The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Vol. IV
336
The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Vol. IV
336eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781943666324 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wake Forest University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2019 |
| Series: | The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 844 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Trevor Joyce
TREVOR JOYCE AND THE IRISH EXPERIMENTAL TRADITION
Among Thom Gunn's witty short poems is a couplet titled "Jamesian": "Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed." Anyone who has trekked through a late Henry James novel will recognize the tendency of all discussion to move to a meta-level of intellectualization rather than anything as banal as mere communication. In the same way, the discussion surrounding the Irish avant-garde can often seem hung up in self-inhibited ways on the question of whether it exists at all. Anthologies and critical studies of Irish poetry come and go with no reference to the avant-garde, or sense that anything is lost by not engaging with Irish writing of a self-confessed modernist hue. By titling his 1985 critical study Irish Poetry After Joyce, Dillon Johnston drew attention to the existence of other wellheads than Yeats for modern Irish poetry, placing in fruitful dialogue the traditions that emerge from Yeatsian cultural nationalism and the alternatives of "silence, exile and cunning" identified by James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. Where poetry is concerned, an often-cited foundational moment for Irish modernism is Samuel Beckett's 1934 "Recent Irish Poetry," published in The Bookman under the pseudonym Andrew Belis. The phrase "foundational moment" may be something of a misnomer for a manifesto which achieved so little purchase on the landscape of 1930s Irish poetry, but eight decades later the force of Beckett's opposition to neo-Revivalist poetics has lost none of its urgency.
Just as T. S. Eliot had theorized a modernist aesthetic into existence on the basis of striking but fanciful generalizations — the "dissociation of sensibility," the "objective correlative" — Beckett announces that Irish poets can be divided into those who have and those who have not taken cognizance of the "breakdown of the object." Those who fail this test are the "antiquarians," trapped in the "flight from self-awareness" that Beckett sees as the legacy of a myth-besotted nineteenth century. George Russell, Austin Clarke, Francis Ledwidge, and a host of others are mockingly dismissed and praise heaped on the work of Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin: cosmopolitan poets whose poems constitute "elucidations" and a sophisticated alternative to "dying of mirage." In no practical terms can Beckett's manifesto be said to have been a success: no sooner had the poets he champions begun to publish than they vanished from the scene, either ceasing gradually to write altogether (MacGreevy) or enduring lengthy creative hiatuses (Devlin, Coffey), not to mention the even more obscure fate of Irish women modernists such as Blanaid Salkeld and Freda Laughton. Several factors conspired against this modernist moment. Beckett's dislike of Yeats's imitators in the Celtic mode blinds him to the possibility of any worthwhile poetry being written in this style, driving him to scapegoat the work of Austin Clarke (scandalously traduced in his 1938 novel Murphy as "Austin Ticklepenny"). Given how slender were the achievements of at least two of his favored poets in 1934, Devlin and Coffey, the element of special pleading in Beckett's advocacy of their work is unmistakable. And finally, the essay predates the emergence of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice, figures who would transform Irish poetry of the 1930s and further dilute the impact of the Irish modernists.
Nevertheless, much was lost when the moment of "Recent Irish Poetry" passed into semi-remembered literary history. The poetry of Beckett himself, an influence on Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and Trevor Joyce (b. 1947), remained in penumbra even after his winning of the Nobel Prize. Publishers of Irish poetry led a precarious existence, often leaving innovative writing without a port of call for decades at a time: between the closure of the Belfast-born George Reavey's Europa Press in London (which had published Beckett's Echo's Bones) before the Second World War and the founding of New Writers' Press in 1967, innovative writing was a scarcely registered absence on the island of Ireland. The New Writers' Press sponsored the first real revival of the 1930s modernist poets, reprinting work by MacGreevy and Coffey, as well as publishing a wide spectrum of poetry in translation and fostering the early work of Paul Durcan, Michael Hartnett, and Joyce himself. In a peculiar repetition of the gapped careers endured by the 1930s poets, Joyce's writing life is punctuated by a nineteen-year interval between the publication of The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976) and stone floods (1995), years that coincide with the consolidation of the global celebrity of the Northern Irish poets. Histories of the avant-garde specialize in fall narratives, as a moment of radical promise is squandered or betrayed, and in "what if" questions framing counterfactual versions of literary history. What if "Recent Irish Poetry" had led to the coronation of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Thomas MacGreevy at the expense of Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins, and Oliver St. John Gogarty; what if its republication in the Dublin journal The Lace Curtain had coincided with the ascent of Michael Smith, Joyce, and Maurice Scully to international fame and championing by Marjorie Perloff, just as Helen Vendler would later champion Seamus Heaney?
