Lisa LeBlond
Stony Brook University
Lisa LeBlond is a 3rd year PhD student at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include American and Irish literature and film, oppression, place and space theory, and philosophy. She won the 2020 David Erdman Award for Best Essay by a Doctoral Student at Stony Brook University for “Gender and [Re-]Casting in Steve McQueen’s Hunger: Selectively Culling Bobby Sands’ Writings from Prison.”
“Cartography, Borders, and “a Fount of Broken Type”— Colonial Space and Subject in Troubles Era Poetry”
Thousands of poems were written in Ireland between 1968-98. This presentation concerns three that exemplify “difficult poetry for a difficult age,” penned by poets Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, and Ciarán Carson. The Troubles era coincided with the global west’s countercultural revolution, which fostered a newfound questioning of authority; oppressed peoples were now demanding respect and recognition. This social awakening reconstructed conceptualizations of place in poetry, long situated as thematically important in Irish literature. The transformation was from a rootedness in specific locales such as Dublin, Galway, Derry, and Sligo to named and unnamed spaces of import not for their locus but for what they reveal: the violent ruptures of history. Coinciding with multicultural awareness and contemporary decolonial political discourse was the emergence of philosophically sophisticated geographic studies as well as the field of ecocriticism, with its complex intersections between environment and culture. I will deconstruct Boland, Muldoon, and Carson’s poems, looking at form and content, as well as material and affective history, utilizing culturally geographic and ecocritical lenses and terminology—particularly cartography, borders, and globality—to explicate the heterogeneity of expression imaginatively rendered in their rural and city settings. Their poetic approaches met social reality to engage readers, and underscore conflict in surprising and unique ways, ultimately representing an irreconcilability between space and subject within colonialism. I draw from the theories of Phil Hubbard, Denis Cosgrove, Nigel Thrift, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, as well as others and include quotes from interviews with the poets.
“Difficult poetry for a difficult age” is a quote by Paul Muldoon in an interview with Dinitia Smith. “Times are Difficult, So Why Should the Poetry be Easy,” New York Times, November 19, 2002.
Kelly Matthews
Framingham State University
Kelly Matthews is Professor of English at Framingham State University and Vice President of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Her first book, The Bell Magazine and the Representation of Irish Identity, was published by Four Courts Press in 2012. Her current book project focuses on the early career of playwright Brian Friel.
Transcending Influence: Tyrone Guthrie and Brian Friel
In December 1962, Tyrone Guthrie returned from Minneapolis and invited Brian Friel to visit him at Annaghmakerrig, his family estate in Monaghan. Guthrie had seen Friel’s play The Enemy Within at the Abbey Theatre that summer, and he invited the fledgling playwright to travel to the Twin Cities to view rehearsals for the new repertory company he had founded, which would eventually bear his name. Guthrie believed not only in the participatory ritual of the open stage, but also in the ‘spiritual life’ of repertory theatre, and he intended the new theatre to be ‘revolutionary’ in more ways than one. Not only would its open stage democratize the ritual of theatre for actors and audience, but the building and the company were controlled entirely by a non-profit organization ‘whose purpose is to serve the community.’ Instead of profit, the new theatre hoped to generate ‘a pattern, a purpose and possibilities new to this continent.’
On March 26, 1963, Friel packed his typewriter, his newly issued visa, passport, and chest X-ray, and, with the word ‘IMMIGRANT’ stamped on his ticket, boarded a plane for the United States while his wife Anne, two months pregnant, stayed in Derry to nurse their younger daughter Mary through the chicken pox. The trip to Minneapolis required a leap of faith for the entire family, as Brian explained to his New Yorker editor, Roger Angell, after Guthrie’s attempt to find him work at the Minneapolis Star and Tribune came up empty. ‘I am not going out to a job (in the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre my standing will be less than menial—an unpaid hanger on!) and I will have to live somehow by writing.’
On the day after the Guthrie Theatre’s dedication, the new repertory company previewed Hamlet to an invited audience of local hospital staff, cab drivers, and the theatre construction crew, and the actors performed with ‘a great feeling of pride and esprit de corps’ which had ‘built all during the week’ of final rehearsals. It was a feeling Friel would no doubt remember later, when he and Stephen Rea launched the Field Day Theatre Company in the Guildhall, Derry, in September 1980, just months after it had been bombed a second time by the provisional IRA.
This paper will discuss the details of Friel’s apprenticeship in Minneapolis, many of which have newly come to light in the New Yorker and BBC archives, among the letters the young playwright sent to his earliest editors and mentors in the craft of writing.
Brian McGovern
Kennesaw State University
Bryan McGovern is a professor of history at Kennesaw State University. He has published John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist with the University of Tennessee Press (2009) and co-authored The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1867 (2013). He has also written various articles on Young Ireland and Irish immigration.
Richard O’Gorman and the Political Culture of Liberal Transnationalism
Richard O’Gorman was a Young Irelander who fled to the United States after the failed uprising of 1848. He had been raised in a wealthy merchant family in Dublin but had become relatively radicalized by the Famine and the romantic cultural nationalist movement that had overtaken much of Europe. For O’Gorman, nationalism was tied up in national identity. As a Young Irelander, he associated Irish identity with culture. As an American he believed that immigrants had to choose a new identity to be considered true Americans, otherwise they would be viewed as suspect outsiders. As a subordinated class, given their destitute state when they arrived as Famine exiles, for O’Gorman this meant embracing American middle class rather than working class or revolutionary values. It also meant creating a united community based on similar values, dissipating class and religious differences. Hence, his version of Irish American nationalism meant subduing a desire to fight for Irish freedom or joining unions or embracing a hyper Catholicism that ignored the secular capitalism of American political culture. It also meant elevating Irish Americans above marginalized racial groups to improve their socio-economic status. Since there were few state devices to accomplish this, he utilized the main resources available in the mid-to-late nineteenth century: fraternal societies and political machines.