Irish Poetic Modernism: establishing a timeline

 

This is going to be a kind of rambling discussion related to my recent experiences of reading Irish poetry. I am currently part way through on MA module on Irish poetry, which has thus far been interesting, but also frustrating because the focus is on canonical poets like MacNeice, Heaney, Kavanagh, with very little discussion of modernism or what would later be termed ‘linguistically innovative poetry’. I really cannot remember the exact date of my interest in modernist poetry but if I had to guess it must have been around the time of my last year at Edge Hill University. Funnily enough Robert Sheppard is the director of the creative writing programme at that same university and is a card-carrying member of the British underground poetry scene. It must also have been around this time that I discovered the poetry of George Mackay Brown, who I found out was my tutor’s favourite writer by looking at his blog online. And thinking about it, it was probably not long after I discovered George Mackay Brown that I discovered Andrew Duncan, who’s books on modern British poetry have been like a guide through the world of contemporary poetry. Reading Duncan’s books like The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry one gets a sense of interconnected constellations of poets writing technically brilliant, experimental, and intellectual poetry. Most readers would be content with readers these poets knowing that outside of London and England there are avant-garde poets in Scotland and Wales as well should one get bored of J.H. Prynne or the other usual suspects. It is more than likely the accident of my birth (the fact that one of my parents is Irish) that made me wonder about what sort of experimental poetries where being written in Ireland, and why I wasn’t reading much about it through the usual channels. The line of modernist poetry in Ireland is a broken one: in the 1930s Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey are heralded by Samuel Beckett as Ireland’s newest star poets, both write poetry that is inspired by Eliot and French Surrealism. Most histories of modernism will suggest that by the 1930s the power of modernism is almost depleted, in fact since 1914 it had probably begun to wane. Joyce and Woolf pass away at the end of the 30s as well. Because I can’t think of any great modernist poets writing anywhere in British Isles between the years 1940-1960 it makes sense that no new Irish modernists would come to be either, though I think Devlin at least was publishing poetry even in the mid 60s.

In Britain the 1960s would seem to be a new high point for innovation, in Ireland too we have Trevor Joyce and Michael Smith, though I don’t have a lot of information on Michael Smith. Joyce would seem to be Ireland’s most prestigious poetic innovator, though to outsiders you would think apart from Heaney, Longley, Muldoon there are no other poets worth mentioning on the Island of Ireland. After this initial wave (I say wave but it is literally have two poets, or so it seems) we have Maurice Scully, David Lloyd, and later Billy Mills and Catherine Walsh (I’m not sure on this timeline but I have a rough idea). Here then is an alternative canon to the ‘official’ Yeats, MacNeice, Kavanagh, Heaney, Muldoon one that we are told about, and which I am studying currently. My theory is that in Britain the relationship between mainstream and underground (modernist, innovative, experimental etc) poetry is essentially a close one, and crossovers happen quite a bit. It is not uncommon to find a poet published by Faber who employs some modernist techniques, and its also not uncommon to find a modernist poet become absorbed by the mainstream (Denise Riley). The boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable. In Irish poetry the gap is a lot wider, and there seems to be a lot less crossover. There are various reasons for this, one is perhaps that Irish poets are suspicious of intellectualism: Kavanagh seems to be highly suspicious of poetry that was about ideas, preferring his brand of ‘savage realism’. There is perhaps an argument to be made for The Great Hunger as a poem in a modernist mode, I would really like to write something about this but I probably won’t get round to it. But I don’t think realism and a modernist or experimental poetics are necessarily at odds, although of course critics that make the claim that Kavanagh’s realist lyric is a rejection of modernism are thinking of modernism in terms of surface and indeterminacy, whereas I have a much broader sense of modernism that goes beyond that but is perhaps informed more by more contemporary poets. The point is, that there are ideas and material in The Great Hunger that could easily be assimilated into a modernist tradition, and it would not surprise me if an experimental poet could salvage something from the body of Kavanagh’s poetry that has not already been gleaned by Heaney et al. Of the more contemporary Irish poet’s I’ve read we do have to say that Muldoon, on the surface at least, would appear to incorporate some modernist techniques into his poetry, but I find his style extremely infuriating so I am unwilling to say he is a good poet. Ciaran Carson is, however, a special case and one of my favourite poets.