The American connection is of particular interest for the way in which the categories of the avant-garde and Irish poetry have been kept largely apart. As the representative modern Irish poet, Seamus Heaney is the traditionalist foil for John Ashbery or Jorie Graham: why go to Irish poetry for an experimentalist, when they exist in such abundance in the US? It is not just its non-traditional aspects that have gone against innovative Irish poetry: also a factor is its resistance to what Beckett would call the "accredited themes" of the nation, Ireland, and Irishness that dominate the work of a poet such as Eavan Boland. Joyce makes a reluctant poet-spokesman, on any theme, and is distrustful of poetry that casts the writer as the custodian of national woes. Traditionally, he has observed, a "poetry of expression" will confront the Northern Irish Troubles or the ghosts of the Famine and become "aware of things, events, experiences … with which it recognizes itself as incommensurable" and react to this awareness with stylized demonstrations of "the horror of its own privileged futility to intervene." It is not that Joyce advocates (or practices) aloofness from the currents of history, but that he is keen to refashion the manner of our engagement with politics and history, whatever adjustments this may entail to the national bardic self-image.
If the Irish avant-garde today lacks a figure with the profile of Heaney, Boland, Edna O'Brien, or Colm Tóibín, it is nevertheless heir to the heroic modernist tradition of Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, and others. How to account for this disconnection? As Declan Kiberd has argued in Inventing Ireland and Irish Classics, the incorporation of Yeats and Joyce into the canon of Anglo-American modernism by Richard Ellmann and Hugh Kenner sees these writers as achieving international significance to the degree that they transcend their homeland. As modernists, they are the peers of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, or Marianne Moore, but as Irish writers they are expected to write on Irish themes; and thus the very possibility of an Irish modernism is compromised. The critical discourse surrounding Joyce's work has consequently not been without a fractious dimension. In 1990, J. C. C. Mays published a short J'accuse in The Irish Review in which he painted the boom in Irish poetry in Adornian terms as a culture industry, cravenly subservient to the heritage sector of the Irish economy. Modernist writers rejected during their lifetimes are assimilated to the Irish canon through a process of declawing and an emphasis on themes of Irish identity. Where living writers are concerned, Mays sees not vibrancy but empty boosterism: "There are a lot of writers but they are all the same sort." Irish poets are compared to the identikit houses that spring up around suburban towns, a comparison which — given the centrality of the building industry in the boom-andbust economic scandals of recent years — comes heavily freighted with metaphors of reputational negative equity. In the light of Mays's critique, it is revealing that images of ruins proliferate in Joyce's work, structures often born of the fall of empire. Ruins are a frequent theme too in the work of Walter Benjamin, an urban adventurer with many affinities to Joyce, and who reminds us of the utopian dimension of obsolescence, a lesson on show throughout Joyce's oeuvre.
What then, for a reader unfamiliar with Joyce's poetry, are its salient qualities and attractions? The early poems of Pentahedron (1972) are richly urban in texture, full of gothic excavations of the poet's native Dublin, and intimate cross-fertilizations from the work of fellow Dublin poets Thomas Kinsella and James Clarence Mangan. The river Liffey is a "sheet of filthy linen, green on grey cement," an image every bit as appetizing as Beckett's "slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer" in "Enueg I." Birds are a frequent motif, but often in earthbound or mangled form — emissaries from a miscarried zone of transcendence ("Speech is a broken bird on stunned / wings"). Descriptive writing is greedy for its prey, a hungry raptor ("The eye lifts, strong as a hawk in the open sun"; cf. Beckett's "The Vulture"). Another Beckettian resonance is the alternation between hard-edged loco-descriptive writing and a more ritualistic, or incantatory register: both poets look to Chinese poetry for modalities of calm that bypass more conventional forms of lyric repose. The erotic is placed under several layers of alienated disavowal ("my love, whom yet / I do not know but I already mourn.") Reference to Narcissus completes the checklist of Beckettian similarities, given the centrality of the Narcissus myth to Beckett's 1935 Collection Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates. These are the poems of a young man's claustrophobia, itchy with nervous energy and cultivating the issuelessness of their predicaments.
