Kinsella, Geography, History

David Kellogg Kinsella, Geography, History Thomas Kinsella's poems are grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. They move in an urban field of entangled and confused buildings, a cityscape that has been razed and rebuilt many times.' American readers of contemporary Irish poetry may be more familiar with Kinsella's reputation than with his poems. Yet his work is widely anthologized; Seamus Deane has declared him "the most formidable presence in Irish poetry"; and Seamus Heaney has referred to him as "the representative Irish poet" and a "deeply responsible" writer whose work "marks an important stage in the evolution not just of Irish poetry but of modern poetry in English." 2 Readers of the Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry will find that the editors, Irish poets Derek Mahon and Peter Fallon, provocatively open with a substantial selection of Kinsella's work, a choice which makes a strong bid for the "centrality" and "iconic significance" of his position in the Irish poetic field, not least because it disrupts the otherwise smooth chronology of the volume.' Such claims for Kinsella's representativeness and centrality are reinforced by his renown as a major The South Atlantic Quarterly 95:1, Winter 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Duke University Press. ccc 0038-2876/96/$1.5o. 146 David Kellogg Irish translator and editor; those who haven't read his version of the epic Thin B6 Cuailgne or the poems of An Duanaire may well know his edition of the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse.4 Yet readers who come uninitiated to Kinsella's recent work expecting a "representative" poet, one displaying qualities traditionally associated with Irish poetry—lilting lyricism, rural nostalgia, nationalist mythography, or even an ironic response to episodes of violence in Northern Ireland—are likely to be disappointed. On opening his latest book, From Centre City, we are immediately confronted with the following lines: Enough is enough: poring over that organic pot. I knuckled my eyes. Their drying jellies answered with speckles and images.' This opening is typical of Kinsella's mature work, exhibiting his characteristic perceptual phenomenology, clinical self-examination, and intertextual self-reference. (These lines and others in "One Fond Embrace" contain echoes of his 1976 meditation on violence and perception, "A Technical Supplement.") However, with its flatness of presentation and grim subjectivity, Kinsella's enunciative stance is downright forbidding, and to some readers it may seem "un-Irish." Those new to Kinsella will find him in the midst of an ongoing project of exacting seriousness, one that is reminiscent of American long poems like Pound's Cantos or the "Passages" of Robert Duncan; an inward and outward exploration, both exhausting and uncompromising, that is cast in language which "vacillates between a measured eloquence and a mutilated incoherence." 6 It would hardly be surprising, then, if readers responded by stepping back from such agonizing self-dramatization and turning to friendlier poets. After all, the rewards promised by Deane and other boosters of Kinsella's self-described "meditative and brutal" poems may not seem worth the effort; there are plenty of contemporary poets, in Ireland as elsewhere, whose work offers more immediate pleasures and who have not "repudiated the larger audience which wants its poets to be as charmingly accessible as possible — or, if not accessible, at least charming."' How is Kinsella's reputed idiosyncrasy to be reconciled with his image Kinsella, Geography, titstory 1 4/ as a representative Irish poet? One answer is suggested by Kinsella himself in "One Fond Embrace": I leaned back and stretched and embraced all this hearth and home echoing with the ghosts of prides and joys, bicycles and holy terrors, our grown and scattered loves. And all this place where, it occurs to me, I never want to be anywhere else. Where the elements conspire. Which is not to say serenity and the interplay of friends but the brick walls of this sagging district, against which it alerts me to knock my head. With a scruffy nineteenth-century history of half-finished colonials and upstarts. Still with us.8 In its manner of dealing with space, Kinsella's poetry is both characteristic of the contemporary Irish predicament and uniquely his own. It is uniquely his own in another sense as well: like all of his recent poems, "One Fond Embrace" was published in an earlier, limited edition by Kinsella's Peppercanister Press. The two editions differ slightly; for example, where "elements" appears above, the Peppercanister version has "particulars." 