Dean Browne’s pamphlet Kitchens at Night was published in 2022. Nearly a year on, he spoke to Susanna Galbraith about it and his practice.

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Susanna Galbraith: Your debut (and then unpublished) pamphlet won the International Book & Pamphlet Competition in 2021. It was then published by Smith | Doorstep, nearly a year ago… what was it like to work with a publisher on your first book, and how has the last year been – seeing its reception, knowing it’s out there and people are reading it?

Dean Browne: Paul Muldoon once described the publication of a book of poems as being like ‘the calm before the calm’. But I guess there’s a degree of pomp that goes along with publication off the back of a competition. For a pamphlet I’d say the attention has been generous. I’m glad that it seems to have reached a few appreciative readers.

The editorial process was a pleasure. I discussed the collection with Peter Samson over Zoom. He has a discerning eye. I made a revision or two, substituted in a new poem for one that didn’t entirely convince me yet, chose a different opening poem, and so on. The pamphlet was better for it.

Having the poems gathered in one publication liberated me from them, in a sense. A point was definitively marked and the way stood open to move in other directions. It was illuminating to see them all together. I’ve written a bunch of new poems since then, not radically different to an outside eye probably, but to me, inside the process, a bounce forward, or at least to the side.

SG: How would you describe Kitchens at Night to someone who hasn’t read it?

DB: It’s a question maybe best put to a trusted reader. I wonder if how I’d be inclined to describe it would be how I’d like it to be seen rather than how it is.  As Leonard Cohen said, some guys you just can’t trust.

But I would say that I wanted to be surprised in the process of writing the poems. If that happens it’s possible that I’ve done something that will still be interesting in six months, or more; cheated the rational brain, as it were. It’s maybe the difference between a poem that feels revealed and one that feels engineered.

          “I’m demonstrating the excellence of this potato peeler

          to an audience who could well be allergic to spuds.

          I’m playing the glass harp dressed head to toe in carrageen moss

          with a tin can for coins and peculiar weather in my sock.”

  – from Dean Browne, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, Kitchens at Night, 2022

SG: You’ve been featured in lots of highly reputable publications over the last few years – including POETRY, The Stinging Fly, The Poetry Review and others – and won other competitions. But when did poetry start for you? Or, perhaps, when did you start trying to publish your work?

DB: I began writing poems at fourteen I think, possibly earlier. A significant impetus would have been a selected Auden I picked up by chance in a bookshop in Limerick, the nearest one to Tipperary Town where I grew up. I remember being exhilarated by the strangeness of the language and wondering simply why certain poems were in certain shapes. I sensed that the poems must be underpinned by obscure formal principles and I wanted to decipher them. A year later we got our first computer in the house, a chunky Dell laptop, so I was able to learn more and find ‘my poets’, as it were. Some I read to begin with were Plath, Keats, John Clare, and Joseph Brodsky (I remember liking his early poem, ‘I Sit By the Window’).

The poems I wrote tended to be formal in nature, which reflected my reading then: syllabics, rhymed and metred sonnets, even one poem in imitation of Donne’s ‘Noctural Upon St Lucy’s Day’ which I spent months over. They were fairly studied and laborious apprentice pieces, and spontaneity was rare. Over time I began to want to loosen up and trust in the music to supply itself on the hoof. But that was good training.

I was 18 when I had my first poem published in a literary magazine, The Penny Dreadful, in 2013. I was writing in earnest by then but being in University, meeting others who wrote poems, or were otherwise intense readers, was invigorating. I don’t think anyone develops in isolation.

SG: Did you study creative writing in a university setting?

DB: Never studied creative writing formally. Is that unusual now? My learning was primarily autodidactic for a few years as I didn’t know anyone interested in poetry in Tipp, so I just read as much as possible and wrote. I was fairly obsessive. When I got to University, then writer in residence Matthew Sweeney held workshops and I sent poems to him for critique, as well as to poets I met through Matthew, such as Cal Doyle. This was formative. Maybe that counts? I also began going to readings and forcing myself up to read at things. It was necessary to overcome a great deal of self-doubt and shyness around public speaking, and acute self-conscious inhibition in large social groups in general. The more I didn’t want to do it the more I leant into it. There was no other way to get over it.

SG: How did Kitchens at Night start? Did you know this was the pamphlet you were writing early on, or when did the sense of a book start emerging from the poems you were writing?

DB:It was more accident than intention for the most part. I didn’t set out with an original concept and write the poems toward a pamphlet, or anything like that. But naturally certain preoccupations recur across one’s work; when the time came, I arranged the poems in a way that seemed, intuitively, to best dial-up conversations between them, as well as suggest variety and so on.

