashion, without recourse to rigour, and yes, this informs the text, the writing, and you’re spot on. (A great example, by the by, is the Israel-Palestine discourse of late… week one, everyone was howling and baying at anyone who even said, ahem, this is complex … week three, everyone was howling and baying at anyone who said, ahem, the other side is complex… you literally had artists and commentators entirely swapping their points of view, but retaining their anger, which baffles… (I should say, I do have a particular stance on the conflict, but, like I say, the whole shebang is complex, the only thing that isn’t, is that I mourn for all life lost, very very deeply, and we are all, on this planet, kin, regardless of any determiner, we are kin, together. My stance is also informed by a year’s formal study and decades of informal study on the topic, so the only way I could lay it out is to literally sit down and talk for half an hour :) So I’ll leave my stance at I yearn for peace, and for freedom in a secular form for everyone).
But… then… no… for writers whose interest is in art, not in the self, I don’t think social media makes a jot of difference to the porousness or otherwise of their work, though it’s handy for networking and learning.
Then again, when it comes to multiplicitousness, and Lilies does deal with this in a number of ways, not least if you ask who is the protagonist, when is the protagonist, and how many is the protagonist…
I’ve spoken before, at length, about my views on multiplicity and human nature, but to put it in a nutshell, I don’t believe there are singular whole selves… I do not believe that ‘I’ is constant, more that it is a continuum… so, take for instance, key events in your past, there are hundreds that linger deeply, and they are like anchors of time and soul, you can speak with these iterations of yourselves, these vital parts… and when you suffer the deep loss of deep friends and family… you can speak to them too… and some ideas… you can speak to them… but in any moment where the ‘I’ is called forth to act, the quiet constant discourse of all these times of instantiation, of being, of relationality, they summon forth this agent figure, this ‘I’ with the illusion of total coherence. We are communities, ecosystems all, I believe, and truly I believe this is wonderful. Does that solve the query of porousness? Probably not, but hopefully it’s food for thought.
[Again, this was couched in a particular social atmosphere, and typing this up, I know there is a shared sense of mourning and pity for the ongoing genocide we each witnessed, only taking what was essential to articulate in terms of poetry, in its own terms. There was so much to work with within these answers, and yet we had already pulled much more deeply than we previously had to date. By early November, I still didn’t have a digital copy, which was sent over at the end of the month. My reply is gracious, but I don’t get to the text and updating the google drive for these questions until Jan 2024. “You'll forgive the delay in my responding to this thread. It wasn't for lack of interest. In fact, I've had too much to say, and it took me longer than preferred to finish off the manuscript. I read the greater share of it in one go, and needed time to settle a lot of stuff out before returning to it, which I have just been able to. And it was the same with your extensive comments.” I also update Breen on the information which begins this write-up, about the burgeoning state of Sybil itself, the print release, the ‘chat in a pub’ style in which the interview was taking, and my own academic background when it came to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. We go back and forth and I promise to make a note the above comments were made “within the first few weeks of the current horror-show.” I have tried in all instances to be sensitive to those who have suffered in this capacity while respecting the literary exchange which was forming at the same time. The questions are all answered by Feb 1st, and I have taken two weeks exactly to finish up drafting the page, still unsure about what I will use for the visual art:]
I would like to use this juncture to address the ‘Irish-ness’ of Lilies, then. Certainly, like yourself, I have read deeply on some of these social and political issues, and realise that it is both the case that the present state of things is in part the product of longer colonial issues, and that any loss of life in wartime is abhorrent and unacceptable. Your collection draws on deep roots of Irish mythology and identity, and seems to span the eras from the ancient and modern. Would you care to discuss this a bit further?
Woof, as the man said to the horse… Irishness :) I mean, obviously before anything else, one is infused by one’s culture, its traditions (and obviously some people are, alas, not, based on a lack of knowledge in their family), its song, its laughter, its myths… aye… and I definitely grew up in a household that valued who we are and who we were. And, like you probably would agree, a post-colonial citizen tends to cleave much closer (with exceptions, including a good friend of mine) to the cultural legacy that survived the centuries of desecration and attempted destruction.
