Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism, David Lloyd, Edinburgh University Press, ISBNs Hardback: 9781474489805, Ebook (ePub): 9781474489836’ Ebook (PDF): 9781474489829, £85.00 (all formats)
[Disclaimer] Four of the poets discussed in this book are personally known to me, one I’ve met a few times, one I know quite well, one I’ve known for well over 50 years and the fourth I am married to. I also know Lloyd, and hardPressed poetry published him in the 1980s, a fact acknowledged in the preface. Irish Counterpoetics is a small world.]
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David Lloyd is one of the most interesting commentators on the state of Irish poetry, with a particular interest in those poets who tend towards the margins of critical and popular attention. In this latest book, Lloyd questions the received idea of a counter-tradition of Modernist/experimental/innovative (call it what you will) writing and posits in its place a series of discontinuities that have created pressures that provoked some poets to adopt a counterpoetic stance to the practices of their contemporaries. I’m not sure I have the critical skills or knowledge of theory to do Lloyd’s arguments justice, so what follows is a series of strictly amateur observations.
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After an introduction and overture in which he sets out his frames of reference, as it were, Lloyd completes the first, background, half of the book with chapters on James Clarence Mangan, W.B. Yeats and Susan Howe.
As one who doesn’t share his enthusiasm for Mangan’s work, I approached the chapter, ‘Crossing Over: On James Clarence Mangan’s “Spirits Everywhere”’, with a degree of trepidation. It amounts to a study of the poem “Spirits Everywhere”, Mangan’s translation of the German poet Ludwig Uhland’s “Auf der Überfahrt”. By focusing on Mangan’s reworking of the original he situates Mangan’s approach to translation in a context both of his personal haunting and a specific disjunction that involved the decline of the Irish language both a spoken medium and the primary language of poetry along with famine and political activity ranging from Catholic Emancipation to the Young Irelander. As he points out, Mangan’s practice of translation is counterpoetic by ‘questioning and parodying the Romantic and nationalist insistence on spirit and origin’, thus prefiguring the emergence of Modernism.
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The three poems by Yeats that Lloyd focuses on, “September 1913”, “Easter 1916” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” all grow out of another point of rupture in Irish history, the events that led, in retrospectively at least, to the beginnings of the end of colonialism in the country with the declaration, in 1922, of the Irish Free State, itself a partial and provisional event. Lloyd reads the poems through the lens of a near-miss meeting between James Connolly and Rosa Luxemburg which stands, I suppose, for the near miss of an Irish Socialist (as against middle-class) revolution.
To simplify enormously, Lloyd traces an arc from the romantic view of a peaceful nationalism that underpins what he calls ‘Revival Modernism’ through a kind of stunned commemoration of violent action to a realisation that the spectacle of violence itself numbs the transformation it enables. Departing from Lloyd for a moment, it could be argued that these poems prefigure the emergent Free State as a society of pocket-size capitalists ‘fumbl[ing] in the greasy till’ and ignoring the urban and rural poor while turning its back on the cultural moment that was the Revival in favour of a respectable, contained, safe dilution of the arts. And here, perhaps, we see the roots of the cult of the ‘well-made poem’ Lloyd discusses at some length later in the book.
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The first half of the book ends with a chapter on Susan Howe’s poem “Melville’s Marginalia”. The chapter opens with an extensive discussion on the possibility of Irish Modernism; can a movement that is seen as ‘International’ be associated with a nationality or ethnicity? Of course, he has already answered his own question in his earlier references to Revival Modernism. Equally, few critics would argue that William Carlos Williams or Lorine Niedecker are debarred from being modernist poets because of their deep engagement with Paterson and Fort Atkinson.