The idea of a book must have emerged at some point. I knew I wasn’t yet where I had enough poems for a full-length collection I could be happy with, but I did for a pamphlet, and the pamphlet format is one I’m keen on in general. I’m glad I was able to mark that point in my writing life, and it’s a lovely production.

SG: The title doesn’t (if I’m correct) actually feature in any of the poems, but it hits on an atmosphere that buzzes all the way through the book. How did you choose it?

DB: It seemed to me the only title. It brought into contact the idea of domestic space and a more imaginary, moonstruck one. Plus ‘kitchens at night’ is suggestive, the title doesn’t shut down on you, it stays open. The image invites associations from a reader – invites them to write into what I’ve written. It’s understated too I guess. Mysterious. I speak hopefully. It’s a strange zone.

SG: In terms of its settings and ‘stuff’, Kitchens at Night returns over and over to the domestic space and the everyday – living rooms, kitchens, food, furniture, clothing… why do you think you’ve been drawn here?

DB: These are all concrete tangible phenomena, surrounding us; our loves and griefs always have some reference to them. That’s to say it speaks to embodied experience. They may also be correlatives for a certain interiority I wanted to capture aspects of. What kind of interest does an ironing board take in your episode of sorrow? Such weird relationships. 

          I had the blue suitcase open on the floor,

          packed cardboard boxes. I thought of Rimbaud’s Le Buffet,

          that scuffed oak wardrobe, how it opened up to him

          like an old woman lost for words, tongue torn between

          come in / clear off.

– from Dean Browne, ‘Memory is a Wardrobe’, Kitchens at Night, 2022

SG: One of the epigraphs you chose to open the book with is ‘A storm piles up behind the house’, from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Why?

PB: It's one of two entry points. It also works as a couplet with the other epigraph from Theodore Roethke: ‘I think a bird and it begins to fly’. The two just seemed perfect and gave a sense of some context for the poems between them, I thought. A third epigraph I could have used would have been from Wallace Stevens: ‘This is the thesis scrivened in delight’! Maybe for the next one.

SG: Pascale Petit described your work as ‘packed with exuberant images’, and Daljit Nagra described it as ‘richly imagistic’. What does the ‘image’ mean to you within poetry? How do you think about crafting images and managing their relationships with other images?

PB: I love this question. The short answer is I don’t know, except by rereading the poets I admire most. And finding ways to open myself up to chance arrivals. ‘Management’ is interesting. I’ve just thought of myself going about topping up my images like a butler!

Practically speaking a greater focus on image once enabled me to cut through rhetoric or language that was too self-conscious, too manufactured, superfluous. It uncluttered the work. Plus I want to be able to see something in a poem. Unlikely images, or images brought into unlikely juxtapositions that shouldn’t work but somehow do. When I’m in what you might call a flow state these images come and it’s exhilarating then, the poem is open and isn’t running along a conventional groove. I’m always jotting down images seen or made up. I can be seduced by the music of a poem too of course. But there’s nothing like a solid image. 

I wish I’d a better answer for you, Susanna. I should qualify here that most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing exactly, it’s intuitive, drawn up from somewhere. I don’t want to sound like an authority. I’m 28 and still very much figuring things out for myself. Maybe always will be.

I’ll tell you how one image came. It happened that an old classmate of mine sadly died and I kept dreaming about her, and perhaps to sort of process this I wrote a long free associative piece about seven or eight pages in length. During that time I had to pass a dead rat every morning in the car park on the walk into work. The rat joined the main dream which had featured coats hanging sinisterly in the boot of a car, which actually opened to reveal a staircase down into just darkness, might have been coats all the way down. I was thinking how inaccessible our interior landscape is to others, and the magnitude of pain anyone can carry and nobody would know any different, unless you tried to articulate it. Anyway for a finish I took the closing image of that long poem and zoomed right in. It took on a metaphorical charge.

          Your dreams make all kinds of no sense—

          locked cabinets with cobwebs across

          the wobbly glass knobs. Rachael

          adjusts on her nothing shoulders

          the winter coat she’d have worn,

          the stitching so gone in the pockets

          her hands believe they’re bottomless.

– from Dean Browne, ‘Rachael’s Coat Inside Out,’ Kitchens at Night, 2022

SG: There’s a line in your poem ‘The Goatfish’: ‘your ordinary is so strange’. It would be easy to describe your poems as ‘surreal’… Is the idea of surrealism something you embrace, or is there another way you think about the embrace of the strange in your work?

