Róisín Sheerin: You are living in Vienna. What is it like living as an American ex-pat in that city?
Eleanor Keisman: I’ve experienced life as an expatriate in several European cities – as well as a Chinese village – and I would say that there are a lot of things about Vienna, and Austria in general, that make life very easy. But I might just be saying that because I’ve put the most effort into figuring out how to live here. I speak German, and that helps, not just for ease of access but also to sidestep some of the inevitable (however, understandable) anti-Americanism I occasionally encounter. But I couldn’t imagine living here without knowing the language, although I know there are people who somehow manage it. Specifically, as an American, there are certain things I’ve gotten used to which would be very difficult to leave: The national public transit system, the cost of and easy access to fresh, local foods, renter’s rights, employment rights, and, of course, government health insurance.
And the coffee. I’m forever ruined.
Róisín Sheerin: ‘Dancing with you at Stephanplatz at 1 in the morning.’ reminds me of Richard Linklaters’s film Before Sunrise. A romance is crystallised (in Europe) within a very short period of time with no guarantee, because of circumstances, that it will continue. The lovers’ parting in your poem, is inevitable, one of them has to catch a plane the next day. The sweetness of desire sharpened by the pang of an inescapable and, possibly, permanen separation. Am I on the right track?
Eleanor Keisman: That’s the track, absolutely. I think the fleeting nature of romance is often one of the topics I’m most drawn to in poetry. As you mentioned, it’s the intensity of the sweetness which is sharpened by the inevitable loss to come. I often wonder if the not-having is what makes these types of moments so worthwhile, in the long run. There are so many wonderful poems that deal with precicely this, which makes me wonder: Does the elation of romance come solely from the pleasure of the memory? The fact is, I’ve had a lot of heartbreak in my life, of varying sorts. I think the result is that I’m highly romantic. To my mind, heartbreak can only exist because the potential was so promising, and I think the promise of potential can often be more beautiful than any real outcome. And it’s this very moment, this ember, from which such poetry can arise. I’m not sure if that makes me a doomed optimist, or a fatalist – or, is there a difference?
Róisín Sheerin: ‘Dancing…’ is a very aural poem, the sound of the U3 thunders, blood thrums in the body with a strange amplification, the booming church/cathedral that offers hushed protection… a swarm of teenagers I can’t help auralising as a gang of, urban starlings. Did you set out to write a poem so full of noise?
Eleanor Keisman: It’s funny you ask this. It wasn’t until some writer friends pointed this out to me that I realized sound is rather a feature in my poems. I think that cities are great settings for sensory poetry. There’s so much going on, so much sensory pollution, our bodies are bombarded by the external stimuli of smell, color, sound, etc. It makes it all the more powerful that something could be happening inside, some internal sensation, which drowns out everything else. As someone who’s very sensitive to my surroundings, it’s not often that I experience that. There was an actual moment, at around one in the morning in the centre of Vienna, but probably the contrast of sound and quiet is exaggerated in my memory. It’s corrupted by sentimentality, as all intense memories tend to be. But as to whether or not I set out to write a poem about noise, I can only say that the poem began in my head with the first line I have never known a 1am so quiet. I liked it, and it made me think about all the noise that romance and sexual energy can deaden.
Róisín Sheerin: How different might your work be, do you imagine, if you had stayed living in the States?
Eleanor Keisman: This is a really hard question! I’ll answer it like this: Oddly enough, it wasn’t until years after leaving the US that I started to become interested in more classic and modern American writers and poets. It wasn’t something deliberate, it happened kind of accidentally, picking things up here and there. I found myself reading stuff that came from a very specific place, the American northeast. The writers that stood out to me, in no particular order: Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, e. e. cummings. I don’t view myself at all as a patriotic person, but there was something about reading these writers that made me feel connected to an American voice that I’d never considered. And while there are many writers of great influence for me that I probably never would have discovered had I stayed in the US, these American writers hold an undeniable sway. What can I say? Maybe it’s the romantic in me. The poetry of America is the bud of its potential, in all likelihood never to be realized, and for that reason, to live forever as a treasure on the page.
Róisín Sheerin: ‘I dropped a bracelet in New York somewhere’ is also a sonorous poem - the bedlam of Herald Square, the heart shaped moan emitted by the falling bracelet that you imagine climaxing in a nuclear crescendo. Again, by the end we don’t quite know the fate of the lovers. It is inconclusive but you delicately hint it might be over. However that is not a tragedy, it is the energy that was engendered by the passion that is the nub. You seem philosophical about love affairs. Would you like to comment?
