Oisin Breen - ░꧁𓊈𒆜🅼 🅰 🅽 🅽 🅴 🆀 Ü🅸Ñ 🅷Æ🆄SS𒆜𓊉꧂ ░ （ラ曖茨）

Oisin Breen
Flowers, all sorts in blossom, Figs, berries and fruits forgotten
96 pages,
Poetry
HYBRID PRESS
PRE ORDERING INFO BELOW
Publisher: Hybrid Press
URL: hybriddreich.co.uk/
Publisher's Name: Kevin Cadwallender
Email: [email protected]
Wee Caveat: International Pre-orders before Mar. 29 launch getting set-up. To pre-order now, order as normal, and put extra international details in the comments box, or write directly to the publisher: [email protected]

“A lonely, and gentle retreat into the heart. Inquisitive. These are the monologues with the ghosts of our past. ” Fin Sorrel, author of “Transversal” & Founding editor at {a} Neon Garden

Interview:

Fin Sorrel: Thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions, first off I am always curious what a writers process looks like, do you think you could talk a little about your composing method for this new book?

Oisin Breen: When it comes to the composition process, I hear you, and I guess probably it's somewhat different for each of the three thematic pieces, mainly as their production was spread over the course of about three years; so I hope you don't mind my breaking it out into three pieces, and you're welcome to mix, match, edit and hack back my responses. But, briefly, when it comes to the overall composition in terms of placing; choosing which poems to use; and deciding to go all-in with three long-form poems, rather than mix it up, I'd say my reasoning is that 1. Gut instinct on tempo determined their placement; the choice of poems is that each has a strong sense of connection with themes of memory, loss, hope, love, and home, as well as an element of mythical underpinning, thus I felt they worked well together. On going all-in on the long-form, well... I'd say that when the publisher first approached me to do a full collection, I spent a wee while mulling it, but over a fair few poetry performances, I found that when given the time and space to actually perform the longer pieces, in full, they went down a treat, so I canvassed a spot of opinion, and went for it.

Of the three pieces themselves:

On Isn't the Act of Placing Flowers on a Tomb a Gesture of Bringing a Little Life Back from the dead, the poem itself actually started out in my mother's back garden when I was reading a blog-post about the nature of home for refugees, and several lines just set me scribbling into a notebook, then over the course of a month or so, a collected web of scribbles tangled together and suggested the whole piece and a meditation on loss, and up until the last parts it practically wrote itself -- although I do tend to recourse when starting work to chopping it up after the first page is done and throwing it around to see if there are new and interesting placements and combinations, if not, grand, but sometimes new perspectives give you great inspiration -- The final part is the part I actually enjoy the most, but mainly on the temporal side, as it is, written primarily in forward looking tenses, despite running backwards in time as a reflection of that which birthed loss since inception, and that came mostly in one burst, although there was a heap of editing afterwards.

Dublin and the Loose Footwork of Deity is, pretty much as the poem itself lays out, a straight take on history/myth/my own home town, and the relationship between mythos and identity, and for all its playfulness it was quite a traditional write, I had a notion of the whole thing, laid out a short draft of the first few parts, fleshed them out, pruned, hewed, and researched; so of all of them it's the most classical in composition, if not form.

The last one, Her Cross Carried Burnt, is a mite more Coleridgean -- although the dominant theme of ego and the creation of the id was fore-planned -- in that the continuous refrain came to me while out for a good old walk up Edinburgh's Arthur's Seat (a city centre mountain), and I liked it so much and it said there's a poem in it, that, since my battery was dead, I chanted it the three-odd miles home so I wouldn't forget it; and the final part, well... I struggled, I liked what I had, and liked where it was going, but I think I had about 15 pints over several days and a myriad of coffees with people explaining to them that I couldn't find a damn ending. Eventually, I was about to put it aside, hit the hay, then dreamt the ending, woke up, cursed, grabbed the laptop and wrote it before I forgot it ;)

FS: I enjoyed the long form in this book, Flowers, all sorts in blossom.. is written in three long poems, what was the choice on creating a book of three? Was that your set intention while composing, or did you compile these later on?

OB: Ah, I appear to have already answered the second question for the most part, but to gloss slightly more, the use of three is yes, deliberate, though cliched, for we do all tend to like things in trios, but no, it wasn't my set intention to write poems for a trilogy, more that I had always envisioned writing a collection that was a trilogy, and I used some of my work to enable that, though I'd very much enjoy the thought of setting out with a plan for a broad thematic trilogy entirely in advance, that'd be a treat if I could convince a publisher to go for it.

FS: What inspired you to begin writing poems? Do you work in other forms, fiction, essays, plays?

OB: Ah, well... the first time I wrote a poem I was damned young, probably 11 or 12, for a poetry competition. I think I got a merit or something like that, but it was a cheesy poem, and a very strange one for an 11 year old boy to write -- I can only blame the age of my parents (my father, now passed, was born in 1921; and my mother two decades later) -- it was about the passing of the age of chivalry. But I always loved Greek myth and the wordplay, and Irish expression is quite poetic in itself, so once I started to read "literature" instead of more young adult stuff, well... I just started writing, I couldn't tell you precisely when or why, more that it happened, my peer group enjoyed it, and then it became a part of who I am and I kept working on it over the years.

In terms of other forms, yep on all counts. Essays, I'm doing a part-time doctorate in narratological complexity in Edinburgh, so that's a cert, and I've actually a plan to write a couple of more general literary essays this year. I also write business journalism for a US based trade paper. Plays, I have not turned my hand to, but one day I'd love to; and fiction, well... I first thought I'd be published as a novelist. I've written probably about four mostly wrapped ones, and a few uncompleted ones over the years, though not for a little while (I still have a few ideas I'm mulling though), but I'll confess that the first novel I wrote aged about 17, my word is it appalling!

FS: What informed your work while working on this book.

OB: Too much really to answer here... Everything from the philosophy of artificial intelligence, to late night discussions about the Neo-Assyrian empire, to arguments about the law, the nation state, and the state of the world. Honestly, everything informed it.

FS: Who are some of your favorite poets?

OB: Well... hmm... of the English speakers hmm... Yeats, Elliot, Pound, Coleridge, Byron, O'Hara, Heaney to name a few; then there's a tonne of work in translation I adore too, from the strangeness of Tristan Tzara to Montale, or Russians like Ahkmatova or Baratynsky. The list goes on really, but I guess what I like is poems unafraid of imagery, myth, passion, and play; and the only thing I tend not to enjoy in poetry is when it errs too far from style and language and almost solely becomes confessional, I understand -- and of course wholly respect -- people seem to love it, but it leaves me cold.

FS: How long did it take you to find a publisher, what was that process like?

OB: Ah, years? I mean I'm basically rubbish at publicising myself in terms of putting poetry out there, something I'm slowly working on improving, but it's hard to make the time when you're trying to a. work, and b. create. But, really, Hybrid found me. I was doing a performance at a small event, met a publisher, hit it off, then over a year or two we enjoyed each other's company, and after he'd taken a wee personal break from publishing, one day he just told me over a beer that he wanted to publish a book. I did try to play it rather cool, but I was, of course, utterly delighted inside. So in terms of process, random, chaotic, and enjoyable.

FS: Thank you for talking with us.

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