Though The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine postdate those of Pentahedron by four years, they are placed first in the 2001 assemblage with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold. This sequencing underlines the centrality to Joyce's aesthetic of translation, both in itself and as an antidote to the furious subjectivity of the contemporaneous lyrics written in his own voice. Here again the influence of James Clarence Mangan, Ireland's greatest verse translator, is unmistakable. Though touted by his early editors as the national (and nationalist) laureate, Mangan's relationship to the Irish tradition was complex and fraught. Much of his work took the form of translations from languages he could not read, or from non-existent original texts. To a modern eye these experiments in ventriloquism (the "antithesis of plagiarism" as Mangan called them) may read like postmodernist games in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges or Christopher Reid's fictional Eastern European poet Katerina Brac, but for Mangan they closely answered the psychological needs felt by an Irish poet fretting in the shadow of Victorian British poetry. Joyce's relationship to translation is similarly complex. It is unfortunate that Irish critics of Mangan (Thomas Kinsella, Declan Kiberd) have tended to focus on his translations from Irish, rather than from German or Arabic, thus binding him to the all-important British-Irish dyad; much is lost in the process. Joyce's decision to translate from such a wide range of languages is a no less conscious refusal to define his position in terms of a British-Irish binary. Nevertheless, his translations from Irish — collected in Courts of Air and Earth — are a significant contribution in that field. It is worth remembering that his version of the Middle-Irish poem Suibhne Geilt predates Seamus Heaney's Sweeney Astray by almost a decade. While Heaney pokes gentle fun at the fustian style of Whitley Stokes, the poem's Victorian translator, his translation too inclines more to the cooked than the raw — to "naturalization" rather than "foreignization," in Lawrence Venuti's terms. Joyce's Sweeny (sic) poems are resolutely jagged by comparison, progressing in stumpy, stuttering short lines, haunted by the knowledge of their textual corruption and the melancholy they carry like a curse (in the original myth, the pagan Sweeney is cursed and transformed to a bird by a Christian cleric whose anger he incurs).
No sooner had Joyce emerged than he withdrew in the long hiatus broken only by the publication of stone floods in 1995. Joyce's work as a systems analyst for Apple during this period deeply influenced his understanding of poetic diction and the information networks that hem in the language of the lyric poem. A prime example of the new style enabled by this period of regrouping is Syzygy. Joyce draws on a Chinese text, but within a palindromic structure inspired by the medieval canons of Guillaume de Machaut and computer spreadsheets. Having first cast his material out, in "The Drift," he gathers it back in, in "The Net," condensing and intensifying its circle of repetitions. John Goodby astutely draws a comparison with the exploded sestinas that drive Paul Muldoon's "Yarrow." The Chinese themes of administration and governance become matters of textual organization, as though one of Ezra Pound's Chinese cantos had been crossed with an elaborate Oulipo word-game. In the poem's last lines, the concept of financial exposure is punningly exploited, connecting the language of international commerce to more primal experiences, the "tune of several millions" returning the poem to the ground bass of shared mortality:
we suffer an exposure to the tune of several millions when the thieving sea will fit in three quart jugs and then there is this sound the red noise of bones[.]
Joyce's use of aleatory textual generation parallels the work of composers Iannis Xenakis and Witold Lutoslawski, who responded to the hyper-organization of modernist music by embracing elements of random generation. No modern Irish poet approaches more closely than Joyce the technical démarches of the great modern composers, forever finding new and unnerving ways of orchestrating his work. He has enthusiastically explored the prose poem, a genre that vengefully asserts its rights in "Stillsman," whose text (too long for inclusion here) is served up in an undifferentiated bolus of Copperplate Gothic caps. In a poem co-authored with Randolph Healy he speaks of "the am of me and the who you are," creating a "sea of voices / outbound / in a bottomless ship," while another co-authored poem, with Tom Raworth, is arranged in "bicameral" form, its left-and right-hand columns arranged around the spine of a central white line. The reading eye is initially confused as to whether to read straight across or down the page in two separate columns: both approaches yield stimulating results. This method is applied again in the much longer Trem Neul, a remarkable evocation of life in rural Galway. "Come here / Open your eyes / Open your mouth," we read in one column, while