An Expanded Poetic Practice: Some Contemporary Innovative Women Poets

The Yearbook of English Studies ◽

10.1353/yes.2021.0009 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 51 (1) ◽

pp. 207-228

Author(s):

Robert Hampson

Keyword(s):

Women Poets ◽

Poetic Practice

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‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2012.0007 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 32-52 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Anne Mulhall

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Culture ◽

Woman Writer ◽

Double Bind ◽

Women Poets ◽

Substantial Body ◽

Growing Body ◽

Critical Attention ◽

Irish Women ◽

Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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The Poetics of Elegy in Maurice Scully's Humming

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2016.0203 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 89-104

Author(s):

Kit Fryatt

Keyword(s):

Hard Work ◽

Poetic Practice ◽

General Movement

Maurice Scully published Humming (2009), a single, self-contained work, after the completion of the monumental eight-book ‘set’ Things That Happen (1987–2008). Humming is an elegy, dedicated to the poet's brother, who died in 2004. This article explores Humming as a poem of mourning, assessing the extent to which it expresses and subverts some of the traditional characteristics and functions of elegy. Elegies often include pastoral motifs, repetitions (particularly repeated questions), an element of imprecation, multivocal performance, commentary on the elegist's ambition and achievement, and enact a general movement from grief to consolation; this essay considers the forms these take. For Scully, whose poetic practice advocates self-effacement, the egoistical nature of elegy, its emphasis on accomplishment and aspiration, presents a problem which is perhaps only partially overcome by the formal strategies discussed here. Poetry without designs upon its subjects or readers remains a goal to be achieved: 'it is hard/ work whichever way/ you look at it.' In conclusion, however, it might be said that Humming, like many elegies, enacts a transition between different phases of the poet's work.

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