Aaron Lelito: Can you provide a little bit about your background in writing? What have been the formative experiences of your creative journey so far?
Alicia Byrne Keane: I started going to poetry nights in Dublin around 2012, and I would say above all else that the performance scene in Dublin around that time was what helped me begin to write. Through that scene I was exposed to the work of a huge variety of artists across disciplines, and I got to meet people like the spoken word poet, playwright, and comedian Sahar Ali, or the late musician, poetry performer, and incredibly inspiring person Raven Aflakete. Often nights like PETTYCASH and The Monday Echo would host a range of artists working in different ways. Being around such performers encouraged me, I think, to view writing as always in a process of interaction between different disciplines. It’s how I met people like Áine O’Hara, a brilliant theatre maker, stage designer, photographer, illustrator, and writer (I feel like I keep listing what everyone does in a big list and I’ll stop) who is doing great work about healthcare and disability activism currently. Beginning poetry from a performance perspective was essential in teaching me not to view writing as detached or removed from oneself. I think learning from performers encouraged this: when you perform your writing, you are very vulnerable and visible, but also able to be very genuine. Your sense of humour, your opinions, can be conveyed to people in a very immediate and honest way, and that is probably how you should write all the time.
AL: Considering your own poetry, what tends to inspire you? Is there an essential question (or a few of them) that you feel that you’re responding to in your writing?
ABK: This is where I’m going to take quotes from Beckett and probably misuse them. With relation to writing through times of anxiety and uncertainty I always think of his poem “What is the Word” and the sense of lostness and grasping it conveys: “folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what – .” It has sentences like that in it. Lately I am trying to do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that focus on reframing a worry or statement. It strikes me that through writing I have always been searching for the words I can say to myself that will make things okay. I have always written to find a kind of reassurance, but the reassurance is always elusive and escapes me, and in that way I’m compelled to keep writing in order to try to find some imagined sense of ease. So in short I would say the essential urge I respond to in all my work is a very anxious impulse. The central question would therefore be some variation of “what is the word,” or “what are the words that will help.”
AL: In your submission, you said, “my writing addresses themes such as the decline of creative spaces in a rapidly gentrifying Dublin and the clash between the natural world and urban non-space.” That idea of nature and civilization (and their clashes, and coexistence, and blurring of boundaries) is something we’re particularly interested in exploring.
First, can you describe your view of this “clash” as you see it happening in Dublin?
ABK: This is a really interesting question! I would have described my recent writing in those terms or similar, since I started writing more “page-poetry” for print publication about a year ago. Such statements about the natural world have taken on a very different resonance since the onset of COVID-19. I don’t want to echo the trite ‘nature is healing itself’ narrative with relation to Dublin, but I will, however, talk about train stations, and the effect they have on my memories of the city.
In the early months of this year, I wrote a collection of poems about the DART, or Dublin Area Rapid Transit train line, which I am currently submitting for publication. There are thirty-one poems, one named after every station. DART stations are quite liminal, concrete, standard-issue looking spaces, like many train stations I guess, but a good few of them are located in these otherwise quite secluded natural spaces. The train line follows the coast, and I wanted the collection to be informed by both tides and timetables, a conflict between human and non-human structures. I was thinking about the Dublin housing crisis and also a personal sense of quarter-life crisis as friends of mine emigrated. There are parts of the DART line in which the train zig-zags through mountains, and I wanted to chart the precarious bits, and for the poems to be full of searing light and maritime winds. I get the feeling of time-slip anyway when going places in Dublin. Everywhere has memories embedded, and I feel like a hangover from an earlier era. Train stations are fixed places that see movement all day. Similarly, the anxious mind ruminates on scenarios – nostalgic or traumatic – with the effect that the past can appear to be continually unfolding. The collection is called Objets DART, which I’m aware is ridiculous, especially since the poems are intended as utterly serious. I will probably change the name.
AL: Next, maybe you can say something about the “bigger picture” here. What do you think about the future of this problem? (You might consider Dublin specifically, or take a more abstract approach… it’s a big question, so take it where you’d like!)
ABK: I feel like post-COVID 19 I will have to rewrite this entire collection, or maybe some of its issues still apply but even more acutely! A lot of people talk about how impersonal and corporate Dublin has become in recent years, and I also wonder what will happen to that aspect of the city due to so many people working from home. I would say that certain areas such as Grand Canal Dock, in which there is usually a huge amount of rush hour traffic, currently look immensely different. As for the quite sad fact that many people practicing in areas such as theatre and the arts cannot currently work, quite a few of my friends have moved to their family homes in other counties, leaving Dublin entirely. This is the same for many of my colleagues working on PhD research, in which they are able to work from home so have moved out of the city, some of them indefinitely. So I would say that there will be even more of a sense of change in Dublin, of areas once lived-in, and of absent friends.