Yet it is a strong undertow in the critical hostility to Irish poetry that engages with the Modernist tradition, from Coffey to Walsh. Yes, Joyce is celebrated as a handy tourist attraction, but his influence, such as it is, tends to be confined to the early ‘realist’ fiction. And yes, Beckett is acknowledged, but is misunderstood more often than he is cited. Yet the odd thing is that Seamus Heaney, to take an obvious example, who spent his adult life between the twin poles of suburban Sandymount and the ‘green pastures of Harvard University’ and whose new collected translations runs to a little over 700 pages to is at least as ‘Internationalist’ as, say, Trevor Joyce. It is a false dichotomy used to mask a hostility to that which is seen as Other to the post-Yeatsian tradition of the self-centred lyric of minor-key illumination, Lloyd’s ‘well-made’ poem; the actual objection is technical, not geographical.
More disturbingly, for me at least, Lloyd centres his discussion of Howe’s poem on questions of ‘race’ and ‘racialization’, of the Irish experience in New England as one of engaging with ‘racial’ identity. As can be seen from my use of scare quotes, I find myself uncomfortable with the use of the term ‘race’ when discussing humans, preferring the scientific, empirical view that there are no races, that race, in this context, is a void category. It might of course be argued that ‘race’s is being used as a kind of shorthand for a complex mix of ethnicity, melanin levels, cultural background, ancestry, etc, but it’s simply, in my view, the wrong word to use. More significantly, by adopting the vocabulary of race, one risks legitimising the rhetoric of racists. I was particularly uncomfortable with the idea, following Fanon, of race as ‘an instance and product of the aesthetic’. But what do I know? Rant over.
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The second half of the book, “New Things That Have Happened” opens with a chapter that discusses two poets whose work I’m not particularly familiar with, Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian. Lloyd sees these poets as representing breaks with the commodity form (what Lloyd refers to later as the “money form”) of the established Irish lyric, Carson through his formal development of a ‘long, sinuous mostly blank verse line’ that enabled poems that pushed beyond the anecdotal scaffolding of the well-made poem and McGuckian through her practice of constructing mosaics of fragments of found language. This practice has, it seems, led to accusations of irrelevant unreadability, a dismissal of the non-representational in her work. Lloyd’s discussion has prompted me to go look at more McGuckian, which is the best any critic can hope for, I think
Lloyd draws a parallel between these poets and the three he discusses after them, Maurice Scully, Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh, through his device of disjunction; how are Irish poets to find ways to adequately deal with ‘the conditions of unfreedom that the neoliberal transformation of society in all its domains has produced’.
Here I have definitely sailed beyond the limits of my navigation, but I would like to point out that the notion that Walsh writes ‘“lyrics” composed largely out of apparently overheard speech’ may, even with the ‘apparently’ included, be something of an underestimation of the poet’s powers of invention. Poets may or may not be liars, but they frequently make stuff up.
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The three chapters that follow are, for me, the meat of the book. First we have a chapter, “Intricate Walking: Scully’s Livelihood” that focuses on Maurice Scully’s magnum opus Things That Happen, which I review at some length here. Lloyd looks at two key tropes in Scully commentary: his use of weave/net/mesh/lattice as a central image and his playful deconstruction of lyric modes. One outcome of these is the irregular recurrence of key phrases, images and ideas throughout this epic lyric (or lyric epic work). Lloyd also notes, as I did, the dialogue with Pound that permeates the book; Scully dismisses the older poet’s grandiose intentions, but this weaving of key perceptions through the work, recurring in new contexts with new weight and depth. I’m reminded of a passage from Pound’s “Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, with Supplementary Notes.”:
A sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds, may be followed by a sound, or any combination of sounds, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for any series of sounds, chords, or arpeggios.
This serves as a pointer to how Scully’s large-scale music works.
Scully’s poetry is representational, but what makes it unique lies in the fact that what it represents is not the ‘significant moment’ of the well-made poem. His work represents something much more ordinary and important, the unending interconnected weave (yes, that’s the word) of life in its mundane, extraordinary entirety. It is the totality of things that happen captured provisionally in the full knowledge that in the next moment, on the next page, the world will have shifted just on the edge of the perceptible, that, to take an instance Lloyd calls out, the gull that recurs across 200 pages of Livelihood is both he same gull seen differently and a different gull seen the same way, and that this matters, is the matter of poetry as Scully makes it.
