Passion and Arrogance: Poetic Craft and Topographies Of
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Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Passion and Arrogance: Poetic Craft and Topographies of Remembrance in the Work of Michael Hartnett Author(s): Eóin Flannery Source: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall, 2005), pp. 42-49 Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515594 Accessed: 06-03-2018 09:49 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Canadian Journal of Irish Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies This content downloaded from 193.1.104.14 on Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:49:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Eoin FLANNERY Passion and Arrogance Poetic craft and topographies of remembrance in the work of Michael Hartnett It [Hartnett's poetry] embodies an Irishness we will be the poorer for ignoring: a sense of shared values, a disdain explore the poetic and cultural processes of counter for crude materialism, a respect for tradition where that is wholesome, modernity that both permeate and energise Hartnett's a delight in nature and an awareness of, and an openness to the bigger world we share with others. (Michael Smith, "Michael Hartnett: creative language, together with his aesthetic delineation of A Memoir" 157) an organic relationship between language and its physical and cultural environs. It is not my intention to fasten the In his seminal study, Oral Tradition as History, Jan Vansina indelible label of "postcolonial writer" to Hartnett, but argues that landscape is properly viewed as a layered and merely to suggest that his work engages with many of the richly textured depository of both individual and communal political and cultural concerns that have exercised recent memory. The landscape is implicated in the processes of work on colonialism, postcolonial theory and subaltern retrospective remembrance, and it is also active in the critiques of modernity. Through his experimental, creation of memory. Accenting the articulacy of courageous and renovating use of diverse poetic forms, topographical memory, Vansina suggests that "the landscape, together with his embrace of marginal cultural changed by man or not, often was a powerful mnemonic constituencies, Hartnett's oeuvre cannot be termed either device" (45) WTiile cartographic surveys and pastoral or "traditional" or entirely "modern." As such it, firstly, romantic representations of physical terrains furnished challenges dubious conceptions of residual Irish limited versions of geographical record, in many respects "traditionalism" by foregrounding the vitality of Gaelic such discourses are differentially collusive in the pacification subaltern spiritual, linguistic and social rituals, but equally of lived memory. It is my argument that such representations articulates the postcolonial desire to critically re-imagine belong to the realm of historical discourse, and as such, are beyond the staid parameters of modernity. Concentrating estranged from the realm of memory. Rather than on a selection of poems from four collections of his poetry, celebrating or tracing the actuality of the concrete, the the Collected Poems (200 IM Necklace ofWrens (1987)1, Inchicore sacredness of the everyday or the evolution of the local, Haiku (1985) and A Farewell to English (1975), I will discuss the historical record tends to analyse, dismember and consign Hartnett's unique rendition of his native, local landscape; a the "traditional" and the "past" to anteriority In canvassing body of work in which we can trace the poetic efflorescence its own universality, history homogenises human experience occasioned by the intimacy of poet, tribe and community. and, thereby, neglects the multiplicity of collective and individual memory. It is in the light of Pierre Nora's The Craft contention that "Memory takes root in the concrete, in In the opening poem of his collection, The Reed Bed, spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself entitled "A Ball of Starlings," Dermot Healy provides us strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to with an ornith[e]ological creation myth. Healy constructs relations between things" (633), that I wish to broach the the poem in just two sentences, initially he evokes a sense subaltern memorial signatures of Michael Hartnett's poetry. of the rural Gothic as the starlings swoop in congress over As Michael Smith's epigraphic tribute confirms, Hartnett's the lakeside location, "As evening falls/over the bulrushes/ poetry embodies elements of Irish culture that are too often parties of starlings/arrive in flurries/to join the other shape relegated to the wistful elegies of the picturesque, or the makers/at the alt" (11). The lengthier, second act of Healy's cheapened apologies of a society addicted to the promises