By Alicia Byrne Keane
Alicia Byrne Keane (ABK): First of all, it’s great to have the opportunity to interview you! I have really enjoyed your recent poetry in Banshee and Anthropocene. I wondered could you talk a bit about your own poetry first, maybe in terms of your process of writing about imagery from nature? I know every poem is different, but do you find yourself typically developing a poem out of – for instance – mainly sounds, images, or textures at the beginning?
Susanna Galbraith (SG): Hi, that’s kind of you to say, thank you. These questions are always so difficult to answer, but I suppose I’m very image orientated… I take a lot of notes on my phone, sending myself facebook messages etc, while I’m out walking or in a notebook while I’m reading or watching or looking at something. They might be a question or a thought, or a little self-confession, and a lot of the time they’re an image, a couple of words. Eventually I copy and paste these in bulk to a big document of current ‘poetry notes’ and then comb through everything, looking for images really… images that still stick or still feel like they throw light on something. A poem might start from one of those images or observations or questions, or little constellation of them. There’s sound and texture involved in that, of course, they’re part of any image, but I don’t consciously think about that as much – I’m thinking about what’s signified first and foremost, and the sound work is sort of going on in the background, sometimes making connections that might develop an idea, as a poem emerges. I’m not sure how to be specific about my process for writing about imagery from nature… it just comes into everything, is everything. It’s not a conscious decision to write about nature or not. (I don’t think it could ever be the latter). For me ‘Nature’ is like the most fundamental of mythologies, the basic arena of reference. It also probably still makes me feel the most, being in big nature, at the shore or in a forest; it’s my favourite source of astonishment.
ABK: Similarly, is there a particular process of art writing or ekphrastic poetry that you find yourself coming back to? How do you incorporate your research on an artist or artwork – for instance, in your poems in Anthropocene based on Egon Schiele’s trees – into the poem?
SG: Yes, I suppose that the ‘process’ is sometimes a little different when I’m writing poems about visual art. In some cases (especially when I’ve committed to writing about something in particular for a project) the starting point is more of a study, less wandering around and letting things pop into my head, more sitting with an art book (or in a gallery, in the time before) and spending a long time ‘reading’ it, letting it sink in, writing down thoughts… a sort of transcription of the encounter (if things go well enough to get that far). Then usually I’ll comb through that for an image, images, and so on… Sometimes research is part of it, sometimes (often) it’s more egotistical than that would allow for… ie it’s about how it feels to look and read than about the artwork itself, or the artist. I did a masters in Art History, but even then I was less interested in examining the ‘actual’ history of art objects and more interested in thinking about what happened (affectively, psychologically etc) at the site of the looker, the person who encounters them in a gallery or a book.
I’ve been doing more research recently for a series of poems I’m trying to write as part of a project supported by Arts Council NI (as ever extremely grateful for their support!) – about one of John Everett Millais’ models Sophy Gray. But sometimes I find the research inhibiting… it can start to put you in this position of responsibility to another person, the artist or the subject. I never want to try to speak for them, I suppose, so this makes me a bit uncomfortable. What you read can also start to drown out your own feelings. But sometimes it’s very enriching, or important. I always seem to write poems to Egon Schiele paintings… I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t think I’ve ever gone off and deliberately ‘researched’ for those (so I suppose I’m not inhibited), I just spend time with the artwork (reproduction, in this case) and see what ideas it draws out. (Though I’ve been reading his poems again recently too.) I used to write a lot in galleries, but often the poems that would result weren’t ‘about’ the artworks I’d been looking at… I think artworks can be like idea machines you feed something of yourself into and see what’s fed back out…
ABK: To follow on from this question, do you find there are any commonalities among the visual artworks you are drawn towards writing about?
SG: Most of them are by Schiele…? Other than that, I’ve ended up writing about/to painted portraits of women often enough. Which strangely is pretty different to what I would tend toward in critical work.
ABK: So myself, and many others, will have known of you also via your role as one half of the editing team for the journal Abridged, which itself showcases strikingly interwoven collections of writing paired with visual art. The themes behind your issues – such as ‘Delete’, ‘Persephone’, and ‘Trivia’ – are intriguing. How do you and your colleague(s) choose them?
