Keegan’s poetry explores Dublin’s hidden places

COLM Keegan is in a taxi. He is on his way to RTÉ to record poems from his debut collection Don’t Go There for Radio 1’s ARENA arts show, for which he reviews and contributes poetry. Published by Salmon Poetry, located near the Cliffs of Moher, the book weaves fiction and autobiography into an arresting tapestry.

“There would be a bit of anxiety, if I’m honest,” he says, over the phone on his way to Montrose, about revealing aspects of his private self in his work. “But if there isn’t anxiety, there’s no point because you have to risk some sort of exposure for it to be any good. I remember someone saying to me, ‘We read to find our secret selves’.

“When you’re writing, you have to be sharing your secret self. If you’re not, it’s not going to be of any use. It’s like saying, ‘I have these feelings’ and, ideally, it resonates with the listener and reader. If it does, it’s a success because you get an element of validation. You bring the reader and writer closer together. That’s the whole point for me – creating that bond.”

The collection is broken into chapters that both mark stages in Mr Keegan’s life but also chronicle the influence of place, vividly evoking areas and characters that rarely grace the pages of poetry. Drug addiction, violence, dysfunctional relationships and unfulfilled lives confined to the margins of society feature prominently in a dark portrayal of the capital.

“I feel very much shaped by Dublin,” Mr Keegan explains. “The book moves chronologically through my growing up in the city and, at the same time, moving through the city. The first poem is written about Ballymun: that’s where I lived my very early life. The Sub-Urban section is teenage and gritty. The Home section is me as a maturing man. In Last Estate, I feel very much like a settled down family man.”

In the poem Dealer’s Buying Decking, the mundane jostles with the grisly, “He’s planning a gazebo/from the bones of/someone’s son”, while the characters in No Go Area are a touchstone of the collection. “They don’t build statues/for the likes of us”, it opens, before bleakly sketching the wasted potential of “Lives truncated by too much/fags and booze and bingo”.

Similarly, fatherhood and the responsibilities of the role, as seen from both an adult and child’s perspective, are a hallmark of the book.

“My whole writer’s consciousness is informed by being a father,” Mr Keegan says. “Being a father is what defines me now. It changes you so much. I was a father first and a writer second. The writing came out of this idea of ‘What do you represent to your kids? Who are you and what do you have to pass on?’”

Courteous and self-deprecating, Mr Keegan apologies to the driver when he arrives at Montrose for spending the journey talking on the phone. Apart from poetry, he writes screenplays, short stories and plays. Since 2005, Mr Keegan has been shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award four times. “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” he laughs. He started off writing prose and fell into poetry “by accident” but it exerts a powerful hold.

“The poetry won’t leave you alone,” he says. “A friend of mine, John Murphy, said to me years ago, ‘Colm, what you don’t understand is that poetry will take you’. It’s like you’re stepping into a river and you’re thinking ‘I can manage this’. And then you’re flushing down with the current and, before you know it, there’s no way back. It feels a bit like that now.”
With this book published, the author is turning his attention to his first novel. Most writers would be eager to discuss the details of their next project but Mr Keegan is reluctant. “I’d like to keep that to myself,” he says politely. “If you let it out there, it loses its momentum. I’m holding onto this thing and it’s burning like a coal inside me. If I tell anyone about it, it cools it off.”

Performing his own poetry is very important to him and in 2010, Mr Keegan won the All-Ireland Slam Poetry competition.

“If the energy’s right in the room and the audience is with you and you’re delivering the poem with real intent, it’s magical,” he explains. “It has all the great qualities of live performance right in the moment. The written word is only put down on the page for convenience. The whole point of words is communication. There’s something very true about it. You’ve got your 15-minute slot and you get a round of applause every five minutes.”
The contrast between slam poetry and the solitary experience of writing an 80,000-word novel is stark.

“You can’t show it to anybody because you don’t know where it’s going and you don’t know if it’s good enough. If you’re doing it right, you shouldn’t be showing it to anybody because it should be a work unique to you and that reflects your intentions. You’re solving a puzzle to your own satisfaction.”

To help others feel that sense of satisfaction, Mr Keegan co-founded Inklinks, a young writers’ club in Clondalkin, where he lives, and teaches creative writing in secondary schools across the country. What techniques does he use to encourage students to tackle a blank page?

“The thing I always get them to share with me is one of their most important memories,” he says. “Everyone has at least one poem about a memory. I once asked my grandmother when was she happiest. She was two or three and the woman in the flat above her gave her a potato covered in butter and she remembers sitting on top of the stairs eating that. She remembered it all through her life. Nostalgia is a great drive for writing. They say the best writing comes from something you can’t bring back,” he concludes.