Incomparable Poetry

incomparable poetry Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) Incomparable Poetry: An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 and Irish Literature. Copyright © 2020 by Robert Kiely. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and trans- formation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creative- commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2020 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-83-0 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-84-7 (ePDF) doi: 10.21983/P3.0286.1.00 lccn: 2020936447 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Copyediting: Lily Brewer Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Robert Kiely Incomparable Poetry An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 and Irish Literature Contents 0 · Overview · 13 1 · On Trevor Joyce’s poetry and the Celtic Tiger· 35 1.1 · On Special Economic Zones in Ireland and China · 53 2 · On the financial crisis and the Irish response and the Arts · 59 3 · On Leontia Flynn’s poetry and glibness · 71 3.1 · On Flynn’s poetry, Auden, and fascism · 75 3.2 · On Flynn’s poetry, rhyme, and race · 83 4 · On Dave Lordan’s poetry and abuse and scandals · 89 5 · Thought-starting Clichés · 99 6 · Futures · 113 6.1 · The Decline and Fall of Whatever Empire · 125 Bibliography · 141 Acknowledgments This text is in some ways the polished remnants of a series of rejected post-doctorate proposals to various institutions. It was conceived in Hong Kong, and written in Cork and London. I must start by thanking Michael O’Sullivan and Emily Ridge — without them and the conference we organized together on Post-Crash Irish Literature I would never have written this. I would also like to thank Tom Betteridge, Luke Cianciotto, Jeff Clapp, Ollie Evans, Fergal Gaynor, David Grundy, Danny Hayward, Ian Heames, Sean O’Brien, Christopher Upton-Hansen, and Jo L. Walton for their help, as many of them made direct comments on a draft of this text — comments which I have rarely been able to do any justice to — or provided support in other ways. Many thanks to the team at punctum books, in particular Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Lily Brewer. Thanks are also due to the poets I discuss, many of whom have patiently replied to queries and emails. I would like to thank all my family, in particular my mother, Helen, and my aunt, Anne, for all their support. And lastly, thanks to Nisha Ramayya, who read and reread sections as I worked on them, whose kindness and intelligence is a constant inspiration. xi o What is it like to write poetry right now at this moment in world history? What is it unlike? Or, to avoid comparisons at all, what is poetry now? Fascists and an “alt-right” search for platforms, opposed but not often enough; global warming renders laugh- able our comfortable and anachronistic sense of cyclical change; secular stagnation mocks the entire program of austerity; a frantic media, its profitability untenable, devours and annotates every tweet it can. We could compare the moment to anything from the discount bin of history — why not, right? — whether it be China in the seventh century CE or the eleventh century BCE. A common touchstone for Europe or the northwest is the 1930s in the same region. It was a decade haunted by an economic crisis, a period of decline. Culture is an uncapturable swarm of what living people really do, say, sing, paint, photograph, and write, but our inability to delineate it in total does not lessen the imperative to ask what happens when our nebulous and uneven cultural moment is compared with a sense of doom and panic inscribed into other eras, or brought into contrast with other times and ideas. We need to pay attention to the ways in which those transpositions might in their inadequate commensurations be an impediment to grasping what is at hand, while they nonetheless jolt us into describing how those comparisons fail, and thereby perhaps become reotroactively justified. 13 incomparable poetry This essay is an attempt to describe the ways in which the financial crisis affected poetry in Ireland, and thereby how economics and poetry interpenetrate. I concentrate on poems that take the economic changes which Ireland has undergone in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as their subject matter, poems which ostentatiously announce themselves as at- tempts to grapple with those changes. I will largely focus on the work of Trevor Joyce, a contemporary Irish poet whose work emerges from the modernist traditions of Irish literature. The predominance of this poet’s work in my argument is partly due to the insistent regularity of his engagement with economic vo- cabulary and concepts. I will focus on the poem “Capital Ac- counts” and the chapbook The Immediate Future(2013) . The center of gravity in my argument is Irish poetry and economics, but other poets and other locales are brought into relation with this, including China and Mexico, countries pulled into this or- bit to bring Ireland into relief, because these contrasts are what motivate the poems themselves. By virtue of throwing into relief the ways in which our period is like and unlike these places, times, and writings, the texts I look at offer compelling and troubling explorations of our present moment. As surely as there is a ground for a simile or metaphor, there is a sky which illuminates that ground, without which it would be unthinkable. The differential between the sky and ground of these comparisons is a kind of torsion which speaks to the ir- reducibility of the there and then of the poems I will discuss. It is this sky I want to gesture toward, the ways in which these poems don’t work and come apart at the seams. Another more blunt way to come at this dynamic would be to say that commensurability and incommensurability are tightly knotted together. Incom- mensurability describes that which is impossible to measure or compare, that which lacks a common quality on which to make a comparison. Commensuration is a powerful tool because it can render some aspects of life invisible or irrelevant, as when the wage masks or degrades feminized labor through its differ- 14 0 ing levels of validation and valuation.1 Sometimes the wheels come off the commensurations in these poems, especially when they are fixed in place, spotted, analyzed. Their commensurations have a tendency to lose their potency, to display themselves as facetious and inadequate, but that is the whole point, that the mechanism comes apart and we can see what is really happening offstage or behind our backs. The torque between the failure of these comparisons and their explanatory power was and remains a spur to active and passionate thinking at every reading of them that has been given or undertaken in public and private, on page or stage. I want to suggest that Irish literature has taken a decisive turn toward oblique explorations of incommensurability in form and content since the financial crisis of 2007–8. Much twentieth-century American poetry takes the recon- figurations of society under capitalism as its subject matter. The critic Christopher Nealon has argued that this is the case not only of self-consciously radical or left poetries but also centrist and right-wing ones, and this remains relevant to Anglophone literature of the twenty-first century, in particular the poetry in and around Ireland.2 One could argue that economic consid- eration have been central to the sphere of literature in Ireland for much longer. At the putative dawn of Anglophone Irish literature, Jonathan Swift wrote the Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), a pseudonymous series of pamphlets which laid bare the machi- nations behind Wood’s halfpence (a privately minted copper coinage that was believed to be of inferior quality). Writing for an incumbent public sphere with substantial power, Swift argued that Ireland was constitutionally and financially independent from Britain and thereby he contributed to the formation of a national identity in congruence with certain bourgeois inter- ests. Swift looks smug on a Series B £10 banknote, circa 1976–82 1 Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, “Commensuration as a Social Process,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 313–43, at 314. 2 Christopher Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the Ameri- can Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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