Contemporary Poetry

72 contemporary poetry

The similarity is really an accident. I think it’s worth remem-

bering that in England there’s much more mobility, a much

wider range of experience. I’m not saying that there aren’t

any class barriers or distinctions in Ireland, but basically it’s a

fairly homogenous country in which everybody’s experience

is pretty much the same, and the same images just tend to

turn up. And the same images turn up in American poetry.

What more can I say?^36

Certainly, both share a preoccupation with ventriloquising the
voices of the dispossessed and an equivocation concerning direct
political positioning. Longley refl ecting upon the recent changes
created by processes of peace and reconciliation in Northern
Ireland proposes: ‘Just as the Good Friday agreement may allow
poetry to be read more aesthetically, so its “strands” focus the
fi ner print of Northern Ireland not as a bordered space but as itself
internally and externally intertextual.’^37 The three poets through
their different processes of early engagement – mythic ritual in
Heaney, questions of ethical responsibility in Mahon and empathy
in Muldoon – display a shared commitment to refuting atavism
and easy political positioning.

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE: POETRY AND THE
PUBLIC SPHERE – CHARLES BERNSTEIN

An early poem by Charles Bernstein states quixotically that ‘I
read somewhere that love of the / public good is the only passion
that really / necessitates speaking to the public’.^38 Bernstein’s
name is affi liated to a loose collective known under the rubric of
‘language poetry’ or writing, which began to appear in the early
1970 s. Language writing can be characterised as a poetry which
frequently works in terms of diminished reference, questioning
the ‘transparency’ of language, or language’s unequivocal claim as
a fi nite medium of representation. The disruption of syntax, nar-
rative and the foregrounding of language’s generative properties
through its slippages, puns and word play serve to create a poetry
of intense linguistic opacity. For language writing the rupturing of