Feature Friday - Patrick O’Reilly
Name
Patrick O'Reilly
Pronouns
He/It/Whatever
Bio
Patrick O'Reilly is a poet from Renews, NL, now living in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. He is responsible for two chapbooks, A Collapsible Newfoundland (Frog Hollow Press, 2020) and Demographics Report November 2023 (Cactus Press, 2024).
Where in Montreal are you located?
St. Henri
What do you love about that neighborhood?
The heart of any neighbourhood for me is its bookstore, and Librarie Saint-Henri has gotten a good chunk of my paycheques so far. There's also some very nice restaurants. I think what I most appreciate though is that I'm about equidistant between the canal and the train tracks. There's constant, linear movement, so if I sit perfectly still I become a kind of anomaly, something that, by its stillness, moves in the wrong dimensions.
What’s your favourite art space in Montreal and why?
That is a tough question; my understanding of "art space" as a term is pretty loose. I love the BANQ and I love the MBAM and I love the Redpath Museum; there's probably a dozen or so very hip galleries and multimedia places that I'm sure your readers know better than I do. I really love this alley that runs along Rue Notre Damn Ouest that full of old pieces of buildings and scrap metal sculptures and things. Does that count?
Describe your art in your own words.
I'm finding it harder to call what I do "poetry". I think I'm aiming for something that is poetic, but is also like a kind of cinema-in-verse, or archival descriptions, or redacted government papers. I use words. For now.
What have you been working on recently?
I just finished a draft of a manuscript about cryptids, landscape, and neurodivergence that I hope to send out sometime this month. With that off the table, I'm really focused on a kind of pataphysical treatise on phantom islands. I grew up on an island, I live on an island now. They're very important, very disruptive and deformative.
How would you describe your poetic voice?
Catholic. Small c catholic, which is, maximalist and fractal, though that's not necessarily the same as verbose. I am interested in craft and form and concision, but as tools that I can juxtapose against prosaic scientific language, or wild natural images, or little bits of pop culture ephemera. I've been told I'm funny, but I've almost never meant to be. I think the language is funny. I think the juxtapositions are funny. There isn't a lot of "I" in my work, or there's more than I like.
Where do you find your inspiration?
It's all external. I don't spend a lot of time on autobiography, human-to-human relationships don't move me. I like information. Love a list, love a dictionary or a bestiary or a scientific technical paper. And I love nature; I grew up pretty deep in the woods and loved finding unexpected things (seashells on mountains, or empty beer cans three miles into a marsh, that sort of thing). Monstrosity. Islands. Outer space. Zen Catholicism. Weird faultlines in language. Really anything that is where it shouldn't be, or isn't where it should, the paradoxes, the both/and/buts. Those are the things that hold my attention. I see my goal as taking all that external stimuli and filtering it through my brain, then externalizing that, and filtering it, back and forth until the barriers between the personal and the universal (Universal) erode.
Describe your writing process.
I'm bad at editing, so other writers take heart there. It usually begins with a line or two walking home from the metro, spending a couple of hours in my little room playing with images and forms and dragging out word and idea and associations. If I like it, I like it for a while and then hate it. Once I hate it, or if I hate it right away, I put it in the drawer and wait til I've forgotten about it. It's easier to write, I think, once you've forgotten all the extraneous things you wanted to do with a piece of writing.
Who are some of your favorite writers?
I think if I were to limit myself to maybe 4 or 5, the big heroes for me, at different points, have been Alice Fulton, Madhur Anand, Mary Dalton, Patrick Kavanagh, and John Steffler. They're all kind of recorders from or of the "margin", or people microscoping in from the outside. I like that.
What do you love about Montreal's poetry scene?
The writers. Great, great writers here, who are not just good writers but kind, supportive, interesting people as well.
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