Writers Chat 1: Brian Kirk on “After The Fall” (Salmon Poetry: Galway, 2017)

As the first to feature in my “Writers Chat” Series, I’m delighted to welcome Brian Kirk to my blog. We chat about his debut poetry collection After The Fall (Salmon, November 2017).

Be in with a chance to win a signed copy of After The Fall! Simply comment on this blog post and your name will be entered into the draw on January 20th.

I’m always interested in process. Having published a novel The Rising Son in 2015 and a poetry collection which you say was ten years in the making, in 2017, have you found any similarities, if I may suggest, between constructing a collection of poetry and structuring a novel?

I think of the two things, writing poems and writing novels/stories, as two very different disciplines. Generally as a writer I am very structured about how I shape stories and poems, but how the poems work together is very different to how the extended narrative of a novel works. Having said that, I’ve always been able to move between the two over the years. I’m lucky that I can revert to poetry when the novel isn’t going well and vice versa. The sustained effort of editing and finishing a novel can be very demanding, however. With The Rising Son I had a very clear picture in my mind of the characters and the structure of the novel from the start and wrote the first draft in six months or so. During that time, back in 2013, the poetry was on the back burner for a while. Ten years seems like a long time to take to produce a collection but in the context of other works being undertaken during that period – stories, novels, plays – perhaps not that long.

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That’s interesting to hear that you can switch between the two. I do the same with short and long fiction. Sticking to form and process for a moment, if you don’t mind, many of the poems in After The Fall tell a story, or stories, and I note from the extensive array of publications and awards on your blog, the short story is another form in which you excel.

The poems I am thinking of here are ones such as “Two Foxes”, “Chameleon”, and “Persephone”. Is there any particular way you find the form when you have the story in your head? In other words, have there been occasions when something begins life as a poem and morphs into a story or the other way around?

I do have a love of narrative in poetry, although there are more imagistic poems in the collection also. The poems you mention and others run on narrative lines, and very often the narrative is lifted from life, mainly from memory. The poet, George Szirtes, talks about poetry being an amalgam of memory and imagination and a lot of the poems in After The Fall reflect that. It has happened on occasion that I’ve had an idea for a story and it ends up being a poem or vice versa, but in the main poems come as poems and stories as stories. I use quite a bit of formal structuring in the collection and have always found it helps me when writing poems to have that structure in place at the outset even if it doesn’t always remain there in the end. Formal structure doesn’t always pay off, but when it does the demands of the form can add so much more to the poem I think.

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Fascinating that the poems arrive as poems and stories as stories. I found, in both dipping into the collection, and reading it right through, a real sense of identity forming, and a need to look back in order to look forward – in, for example, “The Flowering of Age”, “To Youth” and “When We Were Small”. How does this theme relate to both the title of the collection, and the title poem “After The Fall” where we’re reminded that we have both “lack and appetite”?

The main themes I suppose are around family and relationships, with love, religion and politics in the mix also. When I was writing and sending out poems at first I was simply writing individual poems without much thought of overall themes. But a few years back when I started to think in terms of a collection I was able to discern a strain of recurring concerns in some of the poems. The title of the collection appears in three of the poems and has obvious biblical connotations as well as a nod towards the season. In terms of the religious reference to the creation story in the Judeo-Christian tradition, I like to think of The Fall as not just being a negative thing, but having a positive aspect also; the original transgressive act that opens up the world of the senses to mankind. I also see the bible as a trove of poetical language and images and probably my first introduction to the notion of poetry. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience are a source of inspiration also. The poems you refer to above hanker after youth but also find some satisfactions in age.

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I particularly enjoyed the snapshots of generations in the collection. I found myself nodding at my own memories reading “Ouija”, smiling at the picture painted in “Young People”, and again nodding at the familiar feelings you portray in “In My Day”.

Particularly the last line where the narrator is “not old enough to make free with the future/the way I have with the past.” You had me thinking of the timelessness of being – despite the specifics of growing up in a particular era.

