Alicia Byrne Keane

Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?

Alicia Byrne Keane: For the last year or so, themes of uncertainty and the transitory have been creeping into my poetry due to situations such as Dublin’s ongoing housing crisis. When the pandemic began, this sense of uncertainty obviously became even more pressing even to those less affected by such existing inequalities – therefore, my poetry has become a means for me to write while waiting, if you like. I feel, in other words, like much of my poetry is concerned with the idea of a wait, or an undefined touch-and-go period before some form of normality can be reached.

ORP: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?

ABK: Writing has provided me with a gentle form of routine, especially in recent months. Discovering many online poetry journals I hadn’t known about prior has had a hugely positive effect on my mental health. I start each day now by trying to read new writing and research new publications, which sounds quite boring and rigorous when I type it out like this. However, this routine has been a way for me to feel connected to others around the world, corny as that most definitely is.

ORP: If you could add a prelude, an epilogue, or an addendum to your piece, what would it say?

ABK: I have been thinking a lot about travel lately, probably mainly due to current restrictions on travelling abroad. During Ireland’s first lockdown, around Spring, memories of other countries I’d been fortunate enough to visit in the past kept occurring to me with more vividness than usual. I’m sure a lot of people are getting similar daydreamy sentiments at the moment. The poem ‘surface audience’ is about an unnervingly calm scene witnessed in Canada around seven or eight years ago.

ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?

ABK: I think in my poetry I am often trying to explore the boundaries between vagueness and clarity. I would want readers to be able to discern some specificity in this scene – for instance, I name the location in the poem – but also to be keenly aware of a sense of unknowns and scary variables (in this case there are some quite silly unknowns at play, namely the idea of being apprehensive about sea travel because you don’t usually take boats.) On a larger scale, I hope my poems in general would inspire readers to acknowledge uncertainty. This doesn’t always mean accepting it – for instance, when writing about social inequalities there are uncertainties we should rail against – but to find strength in their ability to document and process liminal situations.

ORP: What do you think is the most essential advice that most writers and artists ignore?

ABK: I am trying a lot lately to write in a more casual voice, and to get more comfortable with including in my poems the little amendments and digressions you would make in everyday speech. For years I was concerned with trying to write in some sort of polished but abstract ‘poet voice’ that doesn’t really exist. I would say that is quite a common issue, balancing your conversational, personal voice with what you think poetry ‘should’ look like. Maybe others also struggle with that impulse to eliminate dithering – maybe the essential advice should be to dither, by all means!

Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study problematizing ‘vagueness’ and the ethics of translation in the writing of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, and Entropy. Twitter: keane_byrne. Read her poetry here.