Interview // “A furious dialogue of song”—A Conversation with Oisín Breen

Oisín Breen is an Irish writer from Dublin, who I first came across at a literary event in Glasgow, run by the poet Jim Ferguson, and we have since kept in touch, also sharing many of the same acquaintances and friends within the wider-Scottish poetry scene. His work tends to err away from the current “house” style of that wider scene, however, including much more of a focus on mythology, musicality, and the longer-form. Since meeting him, I’ve had the pleasure also of reading his most recent work, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, of conversing about his forthcoming work with Salmon Poetry, The Kerygma, and many discussions on poetic technique, all of which led to my desire to engage him in an interview.

A doctoral candidate, poet and a journalist, Breen is published widely, but always open for a jar—and an argument—and although he is primarily an English-language writer (albeit, with the odd flourish of other languages, Irish, in particular), he is quite clearly a part of the longer and wider Irish poetic tradition, both in its more epic sense, and influenced by both its modernist and post-modernist movements.

Taylor Strickland (TS): I was relieved to see Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín rescued and republished by Downingfield Press after the dissolution of Beir Bua. The book moves ambitiously through Irish mythology and symbolist lyricism, but with a lovely flourish of what Rody Gorman calls “Sweeney-ese”—a kind of garrulous craic fit for the pub yet very characteristic of Hiberno-English speech patterns. First, can you tell us about the book’s linguistic capture? What were you trying to achieve, linguistically, and is it fit for purpose in relation to theme/content alone, or is it also a “write how you speak” mechanism?

Oisín Breen (OB): I confess, saddling up with your damnedably erudite questions and their depth is both an exciting prospect, but also one that’s daunting, for lord, half of what the poet does, even when informed on an abstract level by having studied and thought and lingered in the ephemera of such topics, is, at least to me, more explored in the taste and sound of language-as-it-is-in-the-being-of-being-used . . . or some-thing akin to that anyway. Then, at times, and more on that later, there is, of course, an element of infusing and playing, and recreating, and rethreading ideas and patterns into the work as a body itself.

So, beginning at the end, is the work a write-how-I-speak mechanism, or anything of the kind? I’m afraid to say it isn’t, although it is definitely intended for both aural and visual reception. There are, of course, patterns of speech that do exist in the outside world in the work, but that is in no way the intent. I’ve never valued “authenticity” as any kind of lodestar for art, never saw it as remotely anything to do with art, frankly. But, equally, no, the work is not fit for purpose solely in its theme or content, it is, as you’re guessing, an assemblage, an emergence of all aspects of what you posit. It’s a funny one, for this is the kind of question I can write 10 words on, or 4,000, but not really 200, or not with as much clarity as I’d like (the ten word answer: me too, yay, thank you, it isn’t, beauty, both, no).

What was I trying to achieve? And, linguistically? Something that was part of tradition, but also something that was new. A furious dialogue of song and wonder that splits thighs and lolls tongues, but also has you rubbing your chin going, “hmmm, well then . . .”

But to be clearer or snippier, the linguistic capture of the work, it’s not really a part of the work at all, it is, in the paraphrased imagined words of old masters, my attempt to put the best possible word after the last best possible word in a pattern of music and sound and meaning that runs as smoothly as a young horse along the plains. Whether I pulled that off, that’s for others to determine, but that was the intent, beyond, obviously the semantic aspect.

TS: Macaronic verse, especially the “peek-a-boo” of minorized languages like Irish, interests me greatly in the context of English. Indeed, English should be disrupted where relevant, so I feel. Are you an Irish speaker or learner, and why intersperse your English with Irish? What does macaronic verse mean for you as an aesthetic and/or moral tendency? 

OB: I’m a big believer in deliberately admitting ignorance at times, because I think it is a healthy habit to sustain. So despite various lengths of academic chicanery, I had not come upon the word macaronic, though in terms of the question you’ve phrased I did go ahhh (then checked).

I agree with you, too. I’ve always loved that about the modernist works, and indeed it’s becoming quite the thing in television and cinema nowadays, interspersing multiple languages . . .

I think for me, I’ll say the writer’s job is to be true to the work, rather than their own vision, to attempt to use language to its fullest (not necessarily its most accurate). As a result, whatever the writer knows or has reach of, whatever truth, hypertruth, or distortion is the tool of the writer, in full.

