What themes do you investigate in your work?
My work is often research based. I quite enjoy reading dry academic work, especially lengthy history books, and they get my creative brain fired up. I am always asking myself, “where is the voice” in a particular piece of information or a piece of history. I do gravitate naturally towards the female voice in history, and I am always looking for an element of things which impact the body.
I am always interested in layering, and so I really enjoy compressing time. I might take an historical figure or an historical moment and intersplice that with something contemporary. I love the idea of condensing or expanding time in my work. I am working on a sequence of poems at the moment which take place during a séance, and the idea is to take the traditional idea of a séance, but then looking at what a contemporary spirit would be talking about now. I want to apply a contemporary sensibility to historical situations.
You use historical settings to explore contemporary issues. Would that be reasonable to say?
Yes. I want to be able to explore issues which I am interested in without putting myself at the centre of the writing. My research offers me a way into issues, ideas, so that I can take an historical figure like Hildegard of Bingen and then look at her activities, look at what has endured, what has been rejected. I can look at the historical, taking some experiences which appear so disparate, then I aim to find points of connection between the historical and current situations.
Over lockdown, I was working on a project where I was looking at Herbalism, and the medicinal. I was looking at information on plants and healing, and I think at that time because we were so conscious of the body, and monitoring ourselves, and keeping an eye on symptoms and things like that, it chimed with what I was reading about.
I was reading 16th and 17th century compendiums where the world around you was linked directly to you and your body. The ecological issues were connected to you, so if you were sick, there was a connection to the earth and the earth could provide a remedy. And that was really interesting to me, it was an idea that must have made so much sense to people living at that time.
Would it also be reasonable to say that there is a comedic element to your work?
I enjoy reading poems which are funny, and I especially enjoy when there is a side alley of humour in poetry. I write about quite dark themes, death, medicine, the occult, and I think I try to include a sense of humour in the voicing of the poem. I like finding the humour which can exist alongside the more difficult subjects.
In a couple of my poems which look at mediums or ghosts, while they deal with difficult, sometimes tragic, subjects, there is something quite funny about the characters. If there is humour in the characters, I think this throws some relief into something that is dark and disturbing.
I try to use humour to disrupt the narrative or the expected narrative. Sometimes, with particular characters from history, there is an expected pre-determined narrative. I want to create tonal shifts throughout the work to allow a sense of a more holistic character, rather than say presenting a one-dimensional figure.
What about form and structure?
I think that the poem dictates the structure and the form. Depending on what I am writing about and what I am trying to achieve with a poem, the structure will follow that starting point.
I worked on a trio of sonnets about the film “Death Becomes Her” which were very strictly Petrarchan Sonnets. And that felt essential to the poem because the women characters in those poems were trying to conform to a very strict definition of beauty. I thought the poems had to be quite strict in form and structure, because their version of beauty had to conform to a very strict view of what beauty is and what women should aspire to and what women’s existence should set out to conform to.
I’m working on material at the moment and there is a character who is very methodical and scientific and I am using prose poems for that. It feels like the character requires a sense of documentation. That is what this character is interested in, documenting information. I think prose poems suit that, they can function almost like reports.
I am always thinking about form in some respect as I’m writing, of course, at the level of the line or phrase, the sound of words and the rhythm of the poem. Again, much of that is dictated, in so far as it can be, by what I want the poem to convey.
You were selected by Poetry Ireland as part of their Introducing Young Poets series. Could you say a little bit about that?
That was in 2021 and it was and about 10 other poets from all over the island. You go to Poetry Ireland in Dublin and you attend a series of workshops with people like Sean Hewitt, Jessica Traynor and Annemarie Ní Churreáin. As a group you go to meet and talk and share poems with each other. You get to meet, talk to and interact with established poets.
I went to a workshop about performing your own poetry and that isn’t something I had ever considered before, how to actually perform, how to deliver your own poetry.
It was a great opportunity, a great experience and it culminated in a reading at Smock Alley Theatre and I had never done anything like that before. It was one of the first readings I had done in a theatre space.
Could you talk a little bit about The Tangerine?
The Tangerine is a literary magazine which showcases new writing and it has non-fiction, short prose, poetry and it has some visual art in there as well. It has been going for about 5 years and I have been on the editorial team for around 3 years. We showcase some of the best new writing around at the moment.
We apply for Arts Council funding and we also sell the magazine, and there are submissions from Ireland but we also get submissions from around the world. It is an amazing magazine to be working on and I also get to read and experience so much new writing and it is important to have this magazine based in Belfast at this point in time.
The readership is quite diverse, we send copies to the US, the UK and Europe, as well as farther afield, and we try to have a launch in Belfast and Dublin for each new issue as well.
Where to now?
I am currently working on my PHD and that is my main focus at the moment. I will be reading at the John Hewitt Summer School and I am working on a pamphlet, which I hope to have finished by the end of the year.
