Fionn O’Mahony
Highly Recommended
The Patricia Coughlan Award
Medbh McGuckian carefully selects segments of existing literature and rearranges the sentences to convey her own meanings and evoke emotions. Or perhaps she chooses these works at random to create her own poetic anagram for the sake of it? It is possible that McGuckian’s alignment of words, or her “plastic use of English”, as she calls it in an interview with John Hobbs, is her unique way of displaying personal themes (113). Regardless of purpose and meaning, the poet boasts an extremely innovative and idiosyncratic style. It is quite fitting that Nessa O’Mahony makes a comparison between the poet’s works and the paintings of Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, stating that, after seeing his work in the Tate Modern, “the response […] was visceral rather than intellectual”, and that “The experience of reading Medbh McGuckian’s poetry can be somewhat like that” (12). As Kandinsky distances his art from simply recapturing images of people and instead deals in a form of abstraction, McGuckian distances hers by refusing to abide by traditional poetic structures and absorbing her poems of any definite meaning. Instead of mining McGuckian’s work for answers that may not necessarily be embedded in them, it is perhaps more worthwhile to focus on the mood that her poems cultivate.
This vagueness is not strictly limited to artworks, as it is also something that exists in philosophy. Susan Porter applies the writings of contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida to the poet’s work, particularly his idea of dissemination in relation to meaning. Porter writes that, “Derrida’s disseminated meaning and refusal to come ‘to the point’ arise from his desire to escape two kinds of authoritative determination of meaning”, one of which is “conclusions of binary [or] either / or logic” (96). Similarly, McGuckian also refuses to conform to definite meanings that could be applied to her work. Consider her poem “The Soil-Map”, which opens with the line, “I am not a woman’s man” (1), yet the “I” mentioned is not the poet herself. The binary between I and oneself is shattered. The word no longer conforms to its original definition. McGuckian toys with the binary of masculine and feminine throughout the poem, stating that, “because the mind / of a woman between two men is lighter / than a spark” (4-6). The dichotomy of male and female is mentioned here, as it is also mentioned in the opening line, showing tension between the two and alluding to this gendered binary. Yet, as there is essentially no point to arrive to, it escapes definite meaning. Woven throughout the poem are domestic terms, such as “two-leaf door”, “steps to your porch”, “fenestration”, and “slender purlins” (1-10). Returning to Porter’s writing on McGuckian and Derrida, this loose connection of terms correlates with the philosopher’s theory on dissemination, as “The unit of coherence here is not necessarily the sentence, the word, the paragraph, or even the essay”, but instead the threads that “are woven through the bindings of grammar” (Johnson quoted by Porter 95). A fecundity of household imagery is present throughout “The Soil-Map”, yet it is only loosely connected through sporadic terms and phrases, which aids the poet as she “refuses in one sense to ‘come to a point’” (Porter 96). A homely mood is crafted and presented to readers, sans definite meaning. Of course, this does not prevent readers from applying their own interpretations to the poem. It simply makes any certainty redundant and creates a space for speculation.
In keeping with the theme of the household, “Partly Dedicated to a House” presents us with more disseminated meaning through domestic imagery. Melancholy runs through the poem, particularly when McGuckian describes the features of the house and the accompanying farmyard. As Adam Hanna writes,
The houses McGuckian writes about are often far from settled or stable: rather, they are living, breathing and vibrant. They are capable of feeling contentment, of suffering from sleeplessness and of taking offence; in her poems they swell, dance, threaten to collapse, sicken and heal (115).
The “farmyard” that she mentions is “Swept clean and hungrier” (12-13), the “window” has a “glance all blue / And despairing” (1-2). Buildings are not just lifeless structures in the poem, but emotive objects that McGuckian breathes life into with her arrangement of words. In this case, the “farmyard” and “window” are riddled with hunger and full of despair. Instead of simply lying dormant, she animates them with emotion. It may also be worth mentioning that these personified objects are mentioned in two separate stanzas, with their feelings being the only loose connection, once again relating to Derrida’s disseminated meaning. The “window” and “farmyard” create a melancholic mood, as their feelings are projected. It is possible to impose an additional personal meaning on the poem, yet that is strictly for the reader to decide.