DB: I wouldn’t embrace surrealism wholesale, but it probably informs the poems in the pamphlet a good deal. I’m not very much into isms in general. But it’s a way for some people to access the work and I wouldn’t begrudge them it. In a sense what I think doesn’t matter anyway. I only wrote the poems. Maybe instead of surrealism, surrealish!

SG: Daljit Nagra also described Kitchens at Night as often ‘edged between… humour and revelation’. What role do you think of humour playing in your work, or in poetry in general?

DB: It’s just so much of a piece with my thinking. I don’t see humour and seriousness as antonyms. A serious thing was often approached by way of a joke where I grew up. I don’t think my poems are that funny at all, but sometimes at a reading someone will laugh and I’m delighted. I think there’s a basic pathos as well as the humour though that possibly gets missed. Those two things are related in many ways. I think of a poem like ‘The Cowboy’ by James Tate that I’ve always founding so affecting. You don’t expect the gut punch, he’s disarmed you with a light touch early on. It’s not just jokey, in other words. The humour is threaded organically into the spirit of the poem. It needn’t be turned up to eleven.

SG: I also think of Frost: ‘What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing [the poem]?’ That’s so even if the poem is one coloured by grief. Similarly Auden said a poem ‘must praise all it can for being and for happening’.

          Folding one sock into the other, or

          kneeling to separate helm from rhubarb helm

          in a straw hat, your ordinary is so strange

          you might as well be filleting goatfish

          on the far side of the moon –

– from Dean Browne, ‘The Goatfish,’ Kitchens at Night, 2022

SG: Do you have a favourite poem from the book?

DB: I’m attached to some more than others, but I’ll not say which.

SG: I love your opening poem – ‘Aide-mémoire’ – with its dream-transitions, the goat with the sign reading ‘NEVER FORGET’, the questions like ‘What am I meant to remember?’ that seem to ring out so far beyond the situation of the poem, the dizzying conclusion of the ear coming off in the speaker’s hand… what can you tell me about the decision to open with this poem, or with the idea of a memory-aid?

DB: I’m glad you like that poem and I like how you’ve read it. It almost never happened. I wrote the first two lines and my internal censor flared up, but I thought fuck it, rather than erase them I’ll incorporate the censor, see how he likes that: ‘that’s not very original I think but I’ll see where it leads’. In a way, then, the poem became about its own improvised making: ‘where, if anywhere, all this might connect’. It was also to work on the level of what you might call the narrative of the poem – I’m just talking process. It was written in a sitting like that just as it is, pencil and paper, under the heckling of my censor as I went! He was relentless that day but I won.

As to opening with it, it spoke to ideas of imperfect recovery; also the speaker doesn’t know more than the reader. He’s bewildered, hunted. The line between memory and imagination occurs elsewhere in the pamphlet in various forms I suppose. Sometimes a poem just demands to be first.

          A goat has been following me for hours. There is a sign

          hung around his neck that reads NEVER FORGET.

          That’s not very original I think but I’ll see where it leads.

  –– from Dean Browne, ‘Aide-mémoire,’ Kitchens at Night, 2022

SG: You return a few times to the fourteen line poem – the implication of a sonnet – in ‘Curriculum Vitae’, ‘Tabernacle’, ‘Polyphemus’… why? And can you tell me about how you think about form more generally when you’re writing?

DB: I’m certainly conscious of form when writing. Whether writing in a traditional form such as the sonnet or when resisting form, as I might do if I suspect too much facility entering in. The sonnet is one particular form I notice I’m always coming back to. There’s also an element of trying to sneak one past without the reader noticing at first that it was a sonnet. The form should be listening to the content, though some mishearings can be interesting.

SG: The idea that the word ‘stanza’ comes from the Italian for ‘room’ came to mind reading your work, with its allusions to hermetic spaces, the domestic, your reference to Gaston Bachelard etc. You often adopt a single-stanza form, and elsewhere the quatrain crops up a lot… Is the stanza an element of structure you think much about when you’re writing?

DB: Finding the right form is important and like anyone I’m more partial to some than to others. I do fall in love with certain forms, such as the two you mention. Lately I’ve been writing in long lined couplets, and as it happens I’ve just written a pantoum of all things.

SG: The way you end a lot of your poems is powerful – a little twist that blows the whole thing open… I’ve mentioned the end of ‘Aide-memoire’… and in ‘Approach to Chilli’, for example, suddenly the speaker is tipping up the chairs ‘one by one’, and the dramatic monologue ‘My Last Consultation’ ends with the question ‘is it art?’… Can you tell me about how you approach or think about endings and how you land on them?