The development of Irish literature in the 20^th century will no doubt have been helped or hindered by a tumultuous political history that meant that ideas of nation and identity were central to much of its poetry. Poets like Heaney and Kavanagh have in some way had to struggle with a myth of Irishness, and their poetry has perhaps come to be defined in terms of a tribal dialectics that must necessarily define an ‘other’ to write ‘against’ or to exclude. There is a prevailing sense that Irish poets must write ‘for’ their nation, and perhaps this precludes them from writing what ever poetry they find most interesting. Kavanagh perhaps attempts to slip past these nets of nation etc., but I think to really get outside of this myth of the Irish poet requires an intellectual and creative effort that was perhaps beyond Kavanagh. Heaney is much more consistent than Kavanagh and is the closest thing we have (or did have) to an internationally popular poet, which is no doubt why he is often claimed as part of the British mainstream despite the fact that he identifies as being Irish. Station Island is an interesting long poem and on in which we find many moments of self reflexivity and ambiguity. But outside of this I find Heaney less than exciting, and I recall reading some of his later poetry and finding it utterly boring and repetitive. Heaney does pass some comments in one interview about J.H. Prynne, but I’ve yet to find him commenting on Trevor Joyce or any of the other modernist Irish poets named above, but many writers work in isolation and are unaware of each other anyway. Reading the poetry of MacNeice, Kavanagh and Heaney over the past few weeks has left my insatiable itch for avant-garde poetry unscratched, MacNeice particularly is a conservative writer, and apart from a handful of poems there is not much of his oeuvre that interests me. I may well revisit Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger, there is enough going on there to hold my attention for the whole 20 pages, and it reminds me of a Bela Tarr film with it’s stark description of rural island and the lives of peasant farmers. But as I have been reading these poets I have of course been tracing the alternative canon which I spoke about above.

Randolph Healy was a name mentioned on a website about Irish modernist poetry (I think it was Trevor Joyce’s website), I read “Frogs” sometime last week which was a relatively short poem that seemed to be doing several interesting things at once. I checked out Healy’s own publishing press a couple of days ago, the webpage had a really crude d.i.y vibe that I really love and seems to be a common thing among the small poetry press scene, exciting as this lo-fi aesthetic was I was even more excited by the fact that a whole swathe of Healy’s own poetry was available here in PDF form, a collection of shorter poems and I think 4 longer pieces. Some of the shorter poems like “Processions” seem to be in a recognisably lyrical mode, though some like “World War II” and “Colonies of Belief” seemed dense with the kind of specialised vocabulary you might expect in a John Wilkinson or Prynne text, the poem seemed to move and order itself according to a logic that wasn’t lyrical in origin, the poem seemed to want to relay its message in a cold logical fashion. This seemed much like Allen Fisher’s work to me, especially Gravity as a Consequence of Shape. My first thought was that this poetry wasn’t privileging the oral over the written, as a lot of Irish poetry appears to be doing, this was much more like reading someone’s research notes that had been arranged into lines to see what patterns could arise. You can see why critics would dismiss this poetry as lacking any sort of metaphorical imagery or cohesion, unless you expand your notion of what poetry is beyond the  ‘lyrical’. If you have been reading poetry by someone like Allen Fisher you will already have made this quantum leap, poetry that is not grounded in this image of the poet speaking directly to us is possible. To take Heaney as an example again, a lot of Heaney’s poetry (you could say Yeats or Kavanagh as well) relies on this oral dimension, even some of the rhymes in his poetry only make sense if you hear them in his own accent. Yeats too put a lot of emphasis on this idea of voice, listen to the way he rolls his Rs in recordings, and I can even remember listening to Eliot read some of his poetry, and he seemed to be simulating a ‘celtic’ note that sounds almost like Yeats. Healy seems to want to deconstruct this oral presence that seems to define so much Irish poetry. I always feel uneasy using post-structuralist theory to think about poetry, however for obvious reasons Derrida is going to be useful when thinking about how the voice, or speech is usually privileged over writing as the condition for presence. I really don’t want to go into this further. Reading one of Healy’s longer poems, Arbor Vitae (The Tree of Life) which was published in 1997, you can see how Healy’s practice further developed as he experimented with longer forms. As Marthine Satris illustrates in an essay this a really fascinating poem for many reasons, Healy isn’t just taking his shorter poems and making them 15 pages longer, he is interrogating the long poem format in a way that is reminiscent of Peter Larkin’s similarly idiosyncratic presentation. Much is confusing in the text, we are presented with factual information which seems to be a history of the institutional exclusion and abuse of deaf people, there are more ambiguous passages where the reader has to guess what is going on from textual clues. This isn’t a poetry as we normally understand it, but rather it is like a poem/prose/essay hybrid. There are precursors to this type of poetry, Peter Larkin’s poetry is unconventional in this way as his long poems often consist of long and dense prose passages that are interrupted irregularly by little bursts of 3- or 4-line stanzas. Donne’s poetry, because it is often rhetorical and persuasive is somewhat along these lines. Even Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’ carries an intensity of language that borders on the poetic. The poetic essay is already a literary commodity of course, but Healy’s poem is completely different for the way in which he combines and switches modes, presenting something like a technical description of the potential hazards of hearing implants for their users and elsewhere images of startling beauty that seem almost accidental:

