Irish poet, doctoral candidate, and journalist, Oisín Breen, a multiple Best of the Net nominee and Erbacce Prize finalist, is published in 117 journals in 22 countries, including in Agenda, North Dakota Quarterly, Books Ireland, Door is a Jar, Northern Gravy, Quadrant, Decomp, and The Tahoma Literary Review. Breen’s widely reviewed and highly praised second collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, a Scotsman poetry book of the year, 2023, has just be reissued by Downingfield (Nov. 20). It follows Breen’s critically well-received debut, Flowers, All Sorts, in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten (Dreich, 2020). Breen’s third collection, The Kergyma, is slated for release in 2025 (Salmon).
You can read Movements in Denim and Corduroy in the July 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
Surely, the piece itself is a modified and developed extract from my forthcoming book (The Kergyma, 2025, Salmon Poetry), from a large section (it’s an epic poem) that takes place in a bar, Hargadon Bros. in Sligo. This particular moment is part of a section that details the imagined entrance of the protagonist into the bar as they flee the island on which they have been living having realised what their future holds, and the terror of it. This piece is an approach to describing the physical entry of the protagonist into a bar, and how it unfolds, which is done solely through an atypical approach, from the way they move in their clothes (this poem), the way their boots sound on slate, the movement of sound in the air, and all that jazz… Effectively it’s an extremely artsy approach to saying: ‘they walked into the bar’. But overall, I do very much enjoy the play of language on show in the work, and I’m a sucker for drilling down into fine detail to find the subtleties and the internal dissonance that allows greater meaning to thrive.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
Obviously, glibness isn’t entirely useful, but it was because that is the only form that can approach this kind of expanded description of the minutae of a form. Poetry allows musicality and breadth to language that other forms can not quite afford.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
As an artist, I’d presume I’d have been drawn to another form of creation, most likely (as I have previously worked in) prose. Were it an absence of the literary altogether, I’d presume through singing folk music, which I do regularly do at wee gatherings in my kitchen.
How do you revise your work?
Scrupulously, carefully, repeatingly, step-by-step, again and again and again, word by word, listening for sound and music, deleting words that don’t sing.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Published books, published poems, reviews, discussion, analysis, laughter, performing, being able to pay for one holiday once every year on poetry. Hopefully, at some point, people go, ‘ooh we really like him’ and poetry can contribute to my retirement in some way.
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
Rabbits (Hessell, my 13 year-old rabbit remains a boundless source of fun), trees (everything… ah such wonderful beings), nature in general, water, air, people (I’m endlessly communicative), random pub chat, random café chat, making new friends (I think it’s always important to be open to new experiences), silly gestures (my lady and I, for instance, have a propensity to turn into various role-play characters. At present these include: sentient crabs (we have dances), and a strange Nordic couple consisting of Gretl, a high-flying woman who lives in the upper East side of Manhattan, and her lover, Hans, who pines for their simpler life near the fjords, and for whom Gretl consistently imports large amounts of lumber so that he may stand outside their apartment, on the Manhattan streets, chopping wood all day … dear me there’s so many things to take joy in… music, song, art, improvisation, play… basically, I never stopped playing.
What are you working on now?
Absolutely nothing poetic for a change. Some academic stuff, and general work, and just taking a month or so off after submitting my finished manuscript to my publisher. I do have ideas for the next work, but they’re gestating. Galleries help.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
With the first line, which sometimes turns out to be the last line.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
All of them, but I’m somewhat of a classicist in that I don’t dig the contemporary geist where ‘selling out’ to become a corporate pop drone is now a good thing (…) What I do get inspiration from: poetry, novels, art (everything but installations, which are masturbatory bilge pumps), opera, ballet, jazz, blues, folk, world music, Irish traditional, amateur kitchen singing, mosaics, carpets, tapestries, ancient architecture, classical architecture, good quality fashion (none of this normcore we all wear sweatpants bollocks, actual beautiful clothes)… Basically I believe in the beautiful.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
By stopping what I’m doing when I choose to, spending some time on poetry, and keeping some measure of awareness of what amount of various tasks I have to do each day in order to present as a sane and normal human.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
The biggest ‘inspirational’ moment of late was me wandering around the Prado and getting obsessed with the colours used and representations of emotion in 14th Century painting (and an 11th century set of frescoes). There’s something major there that we’ve lost. I’m ruminating on it, so don’t really want to unspool it yet.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
Yep. If you use a word like love or any other word that is so often used, you better interrogate it, because these words have become so universal their meaning is more or less bled out unless you really nail it. (Alan Gillis, you’re a. a great man to have a pint with, b. a legend, and c. though we argued a lot when we talked poetry at uni, you bloody nailed that point)
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
No. I’d probably throw myself out a window. The congratulatory air… the ‘it’s the participation that counts’… the ‘everybody’s a winner’ malarkey, oh lord no. I talk to some poets sometimes, over beer. Very now and then we’ll take a look at each other’s work, but not as a matter of course, more, oh here’s a line I’m unsure of (and that probably happens about four times a year to me). Feedback is inside my own head. I believe to be a writer you have to have a very very very strange level of self-confidence, i.e. to forage in obscurity for decades while remaining totally convinced of your talent, despite all evidence to the contrary.
How did you begin writing poetry? Was there a specific inspiration or reason?
First poem: aged 12, about chivalry, recommended in a national youth contest thing in Ireland. Second poem: aged 16, while pretending to study at a 5-730pm study session mandated by the school. Further inspiration: Girl beside me that I liked went ooh that’s beautiful. Sex was definitely an inspiration. Aged 16, girls liked guys who emoted but were also ‘cool’ and also wrote poetry, ergo sex, ergo more poetry. That’s not, obviously the sole reason, film representations aided it… Books… and actually just really digging poetry. But I love words, all of them, and poetry is the most musical of wordplay 🙂
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
No, but I hope my work, and that of others, will eventually help create a new zeitgeist where people favour quality, craft, play, and the attempt to create something new, over oh look this person has just written another book about how they feel sad because something sad happened… I despise confessional work like that. The amount of times you go to a poetry reading and it’s just a bunch of bland people standing around discussing the various reasons they are sad in prose, but everyone claps and goes oooh that was so authentic, thank you William thank you for sharing your truth. My response, if I were not too polite to openly air it after William speaks would be: Dear God, William, please never pick up a pen again, please!
More seriously, questions to answer? Aye, sure… but they spring up in the writing process… In my next book, for instance, there’s a section where I attempted (and, I think, succeeded) to pull of the kind of time lapse effect you get in Terence Mallick movies, via treescapes… That sort of thing, technical, playful… That, I like.