DB: That’s very generous of you to say. I’ve heard of some poets keeping a really good line for last and writing up to it. I’m more inclined to just put it down and go from there, or at least get it down early. Not knowing where the poem will end up creates an urgency to get wherever that might be. And again I feel freer to move in the poem without such a pre-decided closing line. The ending ideally arrives as a revelation. It shouldn’t shut down the poem. Sometimes the lightest touch is best. Just by virtue of being the last line, the last line – whatever it is – will suck in significance. How you lean into or resist that can often be the question. And realising that the last line is not the ending of the poem.

                               … What’s left but to uncork a Côtes du Rhône

           and rearrange the sitting room, in my head? There is no

          TV, so all the furniture points to the furniture.

          I slug back a glass then, one by one, tip up the chairs.

  –– from Dean Browne, ‘Approach to Chilli,’ Kitchens at Night, 2021

SG: There are a few incredible short poems in the pamphlet, especially in what could be termed your ‘food poems’… I’m thinking of ‘Approach to an Egg’ and ‘Barmbrack’, for example. How do you feel about the power of the short poem? Do you approach them differently? (I feel like short poems can be undervalued.)

DB: I agree that short poems risk being undervalued. Seen as unambitious at times, which we’re culturally conditioned to frown on perhaps? Mostly my own tend to be unexpected gifts. I have even shorter poems than the ones you mention which I hope will be published some time. They’re the height of unambition. Or is it the depths?

SG: If I’m correct, you lived in Berlin for a period before returning to Ireland. Is the idea of being an ‘Irish poet’ important to you? Did time away from Ireland affect your attitude to this?

DB: I did, it was a heady time in my life. Call centre work during the day, writing at night, some bar work at weekends. I suppose I came to miss the camaraderie of other poet friends back home, among other things. And I must have been more conscious of being Irish, surrounded by a foreign language. I noticed that some Irish words and placenames began to appear more in my poems while I was there. Then, when I got back here, Berlin began entering into the poems!

          I should never have written the instruction manual

          illustrating the 52 distinct tones that can be struck

          from the triangle, popular now in concert halls

          from here to Berlin. It’s brought me nothing but success.

    –– from Dean Browne, ‘The Triangle,’ Kitchens at Night, 2022

SG: What are you reading at the minute? Or what have you read recently that you found exciting?

DB: I’ve been reading all of Bohumil Hrabal’s novels. I find the brutality toward animals uncomfortable, but otherwise a great companion. I’ve been rereading the late Charles Simic, always a pleasure. Selima Hill is a recent discovery for me. She’s an exciting poet. I always have Emily Dickinson on the bedside, and Ulysses. I’ve just returned from Belfast where I was at the launch of Medbh McGuckian’s new collection, The Thankless Paths to Freedom, which is wonderful. Another was Dianne Seuss, frank: sonnets. 

SG: Can you tell me about a writing ‘ritual’ you have, or some of the processes you go through when writing a poem?

DB: Typically now I’ll play music low. Monk’s Misterioso, Ben Lukas Boysen or Nala Sinephro, say, or Ibrihim Maalouf’s Wind. Doodle. Smoke. Tea. I’ll jot words or phrases in the margins. I’ll check my notebook and so another word or phrase might join the margins from that. That might spark a curiosity I want to pursue. I suppose what I want is to get myself into a state where I can be open to chance, and where the poem can arrive without the inner critic obstructing it – to cheat my rational brain, as I said earlier. I’m trying to bait my imagination. This is a moody, intuitive process. But it does seem to happen. I’m as surprised as anyone sometimes. Last time I wrote a poem I laughed, I was just so pleased to have got it down.

SG: At the minute are you working on a first collection, or any other projects?

DB: I’m hoping to have the manuscript of my first full length collection ready soon. Any time I sit down though I end up writing something new instead, or otherwise distracting myself. Right now I’m into volcanoes and am watching a Werner Herzog documentary on the subject. I’d like to learn more about submarine volcanoes and the sharks that live in them.

Dean Browne is from Co. Tipperary and lives in Cork. He was a recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. His poems have appeared widely in journals such as Banshee, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, PN Review, Stinging Fly and elsewhere.

Susanna Galbraith is from Belfast. She is an editor of Abridged and her first poetry pamphlet is forthcoming with Nine Pens Press, 2023.

Dean Browne’s pamphlet Kitchens at Night was published by Smith | Doorstop in 2022.