On April 2nd, 2025, we were honoured to welcome Irish writer William Keohane to the University of Vienna, to complete his Irish Itinerary tour of his poetry performance Boxing Day. He had previously performed at Charles University Prague at the Irish Itinerary event organised by Marie Gemrichová on March 31st.

Keohane’s Boxing Day is a series of box-shaped poems exploring transition, confinement, and time. For us, Keohane performed an abridged version; instead of 52 poems, one for each week of the year, we heard, watched, and witnessed 26 poems. After Boxing Day, Keohane introduced the audience to his work on trans poetics as part of his PhD work that explores the (poetic) form of the box in depth. This talk involved readings from his published poetry in the Queering the Green poetry anthology, his pamphlet Son, as well as his essay “The Assessments”. 

Keohane’s performance of Boxing Day was moving: his evocative poetry and varied emotional delivery resounded in the darkened, hushed room, illuminated dimly by the white squares of text. It was also full of movement as he explored the limits of the performance space, walking through the aisles, around chairs, leaning against the wall, at times turning to and away from his words projected at the front of the room. The audience was invited and challenged to become both assessor and witness of his words and his body.

An integral part of Keohane’s creative PhD, Boxing Day is a project that is continually in flux, with the poet writing, erasing, and rewriting poems between performances. The poetry lives in variation but is also only available as a whole in performance; the printed texts have not been published.

The short poems, contained within 12x12 cm boxes, explore trans experiences, including coming out to loved ones and the myriad responses trans individuals are confronted with. The poems do not offer a single narrative. Rather, they jump through time, perhaps even across timelines, with a multiplicity of voices serving to undermine a simplistic autobiographical understanding of Keohane’s performance. In Boxing Day and Son, Keohane’s 2023 pamphlet, the writer offers two different accounts of searching for and finding a name; the latter text offers a longer autobiographical narrative. Along with form, genre plays a central role in Keohane’s writing, which he demonstrated in his performance/reading/talk.

Throughout the evening, the issue of access to gender affirming healthcare loomed large. According to a 2022 study, the Republic of Ireland is ranked last in Europe in terms of accessible healthcare for trans people, with a 10-year waiting period for an initial assessment. In his essay “The Assessments”, published in The Dublin Review in autumn 2024, Keohane describes in cold, clinical prose his own journey to access medical care abroad and the ways in which his history, state of mind, and identity were questioned in these situations.

In the final part of the event, Keohane provided context for his creative work by exploring his ongoing research into trans poetics, elaborating on his development of the box as a poetic form and its connections to trans themes.

Using the example of the postcard, he demonstrated how the box shape impacts the writing within it. Everyone received an empty postcard from Keohane as he shared that the first postcard was sent in Austria in 1869, much to everyone’s delight.