It’s funny but when I was reading the proofs of the collection and getting ready for publication I began to see more threads in the collection than I had identified previously. One of these is the theme of ageing – which I shouldn’t be surprised by really – but which took me by surprise a little. There is a sense that we are all on a journey regardless of age. Many of the poems consider my parents and their generation but also my children’s generation and their concerns. There is definitely a sense of continuity – collective and individual memory playing out.

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Many of your poems look at what it means to be human – that it is both a curse and gift. In “Repetition”, there is both “nothing in this world as beautiful as repetition” and also “nothing in this world as terrible as repetition”.

Yet what holds everything together, a sort of binding, if you will, are the simple illustrations of love. Poems such as the Forward-Prize nominated “Orienteering”, “Birthday” and “A Memory” although different in their contexts, really moved me. Was this a theme that emerged through choosing the poems for the collection or was it more of a conscious choice?

One of the earliest recurring themes that emerged when I was compiling the collection was that of map making. I was very much taken with Eavan Boland’s poem That the Science of Cartography is Limited, which knits the individual specific experience so well into the public, political and historical. Poems like Orienteering, Home, The Man, The Boy And The Map, and A Map reflect failed attempts to site specific experience in exact physical locations. It’s hard to know where this desire springs from, but as a kid I always enjoyed looking at maps and reading books that had maps on the inside pages to help guide the reader. The broader theme of the imperfection and beauty of life, encapsulated in the idea of The Fall, swallowed up that lesser theme along the way. I love the image of love being the glue that holds all these disparate elements together!

And of course maps makes us think of the maps on our hands – our palms to be specific – and that push/pull between fate and destiny. 

Brian Kirk

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Lastly, Brian, a few fun questions:

• What are your five most loved books of 2017?

It’s hard to limit it to five. Of novels I read during the year the best were Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life (which reminded me a lot of the late Denis Johnson’s excellent Train Dreams), Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries and Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? In short stories June Caldwell’s Little Room Darker, and I read some great work in Issues 7 and 8 of the Lonely Crowd which is an excellent journal and also I have to include an ambitiously superb story by Kevin O’Rourke Romance and Revolution in Long Story Short Literary Journal. In poems there were excellent first collections by Annemarie Ní Churreáin (Bloodroot) and Amanda Bell (First the Feathers). I’m currently reading Maeve O’Sullivan’s collection of poetry, haiku and haibun Elsewhere and enjoying its breadth tremendously.

• Oh yes. Ní Churreáin’s collection and Caldwell’s stories are on my to read pile, and I loved those novels by McGregor, Shield, and Seethaler. Some wonderful recommendations, there. So what will you read in 2018?

I received a copy of John Banville’s Mrs Osmond for my birthday in December and am planning to read The Portrait of a Lady before diving into it. After that I will read another Hans Fallada, probably Alone in Berlin (I’ve been reading his work over the last few years and really enjoying it). In terms of stories I’m looking forward to Valerie Sirr’s collection coming out during the year. In poetry Maurice Devitt’s first collection is one I can’t wait to read and also a new and very interesting collection from John Murphy which should turn a lot of heads.

• Would you believe it, I’ve just started that very book by Fallada! I’m also  looking forward to Valerie Sirr’s story collection; I love her work. And I’ll watch out for the poetry collections by Devitt and Murphy. So, Brian, to end our chat, what’s next for you in the writing world – Poetry? Stories? Plays? Novels?

I will continue to write poems and hopefully bring After The Fall to more readers around the country, but my main writing focus will be on compiling a collection of short stories and hopefully finding a publisher. I already have new stories forthcoming in 2018 at online journals Fictive Dream and Cold Coffee Stand. I have a novel in progress also which I hope to complete a first draft of very soon. My full length stage play Story was shortlisted at Listowel last year and I would really love to see a staging this year or even a rehearsed reading. So plenty to be getting on with!

Thanks for inviting me to chat, Shauna.

You’re welcome, Brian and thanks for engaging so thoroughly with my questions. I wish you every success with your writing and look forward to reading more of your work, and perhaps even seeing Story on stage.

Readers – be in with a chance to win a signed copy of After The Fall! Simply comment on the blog and your name will be entered into the draw on January 20th.

 

And the winner is….

Congratulations, Karen. Brian will be in touch with you to arrange delivery of After The Fall.