poetic myth cascades musically with the same violent force of modernisation. Hartnett's work not only reflects the as the "set of arched wings" (11); progressing in metaphoric qualitative, and lived, communion between memory, tribe evocation, Healy conjures a scene of seismic, if not cosmic, and topography, but his poetic craft is a vocational project creation and birth. Within this moment of creation, as always, that assumes its urgency from that very landscape. Such there lies both the possibility of new life, but concurrently topographical preoccupations are long established in the the immanence of death. Capturing the turbulent ballet of Gaelic literary tradition, and are also evident in the poetry the viscid mass of starlings, Healy locates a fluid, vital force, of contemporary Irish language artists like Cathal 0 which he variously describes as "a whispering ball of Searcaigh and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. starlings.. .a great teeming net of birdsong.. .a ticking globe Drawing on recent theoretical discourse on Irish above the reeds" (11-12). As the poem opens Healy's colonial history and on the Irish cultural landscape we may collection, it successfully inaugurates the ensuing poetry and 42 FLANNERY Passion and Arrogance symbolically recalls Hartnett's own poetic biography. This content downloaded from 193.1.104.14 on Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:49:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Although the narrative reflects on a concretely tradition, both maintains a formal or public position and, in biographical remembrance of the poet's youth, Hartnett's effect, lives his poetic craft. Ultimately, there is a self "A Necklace of Wrens"2 confluences the twin dynamics of conscious gravity to Hartnett's craft, a fact noted when factual recall and creative imagination, while undergirding interviewing Hartnett by Victoria White, who found that these with the spiritual force of artistic faith. It is this sense "Hartnett's obsession with his craft is hard to take" (18). of transcendence, both clearly visible physical transcendence Furthermore, in a 1995 piece tellingly, and somewhat in bird-flight, and a more pagan-theological faith, which ironically, entitled "Wresding with Hartnett"3, the poet-critic unites Healy's and Hartnett's ornith(e)ological poetic Eamon Grennan distilled the stylistic economy of Hartnett's narratives of creation and birth. "A Necklace of Wrens" poetic/artistic and personal universe. Hartnett's stylistic dramatises Hartnett's enduring, indeed actively pursued, trust sensibility is propelled by his desire to realise "a style adequate in the communal valence of the poet and his richly studied to the expression of his emotional and intellectual and craftsmanship. In the ostensibly prosaic narrative, Hartnett spiritual condition" (663). In divining for such a pure poetic details what is essentially a ritual of consecration, a form of idiom Hartnett remains in tune with the rememorative pagan ordination through which he is elevated to the poetic/ cultural bonds of his tribe. Indeed, as Grennan notes, the artistic cabal and a vocation which he later describes in the stylistic codes of Hartnett's aesthetic are co-extensive with following terms: "A true poet is an egoistical bundle of passion his interface with and responsibility toward his personal and and arrogance, concerned only with the Art [my emphasis]" tribal communities. Ultimately these formal modes must be (NLI, MS, 35910/2). Noticeably, this intimate ritual of poetic "adequate to his relationships with himself, with others, and initiation derives from a quasi-mystical blending of the with the world" (Grennan 663). human and the natural; Hartnett here both extols and There are self-evident philosophical congruencies embodies the spiritual economy of his rural subaltern between Hartnett's farewell to the English language as a community. WTiile Hartnett's later poetic career is evidential medium of poetic expression in 1975 and, the Kenyan writer, of a desire to forge a stylistic mode that is adequate to his Ngugi wa Thiong'o's return to his native Gikuyu language. personal and tribal spirit, the instance of poetic birth is And, perhaps, the unconscious unifying factor in both performed in an instinctual idiom of silent grace. From the decisions is crystallised by wa Thiong'o: poem's beginning, an apparent recollection of a youthful We therefore learnt to value words for their meaning and nuance. rural adventure, "WTien I was very young/I found a nest," Language was not a mere string of words. It had a suggestive power we move to a scene of somatic and spiritual communion, well beyond the immediate and lexical meaning...The language, "They rose and re-alighted/around my neck/made in the through images and symbols, gave us a view of the world, but it had wet meadow/a feather necklet" (19).