9 But as always in Kinsella's poetry, "the elements conspire" in a specific, interactive materialization of time and space. Set against received and predigested emotional states ("serenity and the interplay of friends"), this conspiracy of particulars is a matter of human historical geography, from the brick walls of the neighborhood to the periods of colonialism and Independence ("colonials and upstarts") represented in architecture and urban 148 David Kellogg form, the "ghosts" of that relationship haunting the urban landscape. History persists ("still with us"), manifest in the shape of the city. Although From Centre City opens by affirming Kinsella's identification with Dublin, it ends on a clear note of repudiation: On a fragrant slope descending into the fog over our foul ascending city I turned away in refusal, and held a handful of high grass sweet and grey to my face.1° We should not, therefore, take the posture of allegiance adopted in the book's first poem as a permanent or stable one. However localized this place and thought that "occurs," it is, like all geographical affiliations and cognitive identifications, subject to change. Indeed, the mutability of geography is a fundamental concern of Kinsella's mature poetry, inscribed in this book's very title and the questions it prompts: Does Centre City refer to Dublin as a whole—the city rejected in the end for a new home in County Wicklow— or to the "city centre" of local parlance (An Lcir, as the Dublin bus service has it) and thus to an area bounded by the Grand and Royal Canals, Dublin's oldest and literally central district? Further, does From describe a transition—the poet's moving "away"—or a site of articulation? One of the Peppercanister books was called Poems from Centre City, suggesting a place from which poetic missives are sent, and the opening of "Apostle of Hope" ("A greeting, and thanks, from this sick place") alludes to the Pauline Epistles. On the other hand, this same poem describes an urban setting more like Belfast than Dublin: a squad of baby-looking troops with deadly undernourished faces waltzing across the cracked cement, kneeling and posing with their guns.11 What center/city is spoken for, or from, in such a nationally decentered place as Ireland? What makes a city center central? And finally, in the midst of the book's major move "from" Dublin, there is an additional move "from" America— specifically Philadelphia, where Kinsella taught at Temple University for two decades—back to Ireland, reversing the emigration of a quarter-century earlier: "Our wagon turned away from the Kinsella, Geography, History 149 West." 12 How are we to read a book that scrambles the very geography it maps, shaking the half-assembled puzzle in the box? Much of Kinsella's poetry can be described as a radical geographical critique, a literal decentering. In tracing the multiple histories and meanings of space and the ghostly marks of the past on contemporary Irish cityscapes, he subjects the attractions of "place," a term traditionally given prominence in Irish cultural vocabularies (not to mention its significance in English and American vocabularies of poetic romanticism), to tough critical scrutiny. To this extent, at least, his project resembles that of critic/theorist David Lloyd, who, like Kinsella, has worked both sides of the Atlantic. In Anomalous States, Lloyd recently argued against the presumption of a stable Irish "place" from—or to—which it is possible to write. We cannot, Lloyd suggests, isolate the national questions pursued in contemporary Irish writing from an international economy of cultural values. Noting on the first page of Anomalous States that it was written under "the very different intellectual pressures of two quite distinct locations, Ireland and the United States," Lloyd contends that his writing has been "shaped" by dialogues which "those locations" inevitably "inflected," so it "maps out" a complex "trajectory." Lloyd's consistently spatial language here and elsewhere reflects the state of "Irish intellectual life," which is, "for better or worse, profoundly marked by metropolitan circuits of theory, and in particular by English and American influences."" Whatever its other merits or shortcomings, Lloyd's book marks a calculated intervention in these circuits, demonstrating the paradoxical Irishness of the "multiple locations" of "Irish Studies": "Irish culture plays out the anomalous states of a population whose most typical experience may be that of occupying multiple locations, literally and figuratively."14 Any discussion of Kinsella's poetic geography must therefore take this Irish cultural experience of multiple locations as a central dynamic, simultaneously examining the spaces that the poems explore and the cultural geography in which they are produced. As Lloyd implies, this cultural geography is international; Irish poetry is nested, produced, and pursued in an international cultural economy that renders the very term "Irish poetry" a kind of cipher. That the United States plays a special role in this economy is hardly debatable, given how many Irish poets work in Ameri- 150 David Kellogg can universities and write for American audiences. Indeed, with respect to English-language poetry more generally, American cultural institutions play a hegemonic role in the production of a variety of national poetries.15 Yet even as it is produced and consumed in a transnational