SG: Colleague, just – founder and Abridged mastermind Greg McCartney. Probably three quarters of our issue titles still come from Greg, and the others from myself, and then one of my main jobs is to develop these titles/themes into the submission-calls and editorials. So it’s collaborative. (I think we’re lucky to nearly always be on the same page with things, especially big picture things, but also to be there to challenge each other with others). We’re in a constant back and forth chat about random things we think are interesting and potentially ‘Abridged’ and some of the themes and angles are born out of that. We don’t like to be too obvious – the idea is to stimulate, not to limit what’s sent in to us – and we like to maintain the idea of Abridged as a platform for exploring the ‘dark’ side of things, especially different fears, and links between the ancient and the contemporary. We’ve been doing trilogies recently… Control, Alt, Delete was one, the Changeling trilogy included Kassandra, Persephone and Echo. And we’re at the end of a sort of ‘Dark Goddesses’ trilogy now, which has included Nyx, Trivia and Nemesis, and bounced off our extra covid-19 project Eris.
ABK: Abridged moved online during the pandemic. How has this experience been?
SG: We love producing print magazines, but because Abridged is freely distributed and all of our main distribution sites (galleries, festivals etc) were closed, it didn’t make sense to keep printing during the pandemic. So we moved online, and instead of just putting up the magazines as PDFs on our main website, as we did for all of the previous print issues, we developed this idea of the ‘zone’, a separate online space that can be explored differently. Every issue is a grid of images under the editorial that you click on to discover the poetry, and we continued to get the pages designed. If we were going to go online we wanted to do it in our own weird way that kept the feeling of the magazines, and it’s been exciting to work on the zone, and it’s a great space to have developed for using in the future I think. We’re hoping to go back to print magazines next year, a few things pending, but we’ll continue to use that online space, maybe start putting our archive on it. Online we’ve also been able to publish video and sound pieces as part of different projects which has been really fun, such as Daryl Martin’s compositions as part of The Merits of Tracer Fire. Greg has also been making great use of it as an exhibition space.
ABK: Have you seen any differences in the type or volume of work you have received over the last year and a half?
SG: Hm, to be honest I’m not sure about volume… (confession) I never really count how many submissions we get for each issue when I’m going through them. It varies a bit issue to issue, but it’s always a lot. And I don’t think that has really changed. (Maybe Greg would disagree with me there, I’ll have to ask him.) I’m glad to say we haven’t seen a big drop by going online or anything. In terms of subject matter there’s certainly a lot of work coming in that’s grappling with the pandemic and all of its changes. Which is unsurprising. For Eris, which came out a few months into lockdown in 2020, I remember it was a very strange experience to see how many people were saying the same thing in their poems. And it wasn’t because they were dealing in cliche, it was because everyone was experiencing the same absolutely new things and trying to pay attention to them for the first time.
ABK: You are also involved in the HUMAN ‘(Honest Ulsterman Magazine Archive Network), an online archive of small Irish literary magazines.’ How do you find working on archival material while also involved in contemporary publishing? This seems like an interesting mix of projects.
SG: That’s actually a bit of an out-of-date-ism on my Twitter profile (which I must change)… I haven’t been working on the HUMAN project for quite a while now… but Greg is still ploughing away with it. My role with the project was to create metadata for all of the pages for the search mechanism. So that meant reading every issue of the HU, writing down the names of all the contributors, all the titles, plus themes and reference points etc. What I came away thinking about was those poets whose name you never hear again, poets who maybe published once or twice, but never ‘made it’ in a very public way, never published a book. These issues of the HU were the only public spaces their work occupied. And some of their work was the most exciting. I think about that when I’m editing Abridged. I love it when we publish someone for the first time, alongside regular contributors or bigger names. It’s one of the most important things about little magazines, I think, being a platform for ‘emergence’ (or something…).
ABK: Finally, poetry-wise, can you recommend anything you are currently reading, or have recently enjoyed? Are there any art exhibitions that you are looking forward to attending, virtually or physically?
SG: I really loved Rebecca Perry’s ‘Stone Fruit’, which I read last week. It’s a special book that I know I’ll go back to. I’ve also recently gone back to George Oppen, his ‘Of Being Numerous’, who was a favourite when I was doing my undergrad. I would always recommend that. Not poetry but Deirdre Sullivan’s ‘I Want To Know I Will Be Ok’ was really excellent (and I know everyone’s talking about it, but I also know why…). In terms of exhibitions, I honestly haven’t even checked to see what’s coming up all year to prevent any disappointment/FOMO… I will just be delighted to actually be in a gallery again I think. (And that it won’t be crowded… silver linings?).
Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin where she researches self-translating authors and ‘vagueness’ in translated literature.
Contemporary Irish Literature 