Sometimes there is meaning in a word in one language, lost in another. Grá for instance, in Gaelic, it feels differently to me than love. It tastes differently. It sounds differently. It carries hunger. Desire. Want. It is physical, embodied, reflexive; whereas love, though a beautiful word, feels stative and declarative and personal and felt, but the word does not carry sexuality in its bones, or gum-and-tooth-flashing taste-wanting.

In a sense, I feel the same way about this infusion of the macaronic as I do about writers inventing words, crashing them into each other. These are tools and we should use them to do our jobs to the best of our abilities.

I agree, too, when you speak of disruption, but no, I am not a fluent Irish speaker, for my sins. Would that I were.

I do, of course, like many, or most of my people have some Irish, but not enough for a full throated song, alas. But it is still the spirit language of my people in their bones, and when one works on the rockface of sculpture or art and poetry and music. The bone-song comes out and sometimes it is the right language. Equally, I have also used Italian, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, German and Urdu (only two of which I can waffle in, and only one of which I could pass an exam in) in my work, because it just felt right.

Perhaps I am a terror for erring on the side of emotion rather than the technical in my cause for macaronic use, for I do of course love writing’s technical aspects, including, for instance, the creation of new meaning through juxtaposition, the idea of the “linguistic event” and the “narrative event,” the “minimal event” (I think Todorov can be simplified), and how I believe that all language, in a sense, is actually an event-matrix — and all song and poetry actually narrative, if not a tad oblique.

Ultimately, however, the fullest answer I can give you as to why I do employ multiple languages, most often Irish, into my English work is that it’s in my bones.

TS: Do you ever fear misusing or mischaracterizing Irish and the Gael? Such anxieties certainly plague me when I write Scottish Gaelic into English-language poetry.

OB: Interesting question. To be honest, no.

I mean, sure, I fear I get the syntax wrong, because I’m not fluent, but that’s easily solved by asking a Gaeilgeoir, and I’m fortunate enough to know a few who can help me error check my Irish when I use it.

To be honest, mind, the type of anxiety I personally suffer from is rather limited, and it tends to err either to: ‘I do hope I have sufficient finances to support a reasonable life should I become infirm before death,’ and: ‘Oh Christ I still have these things to do in the next period of time in question.’ Anxiety of performance or presence . . . I don’t really experience. Sure, my favourite dinners always end in trading improvised song and verse.

But I do think there’s a deeper or perpendicular, perhaps, question in your inquiry, namely do I feel that I might misuse the spirit of what it is to be Irish, or the culture, by taking such a liberal willingness to play, to create, to mess around with the various dictions we use in the various languages we use, and it’s an interesting point. It does double back to my lack of anxiety on the topic though.

I’ve always felt unrestrained in art, in a way one cannot be elsewhere, and frankly, if people don’t actually like exactly how it works, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, and room for discussion, for further play . . . But like I say, my culture is in my bones. I may not live in Ireland at present. I may again, or I may not. But it is always and always will be my home, and it is where I will be cremated, where I will have my wake, where I will visit most often, and the way we talk, when we are loose-tongued, when we are tight-lipped . . . it is to me a place, or a format that has the ease of family, or the unrestrained discourse, perhaps, shared by siblings and kin.

TS: Of course, I could go on all day about the language itself in Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín (and as any poetry should do, language is at the forefront). But for other readers’ sake, I’ll move on. Can you tell us about the subjects, or shall I say the conceits, of Lilies? Structurally, the first two poems draw on two female characters, Étaín and Anna Rua, whilst the book’s latter poems have disparate conceits, swithering between places (Ireland and Rome) and between birds and family. What central thread runs through this book if any? Love, perhaps?

OB: Ach! Thank you. And thank you again. The beauty and play of language, if it’s not already clear, is paramount in what I hope my work to be.

I should also add, that one of the tricky things talking about work, given the way publication has a very long tail, is you’re often talking about work that is many years old, but it is “new” in terms of its public status, so I’ve probably forgotten more about the book than I ever put into it.