And then another insight of Lloyd’s sends me off in another direction, the thought that Scully’s poetics ‘counterposes to the “money form” of the contemporary lyric an ethics and aesthetics of dispossession’. This is true in itself, but any mention of dispossession in the context of Irish poetry may send the reader’s mind off to Thomas Kinsella and Sean O’Tuama’s vital anthology An Duanaire, 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed, a book that recovers the tradition that Mangan watched dying. More recently, in 2016, Louis De Paor edited Leabhar na hAthghabhála / Poems of Repossession, an anthology of 20th century Irish-language poetry. It’s a fine anthology with some really good poetry in it, but the title fascinates me, both as a claim to continuity and as a cloth-eared error in the wake of an economic crash that made the threat of repossession a daily one for many Irish citizens and residents. The contrast with Scully could hardly be starker.
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In “Rome’s Wreck: Joyce’s Baroque” Lloyd discusses Trevor Joyce’s third collection, Pentahedron as a work of Mannerism. The original blurb from the 1972 New Writers’ press edition reads, in part, ‘Pentahedron is a collection of experimental poems. The poems attempt to make language describe reality while at the same time remaining aware of itself as language… [it] is, in a sense, an essay towards the description of an epistemology of poetic apprehension’.
It is, perhaps, this self-awareness of poetry as a process of filtering that feeds into Lloyd’s reading. He draws heavily on the ideas of Deleuze, who ‘associates the enfolded traits of the Baroque both with he labyrinthine, composed of multiple folds, and with a peculiar characteristic of its disposition of material where “matter tends to spill over into space, to be reconciled with fluidity at the same time fluids themselves are divided into masses”’. This chimes with my own sense that Joyce’s work partakes of the nature of the fractal.
There follows a fascinating discussion of the nature of Baroque allegory that describes its own labyrinth through the ideas of Benjamin and Marx, lifting out of the realms of the humble poet whose task it is to set words beside each other in shapes that are, in one sense or another, satisfying. Or at least satisfying enough. It does, however, help explain Joyce’s later interest in Edmund Spenser, and the chapter moves on to a consideration of Rome’s Wreck, a translation into monosyllabic 21st century English of Spenser’s 16th century translation of Joachim Du Bellay’s Les Antiquités de Rome, fold upon fold. Joyce’s version is set in a context of fugal composition and the recessive perspectives generated by Baroque artists via the camera obscura. Lloyd notes the recurrence of key words from Pentahedron: ash, stone, dust, flood, ruin, the slow time of geological process. These are, if you like, the elements from which Joyce generates his fractal patterns, his ‘recursive cascade of accreted possible meanings’. This chapter is the most thought-provoking discussion of Joyce’s work I’ve come across.
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Finally, in “Conclusion. Conduits for the Humane: Walsh’s Optic Verve” Lloyd returns to the discussion of Walsh’s ‘major Irish feminist text of the post-Celtic Tiger moment of affective as well as financial deflation’ he began in the first chapter of the second half of the book. For what I hope are obvious reasons, I’m reluctant to say too much here, but I think Lloyd makes two very acute observations. The first of these concerns the use of ‘mixed genres’ in Optic Verve: ‘The text’s dissolution of generic boundaries corresponds with its dissolution of the division os spheres into which modernity has distributed both its modes of practice and the affective and discursive regimes appropriate to each, fragmenting the subject’s experience and narrowing its potentialities’. Earlier in this paragraph, he uses the word ‘porosity’; as I read it, in Optic Verve, and indeed in Walsh’s work in general, the world becomes text in a very specific way, a constant immersion in a debased language that renders the work of writing both impossible and essential, essential if we are to redeem language, to regain some kind of wholeness.
