Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on Belfast poet, Medbh McGuckian. This book considers the entire oeuvre of this globally respected Irish woman writer, a member of the contemporary avant-garde with now fifteen (U.S. published) volumes and numerous individual publications. The author positions McGuckian's oeuvre as political and historical poetry and offers a provocative new assessment of its crafted silences. This work argues that it is the muted character of McGuckian's poems-a consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quoting-that constitutes their agency and force. The silences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of "disaster" and the limits of articulacy. In line with Rukeyser's notion of the life of poetry, the life of McGuckian's silences is located, Fadem argues, in the poems' production, as revealed self-reflexively, and in their prolonged consumption. This oeuvre operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting poetry's reception into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poem and reader and disrupts the given structures of time, place, and the order of things.
Autorentext
Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem is associate professor of English at the City University of New York, Kingsborough.
Klappentext
is an innovative contribution to the scholarship on Belfast poet, Medbh McGuckian. This book considers the entire oeuvre of this globally respected Irish woman writer, a member of the contemporary avant-garde with now fifteen (U.S. published) volumes and numerous individual publications. The author positions McGuckian's oeuvre as political and historical poetry and offers a provocative new assessment of its crafted silences. This work argues that it is the muted character of McGuckian's poems-a consequence of a defamiliarized language, the overwhelming sway of the image, and a profusion of intertextual quoting-that constitutes their agency and force. The silences are read as a response to the precarious positionality of poet and speaker at the site of "disaster" and the limits of articulacy. In line with Rukeyser's notion of the life of poetry, the life of McGuckian's silences is located, Fadem argues, in the poems' production, as revealed self-reflexively, and in their prolonged consumption. This oeuvre operates as a formidable counter-discourse by converting poetry's reception into a much protracted task that redistributes the temporal economy of poem and reader and disrupts the given structures of time, place, and the order of things.
Inhalt
Foreword: Reckoning With (Women's) Silence(s): The Work of Poetry
Chapter 1: Home Is Where the Border Is: The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian
Introduction, Part I: Poetics of Silence: Language, Image, Voice
Chapter 2: Silence | Speaking: The Secret-Spoken Language of Partition
Chapter 3: Text | Image: Ut pictura poïesis
Chapter 4: Textuality | Intertextuality: Embedded Contingencies and the Tyranny of (Postcolonial) Comparativity
Introduction, Part II: Economies of Speaking: Production, Consumption, Conjuring
Chapter 5: Poïesis | Poïema: Deep in your snow: Coming to Be Located
Chapter 6: Privated | Worlded: Absolutely not hermetic: Iterations of Silence and the Borders of Articulacy
Afterword: History | Prosody: The Poet as Conjure Artist