Obviously, ‘Irishness’ is at once a multiplicity, of course. There is no value, as we have seen all too often throughout history, in blood and soil theories (indeed, I’m very much against judging solely people by their identities, rather than by their intent, compassion and action – a stance that can be controversial at times). To be Irish includes so many variations, of course. There is the citizen, and that includes hundreds of thousands not born in the country, or even familiar with its customs at all, at least initially, but who have made it their home and contributed. There is now, for the first time in our history, the concept of an Irish person, an Irish citizen, who actually has very little idea about our oral tradition, and did not grow up knowing the roots of their family in the land back through the centuries and the stories. A post-Irish-wealth citizen of the world, children of migrants who arrived when we actually started getting contemporary migration (round about 2003)... and that’s truly interesting. I only mention this, because a. It’s interesting, and b. I don’t want, when I speak about Irishness, to claim my own more rooted, older, familial, and ancestral kind gives me a right to speak above or for those who have gladly come, and are welcome. Indeed, I know what it is like to move communities from a position of being socio-economically alright-if-not-doing-too-well, so doing so from a position of actual socio-economic weakness is truly tough and pulling that through, integrating, adapting, growing and sharing is always worth a thousand welcomes and a thousand tipped hats.
Now that’s out of the way, of course, it is obviously worth then defining the ‘Irishness’ we’re talking about here, and that is the fusion of our day-to-day culture, the signs and signifiers, the different way we use the English language, the way we play, the way we sense, the way we are sensual, the way we are frightened and alone… all of these things as they interact. We’ll accept that as part A of a Venn set. Then there’s the contemporary art culture, and let’s put that, say, just for ease of clarity, as everything produced by us since the rise of the novel, so let’s loosely go as early as 1700… Then we have obviously a whole tradition of work that continued all the way to (and after) the final and total conquest of the last rebel forces of Ireland, after hundreds of years of desperate attempts to hold the colonists back (at Kinsale)... To be fair, however, I must admit I am largely ignorant of much of the poetry of, say 700-1700. This period also contains, of course, the writing of many of our great ancient oral tales, our great myths, carried in books from the Yellow Book of Lecan, to the Books of Invasions, the Ulster Cycles, my own namesake… and so on. Much of this I have engaged with and love. And almost everyone of my generation and before at the very least has a passing understanding of the more popular tales. Beyond that there is also the mix of history and mythological status… so we go into our first large cities, or great kings, our early settlements (and we go back a looong time, just check out the origin dates of, say, Newgrange (colonists do have a habit of trying to convince the world-at-large that the people they conquered were savages, rather than fully urbane societies))... Now, it’s definitely unlikely that the general population can discuss Abadruad, or which Abadruad they are talking of, although everyone knows the biggies, Ború most of all… Everyone knows, too, about us being an active society at the time of the Romans, but not everyone knows we had trading ties with Carthage and an economic crash that led to a huge reduction in jewelry manufacture for two generations, due to trade issues around 300 BC (I may be off by a hundred years, it’s been a while)... So we now have a B, and a C for our Venn, namely mythological cultural understanding, which includes the ancient history (of varying degrees of depth) and our great epic myths and stories; and a contemporary ‘modern’ post-1700 cultural understanding, which includes everything from Swift to Kevin Barry, Wilde to Flann O’Brien, Joyce to Heaney, Yeats to Kavanagh or Synge, and even the most ultra-modern Irish writers of today, myself included, and I’d namecheck dozens if I could (although none are spoken word, and if anyone dislikes that, I don’t give a damn)... Right then we lean into D., the active and maleable cultural nexus of practice and I guess rewriting or retelling myth. Oooh I guess it’s really about time for a new paragraph.
So, D. then. Well, one of the things that struck me most about living in Scotland early on was that the music tradition differs here, on two main aspects. The plus point is that the actual formal dancing aspect for the masses (in Ireland the dancing part is the performative, i.e. our actual specialist dancers, who train, the majority normally go to a Ceilidh and it’s a lot more like going to a heavy metal gig)... in Scotland the majority actually know how to dance the average ordinary working person’s ceilidh, which is lovely. The downside is that the performance of the music is blighted by a ssshhhh culture, that I worked hard to understand, then I twigged it… it clicked… I went ahhhh… The traditional music culture here is largely dead. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, it’s to say it is a museum piece. People perform the songs largely how they have always been performed. They do not live the music, the culture of it, the sound of it, it is kept alive. In Ireland, our best selling albums are our own music, it is constantly reinvented, from the influx of change due to African migration in the 2000s (think Kíla as the easy example), the melancholy experimentation of groups like the Gloaming, the ribald punk joy of Dublin’s Lankum in their early albums (unlike the entire rest of the world, I think their award winning latest album is their weakest, not as most who would criticise it would say for its experimentation (that I laud), but simply I think all bar the first song are not quite finished, not quite tight enough, not quite mastered for the sound that sings to me, but it is their work and they should make it their way, and I love what they do. They’re also thoroughly lovely people from what I understand. I mention my lack of passion for the fourth album (the third being my favourite), largely to illustrate the point… the music of our people still sings in the land, it is argued over, debated, it sells hundreds of thousands of copies, it fills the streets. Every street, bar maybe 10 in the land that has a bar on it has a night where there is an old man or woman who plays and those who learn from them… who experiment afterwards… the tradition is alive. … So this living practice… it is the old ways, but it is always changing… many will know of Mad Sweeney… but his story can shift… I myself, for instance, have reworked great big chunks of the story of the Wooing of Étaín (Tochmarc Étaíne), the tradition of keening is practiced I’ve seen in feminist stitching clubs, and by radical lesbians. There will be gay traditional Irish dancing lessons. There are short-haired non-binary types with platinum and purple hair tearing up the pubs and whooping right beside 85 year old men with long-loved pipes in their pockets… There is a nexus that is lived tradition, going to a funeral and singing a song, attending a wake, so I guess, this is the physical manifestation of B. and C. as it functions as a higher-order system of interrelational complexity. The paradigmatics of practicing as an Irish person… the day of Bríd, on which I answer this, it’s quite fitting indeed.
