Maybe by comparing and contrasting Irish poets to American poets we can
help erase the lines instead of draw them thicker? By showing how an Irish
poet can just as easily belong to an American tradition we can show that
these labels are just that-labels, useful ways of filing our books on the
bookshelf but not the limiting categorisations they have been known to be.
Andrew Browne
> First off, apologies to Mairead -- I was using the first example to bob up
> from my grey matter, and it happened to be yours. I'm not attacking your
> position but rather a certain kind of, who knows, perhaps imaginary
> position that would seek to give Irish writers a leg-up by transplanting
> them to an American context. Of course there's a comparison between
> Kavanagh and the Beats, but what I was getting at was the idea that Irish
> writer + American context = more important Irish writer. Apologies again.
> No offence at all intended. The initial puzzlement as to why Irish poets
> are always being compared to US poets came from Fergal Gaynor, as pasted
> into one of Trevor's mails.
>
> I think Irish Studies is an inhibitor, yes, in the way that poets who feel
> omitted from the conventional discourse of Irish Studies and Irish poetry
> remain beholden to it, and that discussions of neglected figures like the
> 30s generation still have to highlight the Irish dimension to it all -- as
> if the Irishness of MacGreevy, Beckett, Devlin or Coffey were the most
> interesting thing about them.
>
> I certainly don't have scorn for you or your work, Mairead, and least of
> all for gender-related reasons. I just suggested that there was an amount
> of tokenism in Keith Tuma's choices of contemporary British poets. Or
> that's how it seems to me when I think of Armitage/O'Brien/Paterson (out)
> and Shapcott/Kay/Duffy (all in). No insult at all directed at women's
> writing or your writing, and I'm not quite sure why you thought there was!
>
> best
> D
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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