another suggests that "It is a mixture of spaciousness and intimacy." The immediacy of recovered memory is placed in constant dialogue with artistic self-consciousness and a Proustian sense of the passage of time. As in Beckett's Company, narrative experiment and the innocence of childhood are mutually sustaining, as the text establishes its bearings and finds a language for experience. Readers more used to Seamus Heaney will find Joyce's approach dissonant and disorienting, but his is an unrepentant aesthetic of ostranenie or estrangement. By following the trail he sets for us, we learn to negotiate the textual labyrinth but also to enjoy the detours and blind alleys it throws up as we wander. In an interview with Niamh O'Mahony, Joyce has spoken of the element of inspired randomness and wandering in his work and the inspiration he has drawn from the art of Paul Klee. Moving lines and colors around on canvas, Klee would emerge with a painting "titled something like 'Christmas Night in Augsburg'; it wouldn't have started out as a painting of that, but it would end up as a painting of that, achieved unconsciously by a play with objective formal elements."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry Volume Four"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Wake Forest University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Wake Forest University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Editor's Preface,
Trevor Joyce,
"Trevor Joyce and the Irish Experimental Tradition",
from WITH THE FIRST DREAM OF FIRE THEY HUNT THE COLD (2001),
Elegy of the Shut Mirror,
The Opening,
Fast Rivers,
The Turlough,
Strands,
Chimaera,
To-Do,
from "Syzygy": The Net,
The Fishers Fished,
Concentration,
Let Happen,
from WHAT'S IN STORE (2007),
Romance,
Limitless,
Kindling,
"tiny / universe",
"i walked / through / the universe / of parmenides",
Sanctioned,
Elements,
De Iron Trote,
from COURTS OF AIR AND EARTH (2008),
Seán Ó Duibhir of the Glen,
"She is my love",
"I will not die for you",
Cry Help,
from ROME'S WRECK (2014),
from "Rome's Wreck": I, IV, XX, XXXII,
Aidan Mathews,
"Aidan Mathews and the Irish Religious Poem",
from WINDFALLS (1977),
Returning to Kilcoole,
An Answer,
from MINDING RUTH (1983),
Talismans,
The Death of Irish,
The River's Elegy,
from ACCORDING TTHE SMALL HOURS (1998),
The Acoustic of Water,
Surgeon at Seventy-Five,
Drawn in the Sand,
Fatherlands,
Ex Cathedra,
Eye Witness,
All Burials Are at Sea,
Sea-Change,
Telling the Time,
Guardians,
Oven Gloves,
The Ceiling Rose,
Handicap,
Genesis,
Total Immersion,
from "Night Lights from Lorca": III. Deadwood,
The Head Appears,
Out of the Ark,
Thee,
from "Psalms for a Mammal": IV. Long After Catullus,
Wearings,
NEW POEMS,
After Omagh,
Healing the Lepers,
Kyrie for a Counsellor,
Magdalenes,
Perpetual Outing,
Murals,
The State of the Church,
The Elements of Leaving,
Imperial War Museum,
Watercolour for a Widower,
Nostalgias,
Courtship,
Peter McDonald,
"Peter McDonald and the Northern-Irish Poem",
from COLLECTED POEMS (2012),
The Dog,
Ether,
Galatea,
Out of Ireland,
The South,
The Green, Grassy Slopes of the Boyne,
The Third Day,
Meissen,
The Creatures,
From the Porch,
The Glass Harmonica,
Adam's Dream,
The Aftermath,
Lines on the Demolition of the Adelphi, 1937,
A Gloss,
Work: 1958,
At Rosses Point,
A Fall,
The Risk,
Hush,
War Diary,
Inventory,
Quis Separabit,
Late Morning,
The Bees,
Coda,
The Interruption,
Augury,
A Castaway,
This Earth,
from THE HOMERIC HYMNS (2016),
To the Earth, Mother of All,
from HERNE THE HUNTER (2016),
Two Salmon,
A Sting,
The Names,
The Swords,
Hare,
Sea Deer,
Lebanon,
Roe,
Ailbhe Darcy,
"Ailbhe Darcy and the Post-National Poem",
from IMAGINARY MENAGERIE (2011),
The mornings you turn into a grub,
Icon,
Telephone,
Clues,
You had not looked,
He tells me I have a strange relationship,
Christina's World,
Animal Biscuits,
La rue est rentrée dans la chambre,
Dog Song,
Halo,
Shoes,
The Monster Surely,
The Hotel,
Molly Bán,
The Art of Losing,
Unheimlich,
Caw Poem,
A Report from the Mapparium, Boston,
NEW POEMS,
Hill Street,
Small God Arrives,
Bruce Conner Love Song,
Birthday,
Borrowed Time,
Little Bird,
Mushrooms,
Windmill,
Silver,
Still,
Tuffi,
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh,
"Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and the Buntús Cainte ('Rudiments of Language')",
from PÉACADH (2008),
Ciaróg / Beetle,
Bac Seirce / The Love Bind,
Glas / Green,
Ionsaí na Bé / Fairy Attack,
Meafair / Metaphors,
Tionlacan / Accompaniment,
Cneá / Wound,
Áiféilín / A Matter of Some Regret,
Filleadh ar an gCathair / Citybound,
Moirt Seirce / Love Lees,
Sárú Teorann / Border-Crossing,
Iníon Báis / Daughter of Death,
Ag Léamh ar an Tram / Reading on the Tram,
Seal Fuachta / Cold Snap,
Reathaí Oíche / Nightwaves,
Geimhriú / Hibernation,
from TOST AGUS ALLAGAR (2016),
Irrintzina / Irrintzina,
St Nick's / St Nick's,
Buntús Cainte / Buntús Cainte,
Bhís Dom' Thiomáint Cois Trá / You Were Driving by the Sea,
Druma an Chongó / CongDrum,
Deireadh na Feide / Last Blast,
Bealtaine / May,
Filleadh ón Antartach / Return from Antarctica,
Conriocht / Werewolf,
Biographical Notes,
Permissions,