So apologies for that tangent, but when I answer your query, or speak of ‘Irish-ness’, I want to be clear that this is the Irishness I speak of, the intersecting venn of A. (culture as practice), B. (culture as modern creation), C. (culture as history and myth), and D. (the constant dynamic change wrought from the continual clashing of ABC)... I do hope that makes sense.
I should note, by the by, when you mention war, yes, I should agree on that caveat :) Absolutely, I will 100% categorically state the loss of any innocent civilian life during war is utterly abhorrent. Though, and I once got in a blazing row about this, a colonised subject killing a soldier? I mean, the UN even supports that one. A politician? I mean this kind of thing is a bit more open to interpretation. There are root causes and root states, the need for freedom, the need for the ability to dream, to think, to be, to be free of subjugation and terror, to love, to sing… when we are denied the basic realities of what it is to be human, is it wrong to kill the physical agents of that denial – they’re always the same people, literally high-ranking bureaucrats, police, soldiers, monarchs, high ranking influential power-brokers – I think any person, speaking and thinking honestly (lord even Holywood) would accept that this is not immoral, and is in fact necessary. The issue is when those not involved in such oppression are killed… and that is always a tragedy, and always abhorrent, though even here there is a gray area when it comes to colonisation. If the actual person who stole your land from you is standing on it, and you have nothing left, and you are staring at them, is it necessarily wrong? Are they not akin to those agents of denial I note? I would say they very much are. Is their family? I would say absolutely not unless they intend to take an active role in subjugating you as an imperial subject. Nuance is a son of a bitch, as they say. Equally, the greatest and most horrendous slaughters of innocents come historically through the state, not from those fighting to remove the yoke of tyranny… genocide is typically, in its contemporary sense, a product of the large imperial state, and more recently its insidious relationship to projections of power through propaganda. So as someone probably once before me said: Fuck the Queen and everything she and her like stand for, but long live the men and women all through the world with a song of freedom in their hearts.
I appreciate some sensibilities (I’d say thanks to echo chambers and an unwillingness to self-interogate) might find the above ‘inflamatory’, but before they pass that kind of judgement, I’d ask them to think literally of their own people’s moves to freedom through the centuries, and their own heroes, and I’ll wager 99% of those they laud fit exactly the pattern I’m outlining, and for the 1% who don’t, I’d gladly share a pint with you and discuss this, as the deep-core of my belief here is compassion for the human majority, and not for those who have had the fortune and belligerence to establish themselves as the absolutely powerful historically.
But onto the Venn… and the last part of your question, namely: “Your collection draws on deep roots of Irish mythology and identity, and seems to span the eras from the ancient and modern. Would you care to discuss this a bit further?” … I think, in a sense, the use of a good rambling tangent full preamble to an answer of a question like this, if you’ve managed to do it right, you’ve implicitly answered the question :) And in this sense, I do think I have, but let’s make it literal.