Then again, when lockdown happened around the globe everyone relied so much more on different means of virtual contact, and I know many of us reconnected with friends we hadn’t talked to in a long time. So maybe also, even though some of us have dispersed to different places, we will see a stronger and more connected global art scene due to the prevalence of things like international virtual events. So maybe some of my sadness over emigrated people no longer applies as much. I also hope that there will be more of a sense of kindness, awareness, and change in Dublin. Following the tragic death of George Floyd there is increased urgency in Ireland regarding the need to combat institutional racism, for instance by ending the direct provision system.
AL: Can you describe your academic interests?—You mention the concept of “vagueness” in particular. How do these interests connect to your creative writing?
ABK: Yes! My topic of study has spiraled away into a few different interconnected tangents. At the moment I am looking a lot at how authors such as Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami are perceived as being “placeless” or “vague” despite the fact that their work actually has quite a large amount of cultural references in it. I am arguing that this is due to canonical biases. Both authors use repeated references – things like cats and chic apartments and cooking spaghetti in Murakami, things like bowler hats and greatcoats in Beckett, for instance – in a manner that creates their own “brand,” almost encouraging the reader to view their environments as distinct from the “real world.” This world-creation or world-filtering enacts a form of discursive control. Both authors write in a way that heavily adheres to existing literary forms in dominant languages, even though they have both respectively become known for supposedly writing in a very translation-influenced, multilingual way.
This “vagueness” takes on a different resonance in the case of authors writing from places considered “peripheries.” I am also looking at how “non-canonical” authors often get described as “vague” in a process of othering – how their work could be replete with cultural references that go unnoticed by Eurocentrically minded audiences, and they are thought of as “vague” consequently. This opens up so many topics: you could consider authors such as Édouard Glissant, who used a kind of deliberate “opacity” in his work as a response to racial oppression, right up to modern arguments that the vagueness and silence evinced by Blackout Tuesday posts was harmful in a time when we should rather focus on becoming informed, educating ourselves, and amplifying nonwhite voices. I am currently reading/re-reading all of Jamaica Kincaid’s books. Parts of her work, like the opening to her short story “In the Night,” have stuck with me for years. “In the night, way into the middle of the night, when the night isn’t divided like a sweet drink into little sips, when there is no just before midnight, midnight, or just after midnight, when the night is round in some places, flat in some places, and in some places like a deep hole, blue at the edge, black inside, the night-soil men come.” I think that’s my favourite opening to a story, ever.
On a much more personal level, I think a lot about vagueness and so-called “confessional” writing. A few years ago I began writing short stories, but I found myself unable to write anything that wasn’t in some way informed by my personal experience – after all, who can – and this gave me a huge amount of anxiety. So I think a lot about vagueness in my own poetry. It can become this game of mental Jenga: “if I take out this one reference that makes a character recognizable as a person I know, then the story will lose its atmosphere. I’ll have to think up a fictional image, but then what if that fictional image doesn’t resonate with the rest of the story! You can’t reference lavender and plums in the same paragraph! They’re both too purple and that clashes!” or whatever, and there’s a chain reaction that happens.
AL: As our journal features visual as well as literary art, are there any visual artists that you’re drawn to? Anything goes here—classics to contemporary?
ABK: I have mentioned Áine O’Hara already in a performance context, but Áine’s visual art and graphic design are some of my favourites, along with Sian Conway’s illustrations. Another favourite is the photography and painting by the artist river champion. All three are contemporary Irish creators doing really original and interesting work. My knowledge of art on a more classic level is not great, although it’s something I want to learn more about. I am afraid that my answers would date back to my Leaving Cert (final school exams for Irish students, done when you are eighteen years old or so), where we studied Frida Kahlo and Edvard Munch. I need to research lesser known artists, but at the same time, both Kahlo and Munch left a huge impression on me at the time and I was always drawn to their more terrifying paintings!
AL: Do you have a current creative project that you’re working on? Do you have anything to promote/link to that you would like people to visit?
ABK: I am currently working on setting up a project with some fellow writers, illustrators, and musicians called Eigengrau Collective. The project is in its very beginnings, but we have an Instagram page, and are going to make things like virtual galleries and zines. I also contributed some poems and video footage to a short documentary series called Lost Together, made by Luca Byrne. It’s a really beautiful collection of stories and observations from people during the COVID-19 crisis and those involved are now raising funds for the charity MASI.
I’ve also been working on a large portfolio of poems since lockdown began here in March, which I am hoping to begin submitting soon as a full-length collection. A portion of these are going to be part of a zine project I am working on with a publisher friend, the very talented writer Aifric Leonard. The proceeds from this collection will also go towards a charity for asylum seekers in Ireland.
Otherwise, here is a link to my poem “Glenageary,” recently and very kindly published by The Cardiff Review. www.cardiffreview.com/post/2020/05/24/glenageary/
AL: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know about you?
ABK: There are two poets I don’t think I’ve mentioned so far who are huge influences, so I might end with the brief note that Eva Griffin’s pamphlet “Fake Hands / Real Flowers” is perfect, and Jess McKinney is doing the most original and unique poems, the latest of which can be found in the upcoming issue of The Stinging Fly.
Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Dublin, Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study at Trinity College Dublin that problematizes “vagueness” and the ethics of translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, and Entropy.