Eleanor Keisman: I like this idea that people imprint themselves on one another. Some love affairs stay with people long after they’re over. We’re branded, in a way, by the memory of someone’s smell, taste, the exact texture of their hair, the way they laughed, the glimmer of vulnerability. It’s not necessarily a tragedy when it’s over, but I think once we share that gift of tenderness with another, it’s permanently gone from us. It’s bequeathed to them, and both are forever altered by the experience of giving and receiving. I wanted to take that concept and apply it to a place, to imagine what would happen if the energy, the passion, lived on in inanimate objects, in a physical locale. I think about this sometimes, whenever I see a couple in public, sharing an intimate moment. For example, when I see two people holding hands, hugging, looking fondly at each other, and so on, I wonder if that love, that emotional generosity, somehow marks the location and lives on even after they’ve left. I imagine, in a way, it does. Because it’s hard for onlookers not to see that and smile. In this way, the emotionality, the intimacy of the moment has multiplied and spread. So, yes, I’m quite philosophical about love affairs.
Róisín Sheerin: I am reading a book of Irish writer’s Maeve Brennan’s collected New Yorker columns, ‘The Long Winded Lady’. Are you familiar with Maeve Brennan’s work? I haven’t been to visit, but New York seems to me a labyrinth of numbered streets that have their own identities and occasionally when they intersect, cross-fertilise. How do you feel about New York?
Eleanor Keisman: I’m not familiar with her work, but I’m glad to have the recommendation! I’ve recently been exploring more Irish writers, specifically the works of Claire Keegan and Kevin Barry, and I’m curious to read more.
Streets with their own identities which intersect and cross-fertilize – what a great way to articulate New York! How I feel about the city is probably a complicated answer. It’s the city of my birth and family culture, a place to which I have many associations. But that’s the New York of my mind, not one that exists anymore. When I go back for visits, I’m reminded each time that of that Jim Croce song New York’s Not My Home. The unbelievable noise, the dirt, the anonymity afforded in the large crowds, the endless store fronts and overwhelming wall-to-wall city blocks, all these things used to make me feel comforted and safe. But now all I see is a nonstop urban anxiety. It’s claustrophobic, and one is flooded with consumerist pressure. I’m not a person who finds it comforting anymore. I live on the outskirts of Vienna, and I watch birds through my study window and walk along a silent vineyard when I go grocery shopping. The only noise I tend to hear is my downstairs neighbor who plays the violin, and a woodpecker who, each spring, tries to make a nest in the wall just outside my bedroom. I work in the Vienna city centre, but while I don’t love the commute, it’s always a pleasure to walk home and shed the chaos of the city.
Róisín Sheerin: Poetry featuring inanimate objects is a rich seam. Is there a poem written by someone else about an inanimate object you personally find particularly inspiring, or are attracted to?
Eleanor Keisman: What comes to mind are actually two poems. First, Mending Wall by Robert Frost. The first lines: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall / that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it / and spills the upper boulders in the sun / and makes gaps even two can pass abreast… The poem goes on to make a social statement, but I really enjoy the way Frost can lead us in with this profound image of a wall, receptive to some unseen, unknown will. Just the first word, something, is such an unexpected way to begin a poem. And grammatically the sentence would begin with there, but to have it flipped in this way is much more intriguing.
The poem by e. e. cummings I like my body when it is with your body, while not exactly about inanimate objects, I think it works in this way because of how he seems to divorce the body parts from the person. Lines like muscles better and nerves more and I like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling-firm-smoothness, the parts and aspects of this body are severed from their owner, in a sense. But I think it’s exactly this that makes it such an incredibly sexual and romantic poem, like the speaker is mindfully deciphering the body of his beloved, appreciating each piece separately.
Róisín Sheerin: What life do you think your bracelet could be living now, detached from your
arm, without you?
Eleanor Keisman: Good question. I think the bracelet has become a piece of glitter in the New York subsoil, one of the countless forgotten relics in the city. Or maybe someone else found it, fixed the clasp, and gave it a second chance.
Róisín Sheerin: By the time this is published, the U.S. election will have been decided. I am guessing you may have used a postal vote. How does it feel to be physically removed at this momentous time?