I do draw deep on the roots of our myth and identity, yes – and again, given the present state of the world, I would like to, for my own happiness, state that I adore welcoming the world to share in that myth and that identity – not from some sort of theoretical basis, but because I grew up with it in my bones. Like a large large portion of my countrymen and countrywomen, our grandparents, our great grandparents, and back… from each family at least one fought; from many all fought. The stories are still in my bones… The tales… the sound… The visions… the dreams… I write with mythology and identity infusing much of what I do, because I am Irish in the bones and soul, and that is part of what it is to be Irish. And, as I’ve already mentioned, I don’t believe in singular iterations of the self through time, and I don’t even believe that the constituents of selfhood I discussed even need to be real at all. They can be your vision of yourself 10,000 years ago, hell, hypothetically they could be a small hairless cat named Xerxes who can speak who knows history sent back in time (as perhaps cats are more capable of withstanding the paradoxes) to help establish the great Persian dynasty… Ultimately we choose what we are composed of, or at least a large part of it, much in the same way people might say of a nearly-but-not-quite love… ‘I was not ready to love, I was not open to love’ … It doesn’t mean that three months hence the same event would not echo so resoundingly different…
I chose to draw deep on the draught that is my roots, and that auld Venn diagram I note. So I guess, in a sense, I’m a sucker for practicing my ABCD.
It is certainly the case that the use of Gaelic has a clearly Joycean resonance, but I am also made to think of the terrific Ossian passages in Goethe’s Young Werther, or the little I have read of Keats. Would it be fair to say that you have fallen further into the ecstasy, as opposed to the anxiety of influence?
Oh lordy… Ho-hum. You know I’m not really sure I can answer that one with any sense of actual integrity, beyond saying, ah sure, it’s a little of all the answers, and it changes given the day.
For my sins, I should say (and it’s long been on the list), I’ve never actually read Young Werther, so I can neither claim to be influenced or not by the grand work, as I have repeatedly been told it is. Indeed, my knowledge of the Sturm und Drang era of German art is a lot less than it likely should be. Equally, while I do like Keats, I do have a tendency, as Coleridge did, to think of him as that daft little tubercholic melancholic, for Coleridge speaks to me far more than Keats, so, too does Byron, whose Mannfred is probably my favourite Romantic-era poem… so, too, Shelley… And, I can’t say MacPherson’s fraud is an influence either, although it is remarkably capably done.
Now, our own stories, ach aye they influence me, but much the same way traditional music often takes, borrows a key, or a tone, and reinterprets it… I do not see the idea of developing, changing, playing the minor notes, or… this is what the artist, what the poet, the bard, the singer, the musicmaker, the dreamer… this is what we do… I think it is in this book I have a line ‘the dreamloose threads of a young woman’s skirt’... it may be in the forthcoming work, mind… and in that image I am certainly also lingering on creativity…
Am I torn by the ecstasy or the anxiety of influence? Perhaps the best answer is neither? Sure, I’m influenced by loads of people. Some obvious. Some not. I’m also influenced by dislikes. And none of that is a bother to me. Was I anxious years ago that I might be sounding a little too Yeatsian here or too Elliot or Pound there… Aye… But I genuinely don’t feel that my work carries another’s voice nowadays. Perhaps that is hubris, but I feel I have my own artistic voice, and my work is identifiably my own. So anxiety does not come… But equally I do not feel like revelling in the forms of others either, for largely the same reason.
In a sense it is like standing in the water up to my midriff and asking myself am I wet or am I dry, when the truth is both and neither, and that it does not matter because at that point it is my choice whether or not to swim.
In this vein, we ought to show our hand a little more clearly. Our orientation toward writing is one which doesn’t follow the clear demarcations between poetic movements in different eras. Our terminology for this, postmodern classicism, is a big enough tent to encompass a variety of approaches to poetic practice. I am inclined to make the comparison of your work here to some of H.D.’s writing about Helen of Troy, for instance, which so explicitly exists in a far away time that others might find questionable or even anachronistic to a fault. And yet your representations are so visceral, and not at all at odds with the contemporary scenes. One especially vivid example of this from your manuscript is the poem “A Chiaroscuro of Hunger,” which takes place in Rome, but features an old song from the twelfth century. The lines “hers, I was careful in my fantasy to be delicate/And rough, the two extremes balanced by her breath” seem especially captivating when considering the role of contradiction as a near-transcendent poetic model. Would you care to speak to this further?