There may be certain personal relations to some of the households that McGuckian writes about. “Marconi’s Cottage”, which is also the name of the collection that contains it, may not be a random title as the cottage does in fact exist, and is “Situated on Ballycastle Beach (Antrim coast), [and] it is the place where Marconi first and in all probability successfully experimented with the transmission of wireless messages over water”, along with Ballycastle being the birthplace of her father (Schrage-Früh 45). McGuckian’s poems often consist of the rearranging of words from other texts that already exist, from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic – in “Journal Intime”, as Michaela Schrage-Früh highlights (43) – to the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time series, Swann’s Way in “Lines for Thanksgiving”, which Adam Hanna mentions (130). In an article from Michaela Schrage-Früh, she focuses in particular on the part of the poem where McGuckian writes, “you are all that I have gathered / to me of otherness” (18-19), and claims that “This ‘otherness’ embraced by the speaker suggests the poet’s interrelations with and intertextual borrowings from artists that are Russian, German, English, French and American”, along with the implication of the title relating to Guglielmo Marconi’s transmission (46). It may act as a self-reflective nod to one of the poet’s more peculiar processes of writing, as she scrambles the terms and phrases of others to concoct her own poem. This is also one of her more controversial methods of her craft, and one that has garnered varying, but often frustrated, responses from critics. Yet, reimagining, or borrowing from existing artworks is something that has existed across a multitude of different art forms for years. Of course, this is a considerable divergence from the methods of more renowned poets such as William Wordsworth or Emily Brontë, as they did not pick apart paragraphs of pre-existing literature and have them “pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle” (Ibid 44). It is simply a different technique utilised to create poetry. Perhaps there is an element of homage in this method, an appreciation for the writings that McGuckian is reshaping. It is a possibility, however, so are a vast array of other reasons when considering the poet’s oeuvre.
Medbh McGuckian’s methodology may be alienating to some, but it is not unusual to reimagine the works of another and place them in your own art. Filmmakers often take inspiration from other films, and pay homage to them by recreating a certain scene in their own way, as Stanley Kubrick does in The Shining (1980), as the scene where Jack breaks down a door with an axe is recaptured in a similar manner that an instance that occurs in Viktor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921). Artists often draw on other artist’s works for inspiration, why should the medium of poetry be any different? McGuckian’s work certainly opens an interesting conversation regarding contemporary poetry, and it displays how the medium is everchanging in today’s world. As Nessa O’Mahony states, “[like] the abstractions of Kandinsky, we must trust the mood evoked by the arrangement of words on the page rather than strain after their meaning” (12). Her poetry is evocative, from the personification of inanimate objects by giving them emotions, and can be read in a multitude of ways (as Susan Porter does by applying Jacques Derrida’s disseminated meaning theory to it). Certainly, one may attempt to apply their own interpretations to her work, but if one is searching for definite meaning in McGuckian’s poems then their search is essentially futile. Her poetry is much more speculative, asking the reader to arrive at their own conclusions rather than having the poet explain it to them. In the case of Medbh McGuckian, the meaning of her poetry really is placed in the eye of the beholder.
Works Cited
Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015, pp. 115–130.
Hobbs, John, and Medbh McGuckian. “‘My Words Are Traps’: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian, 1995.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, vol. 2, no. 1, 1998, p. 113. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557476. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.
Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction”, quoted by Susan Porter. “The ‘Imaginative Space’ of Medbh McGuckian.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1989, p. 95. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25512789. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.
McGuckian, Medbh. The Flower Master and Other Poems. Gallery Books, 1993, pp. 36–37.
McGuckian, Medbh. Marconi’s Cottage. Gallery Books, 1991, p. 103.
McGuckian, Medbh. Venus and the Rain. Gallery Books, 1994, p. 51.
O'Mahony, Nessa. “From Colour-Coded Messages to Skilful Portraits.” Irish Times, April 14 2007, p. 12. ProQuest. Web. 4 Jan. 2023.
Porter, Susan. “The ‘Imaginative Space’ of Medbh McGuckian.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1989, p. 96. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25512789. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.
Schrage-Früh, Michaela. “‘My Heart Beats as Though It Were/Hers’: Medbh McGuckian’s Intertextual Dialogues with Women in Marconi’s Cottage.” Nordic Irish Studies, vol. 8, 2009, pp. 43–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25699523. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.
The Phantom Carriage. Directed by Viktor Sjöström. AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1921.
The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros, 1980.
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