But yes, it was definitely an important aspect to foreground two strong female characters, yes, especially in Lilies, which, in parts, very much is centered on the insistence of the sexuality of a character, for, as I’ve said elsewhere, it is in part, inspired by my closest and dearest friend’s loss of his wonderful mother, and how I saw him break at the committal, and how the word “godstruck” sang in my mind and forced the book to be born. To me it was important to allow for the sexuality of a mother-figure, the multi-temporality of that figure; and, I should add, multi-temporality is a key part of each of the works. None are singular, none are linear, and the two long-form works can deliberately be read as having more than one protagonist at the same time. In Lilies, for instance, the protagonist could be myriad, it could be Ailil Angubae (modified from the mythological version with the power to split parts of his consciousness apart to watch and be in time and exist in time, separately, but part of a total union), it could be the mother figure, young, old, and also in a sense transfigured into a version of herself as the ancestral minister of ritual along the river Annalee, and, lord, it could be a male gaze, a female gaze . . . I do, in fact lean into this kind of thing a lot more in my forthcoming collection. I think having fluidity in this sense is really quite fascinating in terms of art.

But is there a central thread? Sure. You’re right, love is probably the big one, as is maturation, but probably the one closest to my heart is that of change through time.

TS: In one excerpt, you depict death as “a single reckoning” like a “stop-start-stop algorithmic play”:

It came in a single reckoning, 
    a blow that shook me from the navel to the heart,
    a furious meeting of synapses riffing out sketches 
    of a stop-start-stop algorithmic play

It was all at once, 
    and not at once. 
So I tell you: 

I have been dying for such a long time
    and I have seen its end.

The ambiguity is tantalizing. Go on: do you hold to a hard-and-fast materialism in this book, or in general, and is this a hopeful foray into jouissance, like a “yolo” statement? 

OB: I mean, first off, though it may be me being interviewed here (and my thanks), I had to laugh and must say well done at seeing jouissance and yolo combined into the same question. That I never expected to see.

Perhaps the first thing to note is that there is binary notation in play here, and that the positioning is death-life-death, and that it is a process, a kind of living electrical hymn.

And you’re right on ambiguity, too, although I’d suggest that is one of the pleasures of the poet, and indeed one of the purposes of poetry, to not quite name, to be a purveyor of frisson between what is known and declared, and what is felt and what shivers in the body and bones.

But hmmm. Dear me my only answer is probably infuriating. Yes, I do hold, and no I do not. If we take materialism to be the proposition that everything exists and has reality to it, then absolutely of course. That’s clear. Do I take it to be that everything we know is only that which is known and the unreality beyond it may also be true? Sure. Is everything capturable by our current knowledge? No. But I do believe everything that occurs has a reality behind it and a strong suspicion of motives and proofs like ‘faith’. Ultimately, however, I’m a big believer in love and respect and a willingness to talk being paramount, and absolute stances being extraordinarily risky. When people present things as absolutes, I smell danger.

But to be honest, it is a stretch to suggest jouissance or yolo, though I love that the work suggests that to you. I think the representation of death is more of a precipice depiction, so to speak, from which a base the reader might make up their own mind. That you leaned toward that intellectual joy as a cry for life . . . I love it.

TS: I ask because “At Swim, Two Pair,” my favourite poem in the collection, seems to reinforce the latter, the hopeful foray, when in place of melancholy “came laughter” (unless “laughter” should be read as a kind of delirium). You’re realistic, granted, believing that nothing gold can stay, but you also accept, embrace even, that reckoning with more than a reluctant shrug. Is pluck or daring your ars poetica?

OB: Ridiculously happy you enjoy that one. It actually began as an ekphrastic piece of work, until I ended up properly contemplating the absolute horror of “duck-mothering,” given the size of the duck brood at birth, and how few make it through, given they are literally predated from 360 degrees of death in all directions, be it pike or gull, storm or drought . . .

It’s quite fascinating that you lean to hope with it though. It isn’t that the poem doesn’t carry hope in my own original intent (forgive me for leaning toward the intentional fallacy), or that I undervalue the optimistic interpretation, merely that I tried to make the work sing, to make it poignant, and to make it descriptive, to show what it shows and to do it in a narrative way from a new standpoint. I did not want to influence its outcome or reception, though, again, I love your take. To risk sounding glib, my own intention was somewhat neutral.
But yes, you are correct to say that that reckoning, that clash between life and death, that fusion where what me make either emerges into something new and changed and vital, or it collapses.

