The Monthly interviews short form poet, writer and musician, Sean O’Connor – Part 4 – Looking into the darker subject areas

The work we have heard does seem to veer towards the darker subjects. Would that be reasonable to say?

When Jim Norton and I were running “Haiku Spirit”, he always found my work very dark, and he set up a little section in the publication called “Haiku at the Edge”. That was for things which were a bit edgy and which dealt with subjects which might not be associated with the form, and my work was always in there.

I think it is important that I recognise the darkness people talk about, but I don’t recognise the work I create, as dark. I don’t deliberately set out to be dark, I don’t think I am writing anything dark when I am writing. For me things are neither good nor bad, things are neither dark nor bright, but it is in the darkness that you find the light. I just write whatever is occurring to me to write.

There is no stone I won’t lift, and there is nowhere I won’t look, and there is nowhere I won’t go and because of that I tend to go into whatever is in the ether for me. So, whether it is war, death, mayhem, anything that is going, I don’t shy away. I think that is partially because I trained in Psychiatry, and came across the very dark side of life. Psychiatry can be a very positive arena to be in, but you do come across a lot of darkness too, and I feel very comfortable, as comfortable in darkness as I do in non-darkness.

What thoughts do you convey with your work?

My main message from my book, “The God of Bones”, is that everything is okay. That the world is okay and I think that is a message that people are not necessarily willing to embrace because they can’t help but think that everything is not okay. In that sense, Albert Camus would be a big influence philosophically on me. This man who said that in the end everything was okay, everything might not necessarily be as it should be, but that life is beautiful even in the midst of the worst situations, it remains beautiful.

That is something that has come to me from Zen. And I will mention this about Zen. People have this idea that it is a very tranquil and beautiful experience. I’ve never experienced it like that. I don’t know anyone who has really practised it that would come away and say, “That was a lovely sitting we just had”. That doesn’t happen. It is usually physically very painful, and mentally very difficult. It is extremely difficult, to the point where most people don’t tolerate it for too long.

I would make the comparison, that there is the beauty in Zen where do you get a sort of tranquillity but it comes at a very high price, and you pay a lot in both physical and mental difficulty. I would go as far as to say pain.

The experience of Zen is one of a direct confrontation with physical, mental and emotional pain. And it is always like that and I have never seen it any other way, but from that we get a great deal of benefit, we develop a different sense of the world which is actually incredibly positive, and I see that in my writing too, so I don’t see the work as necessarily dark.

Where to now. What projects are you working on?

My father died just over a year ago and I spent a year visiting the grave every week. His grave is in a very remote, rural place. It is a strange old graveyard, and it is almost inaccessible. That is where he chose to be buried, very close to where he was born. So I ended up spending a lot of time in a graveyard every week for a year and writing whatever came from there. It is really an exploration of grief and that manuscript is finished and the working title is “A Patch of Earth.”

For a few years I have writing about my experiences of growing up in poverty, in the north side of Dublin, on a big housing estate which had at the time 70 per cent unemployment, huge amounts of drug abuse and all kinds of crime.

The working title is “Waiting Day”, which is a very particular phrase that people used in that milieu, when you run out of money the day before you get your cash from the dole and you are relying on neighbours to feed you. It is not about my memories, rather I try to give that whole world expression rather than just relay my personal experiences. Those are my key projects at the moment.