The second observation is closely related: ‘that effort at control is drowned out by the ready-made language of the commodity sphere, mediaspeak and bureaucratic euphemism that has a peculiar helter-skelter poetics of its own’. Walsh’s response is not to confront but to subsume, to use this language of marketing and control to her own ends, holding it up to the light and seeing what lies beneath, or within, its empty rhetoric. To use one of the more unfortunate cliches of our day, she owns it.
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This conclusion itself concludes with a restatement of Lloyd’s major theme: ‘Across great divergences of form and language practice, and against any hankering after a continuous tradition, they [Scully, Joyce and Walsh] share a corresponding commitment to reinventing the means and materials of poetry that make it adequate to the now.’ This insistence on discontinuity is an important addition to the map of critical discourse around Irish modernisms which chimes with something I tried to express at the Assembling Alternatives conference in New Hampshire in 1996; that the Irish poets in attendance were inevitably not given to assimilation into an American (or UK) model of ‘alternativeness’, because the thing we were alternative to was not the same thing. This brings us back, I suppose, to the question of Irish (or American/British/whatever) modernism. The new things that happen happen somewhere, not nowhere, and that which is counter, is counter to some specific set of circumstances. Lloyd’s great strength here is to bring out into the light of critical examination the specifics of a distinctly Irish counterpoetics.
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And yet. The question arises ‘can you have discontinuity without continuity, disjuncture without connection? Lloyd describes the critical moment for the ‘SoundEye poets’ thus: ‘their acquaintance with one another’s work having been occasioned by their chance meeting’ at Assembling Alternatives. This is both true and not true. Most, if not all, of the relatively younger Irish attendees were all ready well aware of the work of Joyce and co-editor Michael Smith, as well as Geoffrey Squires, Augustus Young and other New Writers’ Press poets for quite a long time previously, thanks in part to the late and much missed Eblana Bookshop in Dublin’s Grafton Street. And Michael and Trevor in turn were instrumental in the recovery of the work of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Niall Montgomery (I first encountered Coffey via the New Writer’s Selected Poems in the mid 1970s).
And Maurice Scully included a set of Coffey’s versions of Eluard in the first issue of his magazine The Beau in 1981, having discussed Coffey’s work in an interview with Anthony Cronin (another poet published by New Writers’ Press) in the TCD magazine Icarus in 1976. Joyce and Smith also reprinted Beckett’s seminal review “Recent Irish Poetry”, referenced by Lloyd, in an issue of their journal The Lace Curtain.
And incidentally the postal address for New Writers’ Press from around 1979 was Smith’s new home address on Clarence Mangan Road. Smith also edited a Selected Mangan for Gallery Press.
None of this is an argument for influence, although such an argument could, to a limited degree, be made. Beckett is not like Coffey is not like Devlin, just as Joyce is not like Smith is not like Young and Scully is not like Joyce is not like Walsh. Each of these poets, and others, found their own counterposition starting from their own unique position and discovering their own distinctive poetic voices (to use that word extremely loosely). However, they did so with some awareness of the fact that others had engaged in similar ventures in counterpoetics, although they might not have used that term. In the ideal ‘big book of everything’, the roles of disjuncture and continuity would be given equal weight, but for mow Lloyd has teased out the implications of the former, hitherto mostly neglected, element in successive Irish modernisms in a book that I believe will be seen as a key moment in our understanding of what is most vital in Irish poetry.
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mason mckibben 19:54 on 25/01/2023 Permalink |
just before the ruse set up by claudius, polonious and gertrude, hamlet’s mother speaks of many the same words. just by participating, ophelia becomes questionable material, a participant in desolation row. a place she can not understand any more than hamlets “madness.”
GERTRUDE
I shall obey you.
And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlets wildness. So shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honours.
hamlet hits every word:
beauty, virtue, honour
anyhoo, falling back into the text, the piece hamlet wrote played by the players
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