Ach, I mean, on the surface of things, I probably agree with you from one point of view…
For the most part, delineation by ‘movement’ or ‘era’ is at the very least a stitch-up… I mean, the obvious case is that Tristram Shandy is quite clearly post-modern, and there are hundreds of other cases in point on that one… The great choruses of Greek tragedy, if you actually envision them literally… it’s like an utterly wild modern bacchanal opera… (I’ll probably end up doing a chorus piece at some point, even if everyone hates it) … When the birds bifurcate heaven and earth as a result of the sagacious advice of basically quasi-Beckettian, quasi cookie monster (I have a theory that Beckett’s Endgame, literally the mother and father figures in the dustbins, are the true origins of the two in the bins of Sesame Street) kind of homeless wise fools… The dreary contemporary presentations of oh it’s immersive theatre… deary me it’s literally medieval theatre (the processional) but less professional and less fun and far far too knowing over its conscious for my taste. In the time of Molière, if I’m not getting my centuries out of alignment the actors stood in a line and then stepped forward and backwards to declaim… We’ve moved from setpiece cinema of action back and forth and now live in a blurry unreality in mainstream cinema of things explode, frame rates are high, and realism is at a low ebb… both the realism of representation and mimesis or indeed the surreal… So ultimately, first of all, I’d say that while I might disagree that there are no real demarcations of movements… I would argue that there very much are – but that the demarcations are always loose, potentially prone to bubbling out and becoming their own thing, and inter-relational, or multi-dimensional venns, complexities… and there is no such thing as a closed system – instead I would say that movements do not exist solely in a particular time, they merely have ascendancies.
Your term reminds me of the paper on narratology by David Herman, which I do generally buy, that the current era is defined as the post-classical, kind of an interprative interrelational plug and play, at least from an academic analytical standpoint.
I do think, however, the idea of embracing or including all traditions in a big tent is actually a problem. I don’t really see the need to not have an antagonistic relationship with one or two things, indeed, I think it’s healthy. Pattern:randomness is the dichotomy that allows knowing, knowledge, data, information, it is only between the two that communication is possible… Too much pattern and I learn nothing new (the woman who drinks orange juice each morning telling me she is drinking orange juice in the morning is not informative; nor is the man who simply says BZRRTT one moment, HFHFKKF the next, and continuous in a never repeating pattern of sound able to teach me a thing…) So I’m quite gladly totally antagonistic publicly to ‘spoken word’, or your Kaurs… not a bother there at all. Indeed, I welcome their antagonism toward me, too :)
I recall the HD note you’re making from a distant lecture.
I recall going bah and humbug to the anachronistic argument. Though like I say, long live the argumentative discussion!
But yes, I don’t remotely think that when, how, or any of that actually matters when it comes to art, but what matters is why, the craft, the execution, and whether it sings – and I don’t think whether it ‘speaks authentically’ is remotely involved in any of those things… So the idea, say the people now claiming not to watch movies that aren’t in HD, for instance… hah, yeah no time for such nonsense do I have.
I should probably say I definitely don’t think I write in an old fashioned way, if anything I find much of the lauded contemporary work of the awards bodies to be more akin to the old-fashioned, dreary riffs on the prosaic banality of the onion bhaji in a fake working class accent to present the ‘reality’ of today… Och, dear lord, no. It’s like an entire group of people decided they wanted to be the apotheosised lovechild of Phillip Larkin and Tom Leonard.
On visceral, I must say, as you note of my work, a word of thanks. I truly appreciate reading that and hearing it… that is very much a strong intention in my work, that it connects to the flesh, to the way flesh sings. So whenever I hear this… Lord, I am happy. 🙂
Interesting on the 12th C. song. A wee bit of inside trivia, is I have no idea if it really is, it’s probably far more recent, perhaps Lancastrian or some such at a guess. But it fit at that time that it was a 12th C. song :) The song itself is simply ‘rose, rose, rose, red // shall I ever see thee wed? // I marry that thou wil’t // when thou art dead,’ which is one of those sang in multiple time signatures choral pieces that you can do with your friends. Great craic.
You also write: “hers, I was careful in my fantasy to be delicate/And rough, the two extremes balanced by her breath” The lines seem especially captivating when considering the role of contradiction as a near-transcendent poetic model. Would you care to speak to this further?”
I love that you enjoyed those lines. I enjoyed writing them. I enjoyed thinking them. And I wanted to represent, I guess the multiplicity of how many people feel. It’s nothing autobiographical at all, obviously, for if it’s not too blunt to say, I haven’t got even the slightest interest in the kink/BDSM angle of modern relationships to sexuality in my own desires, but i do appreciate it exists, and I thought it interesting to engage with it in that line, to speak to differing forms of desire. It felt a bit like a high note and a low… a sine wave… and it felt right.
But on the role of contradiction as a near-transcendent model… och, it’s hard to wax too lyrically on this beyond agreeing that yes, the inversion matters. To be honest, when it comes to this sort of oh there is an ephemeral betweenness that the author as image-maker lauds, aye, there is… for me it’s always best been known through Calculus, or through the Neo-Mohist reaching never reaches, or through Coleridge and the inner-I, or any of the myriad of almosts we employ to consider the continuum… the fact that tomorrow is always today… all of this… 🙂
Thank you again :)