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Writing Identity and Space in Irish Poetry 1963-2016

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Writing Identity and Space in Irish Poetry 1963-2016 1 "EVERY MOVE IS PUNCTUATED": WRITING IDENTITY AND SPACE IN IRISH POETRY 1963-2016 A dissertation presented by Lauren Rebecca Thacker to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April, 2016 2 "EVERY MOVE IS PUNCTUATED": WRITING IDENTITY AND SPACE IN IRISH POETRY 1963-PRESENT by Lauren Rebecca Thacker ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April, 2016 3 ABSTRACT Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland underwent political, social, and economic changes in the late twentieth century that resulted in changing relationships between self, place, and space. I read poets from across Ireland and analyze how representations of space relate to cultural and individual identity. I argue that poetry can define space without establishing boundaries and while allowing for, and even depending upon, the experience of simultaneous and contradictory meaning. My project purposefully looks at poets from the North and the Republic—Ciaran Carson, Eavan Boland, Tom French, and Leontia Flynn—to suggest that the socio-political and socio-economic events, such as the Troubles and the Celtic Tiger, influence poetry across the island. Reading poetry with close attention to national, cultural, and spatial boundaries can obscure rather than reveal meaning, however, attention to such boundaries is common in studies of Irish literature and indeed, studies of Irish politics and social life in the twentieth century. In my analysis of the relationship between place and self in Irish poetry, I note the diminishing importance of borders and boundaries and trace a shift from a place-based identities to identities based in mobility. 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to begin by thanking my dissertation committee: Laura Green, Lucy Maulsby, and Patrick Mullen. I’ve learned and benefitted from their advice, guidance, and example. At other points in my time at Northeastern, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Elizabeth Dillon, Guy Rotella, and Rachel Trousdale have been enormously helpful. Special thanks goes to Professor Brown for going above and beyond in her support of my interests and to Professor Rotella, whose early support made it possible for me to imagine completing this project. It is no exaggeration to say that I would not have survived graduate school without Linda Collins, Melissa Daigle, and Jean Duddy. Many thanks to them for all they do for our department. I was lucky enough to have many wonderful teachers and professors who showed me the value of writing and the excitement of scholarly work. I’d especially like to thank Paige Reynolds, Susan Sweeney, Helen Whall, and Joanna Zeigler, from the College of the Holy Cross, and Ralph Daniels (magister) from East Providence High School. The support and friendship I’ve found in my fellow graduate students is more than I could have imagined. Emily Artiano, Frank Capogna, Ben Doyle, Erin Frymire, Elizabeth Hopwood, Nicole Keller Day and Duyen Nguyen have received many frantic emails, phone calls, texts, and knocks over the years. They always graciously answered and I am grateful for them. Outside of Northeastern, I have to thank my Charlie’s Kitchen friends, especially Laura Hayner and Finn McConvey, for making Boston feel like home for the first time. I thank Margaret O’Connor, Caitlin Quinn, and Jasmine Robledo, whose friendship has always reminded 5 me that there is life outside of graduate school. I thank Lauren Gouveia, Natalia Jensen, Jen McMillan, and Kristen Wroblewski, for being tried and true. To my family: Jay, Pam, and Kyle Thacker, Jill Harrington, and Matt Jacobs, I simply say thank you, and trust they know how deeply I mean it. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, James Francis Thacker Sr., with gratitude for his sacrifices and his love. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 4 Table of Contents 6 Introduction 7 Chapter One: Ciaran Carson's Multitextual 45 Poetic Maps Chapter Two: Eavan Boland’s Suburban 92 Poetics Chapter Three: Tom French and Leontia 130 Flynn: Toward a Multimobile Poetics Afterword: Fiona Benson’s Embodied 171 Multimobility Works Cited 193 7 Introduction In 1987, Ciaran Carson published The Irish for No. The collection opens with “Dresden,” a poem that continually locates, relocates, and dislocates its speaker and the speaker’s companions. The poem begins with the speaker describing visiting a friend called Horse Boyle who lives in a “decrepit caravan, not two miles out of Carrick,” but by third line, he has already interrupted himself to tell the reader “But that's another story.” Not until the eighth of ten stanzas does the speaker get to the story he means to tell, another self-correction that changes the course of the poem and dramatically relocates Horse from his caravan. The speaker, upon