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"My Cleverly Dead and Vertical Audience": Medbh McGuckian's "Difficult" Poetry

2012; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2012.0030

1534-5815

Shane Alcobia-Murphy,

Historical Studies of British Isles

"My Cleverly Dead and Vertical Audience":Medbh McGuckian's "Difficult" Poetry Shane Alcobia-Murphy The looking-glass of Medbh McGuckian's mind reflects, but transmutes to its own purposes, all that it receives. McGuckian, the author of twelve collections of poetry, has the rare ability to transform dreary, time-rubbed words into phrases that enliven the spirit with the first-timeness of poetic thinking. However, when reading her work, reviewers are often made to feel like puppies barking at the Sphinx. For instance, puzzled by the apparent gnomic tendencies of her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), Robin Lane Fox stated that it was "exotic in its imagery and impenetrable in its reference."1 Kevin T. McEneaney concurred, observing that the poetry's "obscure logic" created "unnecessary confusions."2 Reviewers of subsequent collections have often had the same reaction: Aidan Matthews lamented that her poems had a propensity to "escape the reader."3 Nick Rowe complained that the collection was characterized by the "dark speak of riddle."4 James Simmons (like McGuckian, a poet from the North) went so far as to say of one collection that it was "a salutary joke by one who hates the excesses of reviewers or literary critics or bad poetry and knows she can elicit rave reviews by writing an alluring book of nonsense."5 While one cannot deny that McGuckian's poetry is often difficult to understand, critics have of late developed different strategies to enable a reader's appreciation of the thematic and stylistic richness of her verse. For example, critics have usefully read her work within a Kristevan theoretical framework, emphasizing [End Page 67] its pluralist and non-essentialist nature.6 Others have paid close attention to her linguistic strategies and polysemantic play with words to explore how her meta-representational verse displays encounters with "Otherness."7 McGuckian describes her method of composition as highly deliberate. "I never write just blindly," she has said. "I never sit down without an apparatus. I always have a collection of words. It's like a bird building a nest: I gather the materials over the two weeks, or whatever and I keep a notebook or a diary for the words which are happening to me and occurring to me."8 Before constructing her poetic texts, McGuckian reads a number of biographical studies, critical works or diaries by other authors, and keeps a record of phrases that appeal to her in one of her notebooks. "What you look for in the texts are images," she says, "striking combinations of maybe two or three unusual words, esoteric vocabulary; in other words, the poetry which is there, embedded in what people write and say, and what they themselves quote from."9 She then makes a selection from this list and arranges the words in two columns on the top half of a page. The first draft of a poem is then composed on the lower half of this page, with each phrase being cancelled out once it is selected. If we recognize that the poet is engaging in an intertextual practice, then it follows that the tracking down of her sources could shine some light on the intricate workings of the poems and open up new pathways into her oeuvre. For example, "The Over Mother" is a poem that has been dismissed vociferously as unintelligible by Patrick Mason: I'm not sure I can think of a better example of sheer pretentiousness in contemporary poetry. Are we really supposed to guess what 'the sealed hotel' means, what [End Page 68] kind of 'passion / exhausts itself at the mouth', or what 'the underloved body' refers to? Are her critics the 'cleverly dead and vertical ones' she apparently insults?10 Reading the poem in light of its intertexts and the context in which it was written can help dispel its apparent opacity. Below, McGuckian's text is cited on the right. The quotations on the left are from the poem's intertexts: Diane Wood Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography. marked here with an M, followed by the page number, and Elaine Feinstein, Lawrence's Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence, denoted by F:11 the sealed...