Yes is open, two handed,

contact of horizontal and vertical.

No is a small, solitary, upright bird, closing.

Language systems, communication technologies and exclusion seem to be the main themes of the poem. The reader is asked to consider the way in which a whole section of society was excluded or forced to adapt in traumatic ways by a society that regularly views them as ‘other’ and dismisses them, and to consider this in terms of the dominant tribal narrative. Healy’s poetry is a blatant dismissal of the notion that modernist poetry is abstract to the point that it becomes divorced from reality, this is a poem that manages to be personal and political at the same time with getting stopped in its tracks with notions of national identity. There is an ethics here but not a tribal one, it is an intersectional one. Healy examines the notion of language not via the usual binary of Irish/English, but from the perspective of the deaf community, who have a language system apart from orality, a language the state has actively tried to deny them. The poem also presents an alternative way of conceptualising notions of place and belonging via a phenomenological approach to communication which includes thinking about the body in terms of inputs and outputs, the self as a machine and communication as a bodily experience that is more than just voice/speech:

Home is an array of data arising out of

membranes, pressure, chemo- and light sensors

and, even more so, out of post-sensual processing.

But I am a fragment of a shadow

cast by the coherence of energies

necessary to co-ordinate a colony of six trillion cells.

Thinking about being in the world in this way is an effective way to move beyond notions of nationality and the ethics of tribalism that dominate Irish poetry in Republic and more so in the North. For me Ciaran Carson’s poetry could be seen as an attempt to explore a similar sense of communality through  an approach to lived experience that is almost phenomenological. I would need to think about this some more. When we reach the end of Healy’s poem/text/essay we presented with a long footnote that provides some biographical information that informs the context of the poem (Healy’s daughter is deaf) as well as annotations on the poem that replicate the logical and academic tone of the poem. The biographical note is touching and poignant and the tone of the poem is in striking contrast to it. The rest of the notes introduce us to the genius of Healy’s assemblages, acrostics are hidden in the poem that spell out scientific words, lines that seemed puzzlingly out of place are illuminated as quotations or references. The point of the footnote is to make you go back and read again to see what you missed the first time around, which will be nearly everything because as Healy himself points out: “No matter how good your hearing is there are things which you will not hear.”