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Humanities
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The Circles of Contemporary Irish Poetry
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The Circles of Contemporary Irish Poetry

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Literature in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2019) | Viewed by 10171

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Tara Stubbs

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Rothermere American Institute, Faculty of English Language & Literature, Department for Continuing Education, Kellogg College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Interests: Irish and American Literature; Modernism; Poetry and Form; Transatlantic Poetics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are hoping that you will be interested in writing for a forthcoming issue of Humanities on the topic of “The Circles of Contemporary Irish Poetry”. Recent years have seen a proliferation of anthologies of modern and contemporary Irish poetry—among them Wes Davies’s An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (2013) and Peggy O’Brien’s The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry—in addition to Gerald Dawe’s edited collection from 2017, The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets. But each Editor acknowledges the difficulties of selecting and defining ‘Irish poets’ and ‘Irish poetry’ in a shifting, global world; indeed Dawe even begins his volume with what he describes as a ‘prolegomena […] not on an Irish poet but on Edmund Spenser’ because ‘[t]he use of English in Ireland’ offers a ‘lasting and unavoidable challenge’ to Irish poetry. Perhaps because, as a US critic, she is at a geographical distance from Ireland, Peggy O’Brien offers a different spin on such ‘challenges’. ‘Ireland is too small and poetry too greedy’, she argues, ‘to allow such clean binaries as men-and-women, Protestant-and-Catholic, to stand in practice. All the circles overlap; each remains a circle’. For her the presence of the English language, and English poetry, within Irish poetry are further examples of such ‘circles’.

But of course the ‘circles’ of contemporary Irish poetry are wider still, encompassing transnational, global and international issues and opening out its spheres of influence. For this special issue of Humanities, therefore, we are seeking scholarly essays that engage with the ‘circles’ of contemporary Irish poetry (from c.1960 to the present) in imaginative ways: helping to offer a new interpretation of a complex and varied body of writing, which moves beyond traditional English/Irish, Protestant/Catholic, North/South binaries and instead makes a claim for a collective oeuvre which pushes against such boundaries and takes Irish poetry into a global realm.

Dr. Tara Stubbs
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Irish poetry and poetics
  • transnationalism
  • globalization
  • influence theory
  • intertextuality

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 285 KiB  
Article
‘I see where I stand’ Detachment and Engagement in Harry Clifton’s Poetry
by Benjamin Keatinge
Humanities 2020, 9(1), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9010020 - 16 Feb 2020
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2829
Abstract
This essay reads Harry Clifton’s poetry as a body of work that illustrates the poet’s engagement with and detachment from the poetry of his peers. It notes Clifton’s chosen routes of travel in Africa, Asia, and Europe, his interest in Ireland and its [...] Read more.
This essay reads Harry Clifton’s poetry as a body of work that illustrates the poet’s engagement with and detachment from the poetry of his peers. It notes Clifton’s chosen routes of travel in Africa, Asia, and Europe, his interest in Ireland and its elsewheres and his endeavours to find an ideal distance to write from. It also elucidates his Irish subject matter, his involvement with journals, editors and publishers as well as his critical readings of 20th-century Irish poetry. The essay engages with important strands of current critical thinking that have sought to examine a post-nationalist Ireland with Clifton being seen as a bridge between an older and younger circle of writers. Neither hermetic nor sociable, Clifton emerges as a poet engaging with concentric circles of Irish poetry on his own terms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Circles of Contemporary Irish Poetry)
17 pages, 275 KiB  
Article
‘There’s No Return Route, Is There?’: Conor O’Callaghan’s After-Irish Diasporic Aesthetic
by Alexander Wortley
Humanities 2020, 9(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9010008 - 10 Jan 2020
Viewed by 2986
Abstract
In this article, I examine Conor O’Callaghan’s poetry in the context of post- or after-Irishness and migration. The idea of a traditional Irish national literature has diminished in importance and relevance in recent years. Irish writers are now more sensitized to alternative modes [...] Read more.
In this article, I examine Conor O’Callaghan’s poetry in the context of post- or after-Irishness and migration. The idea of a traditional Irish national literature has diminished in importance and relevance in recent years. Irish writers are now more sensitized to alternative modes of identification, unbound by the constraints of a singular concept of ‘Irishness’. This is especially significant for migrant writers, who are geographically removed from Ireland. O’Callaghan (born 1968) is himself a migrant: having lived in America, he now lives in England. Drawn from his experiences of transnational migration, O’Callaghan explores the different locales that he has known. He also feels free to write about suburban life, love, and the internet in an often quick-witted vernacular. What then is O’Callaghan’s aesthetic response to the experience of migrancy? Does O’Callaghan’s poetry exhibit an after-Irish diasporic aesthetic? Although O’Callaghan’s poetry is imbued with a diasporic multi-locatedness, both intellectual and geographical, his sense of Irish identity remains strong, and his poetry also often expresses a desire for rootedness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Circles of Contemporary Irish Poetry)
17 pages, 298 KiB  
Article
“It Isn’t Race or Nation Governs Movement”: New Writers’ Press and the Transnational Scope of Irish Experimental Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s
by Will Fleming
Humanities 2019, 8(4), 178; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040178 - 20 Nov 2019
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3756
Abstract
In this paper, I seek to contribute to the resurrection from critical obscurity of an overlooked tradition in contemporary Irish poetry: namely, that of small-press poetic experimentalism. Taking as a case study the Dublin-based New Writers’ Press (NWP, established 1967), I will interrogate [...] Read more.
In this paper, I seek to contribute to the resurrection from critical obscurity of an overlooked tradition in contemporary Irish poetry: namely, that of small-press poetic experimentalism. Taking as a case study the Dublin-based New Writers’ Press (NWP, established 1967), I will interrogate the absence of virtually any mention of small Irish experimental presses in critical narratives of late modernist poetry of the British Isles in the 1960s and 1970s. By using an array of insights gleaned from the many letters, typescripts and other ephemera in the NWP archive housed at the National Library of Ireland, such absences in scholarship are explored in the context of what the press’ founding editors faced in navigating the small Irish poetry market of the mid-twentieth century. Through this archival lens, the reasons why a cohesive avant-garde network of British and Irish poetic experimentalists never materialised are analysed, and an argument for how Irish poetic experiments of the last half century have not received anywhere near the same degree of critical attention as those of their British counterparts will emerge. In the first half of this paper, I focus on the Irish commercial poetry scene in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately illustrating how narrow and competitive it was in comparison to the British market, as well as the peculiar individual context of an Irish campus magazine, Trinity College’s Icarus (1950-). This will in turn suggest that the absence of presses such as NWP from critical accounts of late modernist poetic experimentalism may well be due to editorial decisions made by those Irish presses themselves. In the second half of this paper, I foreground some important archival evidence to review a number of instances in NWP’s history in which it comes close to forging alliances with presses within the more cohesive British experimental scene, though it never manages to do so. Drawing on this evidence, I present an archival basis for counterarguments to the possible conclusion that the responsibility for the general absence of Irish presses from narratives of small-press experimentalism lies with those Irish presses themselves. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Circles of Contemporary Irish Poetry)
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