And yes, that plucky daring of fused life, you nicely observe, it probably is, to a large degree one of the key motifs that underlines my work. Or, perhaps more correctly, what it is to be, and what it is to be an embodied and disembodied being—both in multiplicities of time—as we search for meaning and to mean . . . That is probably the key conceit that lingers in everything I pursue, that juxtaposition, and the hope of a continual revolution of that-which-was into ever changing new patterns of complexity.

TS: You’ve mentioned a forthcoming book with Salmon Poetry, I wonder if you could give us a short insight into the work, and perhaps how or if it relates to the subjects we’ve already discussed?

Aye, it’s a funny one, because it’s one of those things where if you tell the literal truth, you do risk sounding absolutely vain, but I’ll try and brush that thought aside. The next work is titled The Kerygma, and it’s due out in September 2025 through Salmon Poetry, a press I’ve always wanted to work with, and I am therefore, pretty excited.

What it is, is by far the most ambitious piece of work I’ve completed. It’s also the longest piece of work I’ve ever completed, bar, of course, those novels in the desk drawers, clocking in at 53,000 words and 159 A4 pages. As you might guess from that, it’s an epic poem, though precisely where in the ‘epic’ tradition you’d put it, I might have to leave that to others to decide. Its ambition, or why I feel it’s ambitious, doesn’t come merely from the overall form, honestly it’s more to do with the language and the structures employed. It’s extremely broad in terms of the structures used—though it does still lean most of all on the more jazz-influenced free-verse approach common to my wider work—carrying both the traditional in the form of hidden and not so hidden riffs and plays off sonnets, to the more avant, from unusual typography, to the use of colour, to blackout work, and, I’ll show off my lack of erudition here in saying whatever it is you call it when you run two parallel pieces that riff off each other side by side pottering along down a page or three.

It’s also literally and thematically wild, dealing as it does with the slow transition of a radical sensualist into a fundamentalist suicide bomber who blows up a church in my home town of Dublin, although I should for clarity state that the protagonist’s radical faith is of a Christian kind, and the cause of their eventual move toward violence is the idea that those who only partially believe are more of a hindrance to the might and success of a faith than those who do or do not believe. The book swoops and dives, too, between Dublin, Scotland (mostly Edinburgh, but also a few other parts), Galway, and very particularly Sligo, which is probably the spiritual centre of the work. It’s also the most musical thing I’ve ever written—it’s full of song, of music, and sessions—the most “free,” and definitely the longest single project I’ve worked on, bar a part-time PhD, taking four years or so, and I’ll readily state I’m delighted not to have to apportion any of my brain to the protagonist any longer, that was just strange. Truly though, I think it’s beautiful, hilarious, sonorous, tragic, and a whole lot of fun, and hopefully others do too, although there’ll be a lot in there that could well ruffle feathers, depending on how willing they are to remember that I am most certainly not my protagonists!

Without going on endlessly though, I should add, in answer to the question, that it does, of course, also engage with (and hopefully develop and expand upon what I’ve done before) the topics you’ve noted, as in, it’s certainly full of symbolism; hopefully an enormous amount of craic; it definitely veers into Sweeneyese as you call it, with several minor characters and events and sections certainly showing the grá for the music of the ordinary, albeit pressed into unusual service and circumstances; linguistically again, it’s even more ambitious, with whole sections bilingually presented (with wonderful help from friends in checking my Gaelic, and the odd smattering of Latin and Urdu employed), and aye, it’s oh so very Irish in both the modern and mythical sense, and yes , myth—and a good spot of invention masquerading as myth—plays a big role throughout, although for the most part I’ve leaned on the kind affordance usually given to epics, and rewritten big chunks of the myths I use. Indeed, I’m particularly fond of a rewriting of An Tromdamh Guaire and how I’ve pivoted it to explain, in part, the rise of Irish Christianity as part of a breach of hospitality between the poet king and people. But ultimately, what I’d say of The Kergyma is that I’m excited to see how it’s received, I honestly have no idea how it will be.