Eleanor Keisman: I’ve voted by absentee ballot for the past several US presidential elections, and I couldn’t be more relieved to be thousands of miles away when the votes are counted. Watching US politics play out from afar has been distressing, horrifying, and unreal. To be honest – and I realize this isn’t a very socially responsible thing to say – over the past few years I’ve found myself becoming decidedly less interested in American politics. I find myself in so many conversations where I’m expected to answer for the state of the US government, and while I do understand that people may be looking for some insider clues, I’m as bewildered as the next person. I think something glitched in my head when I saw a certain orange-faced American businessman/reality show star appear for the first time as a genuine presidential candidate. If the appropriate response was to be disgusted, and I do think that it was and continues to be, my fuse is fried.
Róisín Sheerin: You write in many genres. Do your different writers’ instincts compete with one another?
Eleanor Keisman: I enjoy experiencing the mental variation that comes from switching between genres. As much as possible, I like to keep myself slightly off balance creatively, as opposed to getting too comfortable with any one genre. But a rewarding discovery of the past few years has been to see how linked the various forms of writing can be. From exploring structure in creative nonfiction, I learned new things about storytelling, which influenced my fiction. And quite surprisingly, after spending 2 years working on an MFA in fiction, writing a novel and a collection of short stories, I felt that my poetic voice became stronger. I learned that, just as a well-rounded short story has a certain arc of development, so too does a poem (for my satisfaction) require that same feel, the same kind of sea change. But where prose might take paragraphs and pages to build that peak moment of change, poetry can do it in as little as a single line, and that’s fascinating to me.
Róisín Sheerin: You have just finished your first novel. Can I ask you what it’s about? Have
you settled on a title? Have you an agent? Have you a publisher in mind?
Eleanor Keisman: What’s your novel about is a question on which I spent six months writing an artfully and obsessively crafted answer, and one that hasn’t yet managed to catch the eye of any agents or publishers. But I plan to keep trying!
But to answer more spontaneously: My novel, or rather, novella, is about three characters isolated from each other and their world, in language, thought, and environment. New Animal follows the experiences of a wolf, a wolfdog, and a man, navigating survival in a near-future, climate-ravaged Yukon. I’ll admit that I was strongly influence by Jack London and his character Buck, and I wanted to write a Call of the Wild for our time. Perhaps an overly bold undertaking! Although I use climate change as a setting, I’d say the story focuses more on the sense of identity lost uniquely by each character: The wolf from his pack and the natural order as he knew it; the wolfdog from his origin species; and the man from modern economic and societal values. They come together in an unexpected circumstance, and I attempt to capture intimately the ways in which they seek to recreate their own irretrievably lost connections.
Róisín Sheerin: What are you working on now?
Eleanor Keisman: If you’d asked me this question some months ago, I’d have talked about a collection of short stories I was working on, hoping to package them along with my novella. My settings are varied, and I’m interested in stories that explore how people deal with feeling isolated, and often times, resign themselves to disconnection, from both their external community and internal sense of personhood. The tone and subject matter can range from surreal to horrific. But in a cruel irony, my body and mind have been hijacked by long covid, and I’m focused on the uphill recovery after catching the virus over the summer. It’s amazing that what started as a relatively mild infection has left me physically and cognitively hobbled. I’ve had to set my short stories aside for now, and I’ve been relearning how to write with this new brain. It’s a bizarre sensation to have so much trouble thinking. But I do have good days when I’m able to write for short bursts, which I took advantage of to be able to answer these great questions! I’ve done some free verse poetry, but I haven’t had the energy to go back and revise, which is frustrating, as revision is one of my favorite aspects of poetry writing. I’m sure a form of recovery will come, but I’m preparing myself for the possibility that my brain may forever be changed. At the moment, I’m just trying to learn how to slow down and decipher form within the mental fog.
Eleanor Keisman
Eleanor Keisman is an American expatriate based in Vienna, Austria, working in the communications department of an international educational NGO. Her essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in Litro Magazine, The Bangalore Review, Tough Crime, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, as well as adapted for a podcast "The Other Stories". She has an MFA in creative writing and co-organizes an English-language writing club in Vienna. In her free time, she enjoys hiking in the Vienna Woods, cooking, and reading. She has just finished her first novel.
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