seeing Horse’s brother enter, writes, I forgot to mention they were twins. They were as like as two – No, not peas in a pod, for this is not the time nor the place to go into Comparisons, and this is really Horse's story, Horse who – now I'm getting Round to it – flew over Dresden in the war. (64-67) It is in this moment that the impetus for this project begins. Carson’s method of controlling, limiting, and adding information, such that the reader’s understanding is altered throughout, encourages me to view the poem as a space simultaneously navigated by reader and writer. In another poem, “Ambition,” Carson refers to movements made by “one step forward, two steps back,” an apt metaphor for Carson’s accumulation of poetic detail that causes his speakers, as well as his readers, to continually falter, make tentative progress, and adjust their courses. The stanza of “Dresden” in which the speaker finally gets “round to it” is a moment when identity is at stake. The speaker has thus far defined Horse’s identity through the people around 8 him, particularly his brother, noting in the poem’s opening line that “Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule” (1). Horse tells the speaker, and thus the reader, details of other people’s lives: his friend Flynn, jailed for seven years after a thwarted paramilitary mission, and his former teacher, Master McGinty, who came from a particularly impoverished part of Ireland. Horse’s only identity is as the teller of these stories. In the lines cited above, the speaker, thus far imagined as a passive listener, becomes the storyteller and the particulars of Horse’s life, independent of his brother and local community, emerge. In the remaining two-and-a-half stanzas, the reader learns that Horse emigrated to Manchester to find work and eventually, “on impulse,” joins the Royal Air Force. We learn that “Of all the missions, Dresden broke his heart. It reminded him of china” and that he keeps a piece of a china figurine from his childhood in a tin with his war medals. In another example of Carson giving information and then taking it back or complicating it, we learn that Horse “could hear, or almost hear” china breaking “all across the map of Dresden” (75). In these stanzas, Carson demonstrates the temporo-spatial dimensions of Horse’s identity. Horse moves from Carrick to Manchester and then flies over Dresden, which he can only imagine as a map, unlike the specific, first-person knowledge he demonstrates in descriptions of his neighborhood. Dresden breaks his heart, largely due to his knowledge of the city’s porcelain industry and his childhood memories of a porcelain figure, and, back in Carrick years after the war, he keeps his medals with the fragments of that figure. In this poem, Horse’s identity is influenced by local and global experiences, twentieth-century developments that demand or encourage increased mobility, and his ability to construct space and place in his imagination. *** 9 This project investigates identity as it relates to space, place, and movement in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish poetry, using the language of critical geography and mobility studies as a framework. Literary geography and cultural geography have been part of the critical landscape since the 1970s, while mobility studies became prominent more recently, in the 1990s.1 Neal Alexander and David Cooper argue that “one conspicuous feature of the spatial turn in literary studies is a tendency to privilege prose fiction and non-fiction over other kinds of writings” and suggest that there is a “need to develop equally sophisticated evaluations of how poetic language and forms are mobilised in contemporary representations of space” (2). Alexander and Cooper are particularly interested in contemporary poetic representations of space, because “the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperialism, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution and impending environmental crisis have substantially reshaped existing social and spatial relations” and thereby have motivated poetic response (2). Evaluating that response requires an understanding of the ways in which spatial organization reflects and creates social interactions and the ways “exclusivist claims to space” are “attempts to fix the meaning of particular spaces...and to claim them for one’s own” (Massey 3). Classed, gendered, and racialized social interactions necessarily occur in spaces that are “experienced differently and variously interpreted by those holding different positions” (Massey 3). Massey argues that all attempts to fix meaning or establish boundaries are in fact demonstrations of one’s power to “stabilize the meaning of 1 For overviews of literary geography, see Noble and Dhussa; and Massey. Noble and Dhussa chart literary geography through its beginnings in early twentieth century Britain and and development in the in the United States in the 1970s and 80s.
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