literary economy dominated by U.S. interests, Irish poetry continues to be represented in national terms. In the 197os and 198os, the violent split between nation and state led to Ulster's being seen as the primary cultural space at issue. Irish writing addresses spatial configurations other than the North, however, just as the island includes boundaries other than the border. Ireland's spatial complexity is, in fact, one major lesson now being taught by Irish historiography, which has challenged those lingering forms of cultural nationalism that are "largely indifferent to differences other than those defined by the continuing partition of the island."16 Yet the persistent focus on this one difference as "central" (to return to Kinsella's idiom) has obscured the roles of other spatial configurations —domestic, rural, diasporic, and transnational—in the production of Irish identity. One major effect of this obscuration has been the highlighting of Ulster poetry as such, especially for American audiences. In the words of Mahon and Fallon, "It might seem abroad as if the only contemporary Irish poetry of particular interest had its origins" in Ulster? The perception of a bias toward Northern poets has in turn generated a backlash, yielding its own set of distortions, as in Kinsella's having shortchanged recent Ulster poetry in his New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. The anthology wars of the 198os opened a healthy debate over the relative place of Ulster poets in the Irish canon, but the question of whose work is "representative" of contemporary Irish poetry does not address the issue of representation itself. Produced in an international media spotlight, today's Irish poetry is expected to explain the political identity crises that revolve around the North; thus the more international its production has become, the more Irish poetry has zeroed in on Ulster. So even if the Northern Irish Renaissance is, as Kinsella has somewhat bitterly described it, "largely a journalistic entity,"18 the fact remains that in the transatlantic world of literary production and consumption a poet's reputation may likewise be "a journalistic entity"; sometimes, poetry is just plain news. Still, nobody is well served when the currency of the Ulster dilemma is allowed to override the rest of Irish (or even Northern Irish) culture, as in Kinsella, Geography, History 151 Rand Brandes's discussion of violence in Northern poetry, with the border made to symbolize virtually every fissure in Irish society: Ireland, in its postmodern condition, is a state (still) torn apart— North and South, rural and urban, Catholic and Protestant, employed and unemployed, and man and woman. And like much of the rest of the world, Ireland has grown relatively more violent or at least our sense of the violence has increased. Everywhere we look we see the body dismembered, blown to pieces by bombs, mutilated by the assassin and torturer.19 Well, not everywhere—not even on the news. Indeed, as the binary terms spin off of Brandes's initial North/South opposition, linking the island with other sites of cultural violence and providing a seemingly endless list of polarizations with which to represent postmodern Ireland, the everyday social life of the Irish remains invisible. In this context, Kinsella's poetry seems striking not so much for its obsession with the multiple spaces of Irish subject formation, but for its refusal to fix the Irish subject exclusively in reference to the border. His poetry even contrasts in this regard with his editing of the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, which, in affirming one "side" of the North/South poetry divide, reaffirms the importance of the other side as well. Kinsella's poetry usually avoids the petty generalizations to which such projects as the Oxford anthology are prone. Like the "long shadow" that Homi K. Bhabha sees Heart of Darkness as casting over postcolonial studies, providing "a necessary caution against generalizing the contingencies and contours of local circumstance, at the very moment at which a transnational, 'migrant' knowledge of the world is most urgently needed," 2° Kinsella's geography, local and often urban, resists generalization. His poetry is packed with the names of real streets, neighborhoods, and buildings in Dublin, yet his sense of the "gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition" inherited by "every writer in the modern world" is as internationalist as Bhabha's sense of "the perplexity of the unhomely, intrapersonal world." 21 More significantly, Kinsella's local spaces are not so much observed or even inhabited as they are traversed. From the early "Baggot Street Deserta" to the most recent work, his longer poems have always taken a peripatetic form: a restless, seemingly aimless speaker wanders the Dublin streets, enmeshed in the 152 it David Kellogg particulars of their history, but this flaneur's perspective is informed by an acute social and historical consciousness which elaborates local encounters into large-scale temporal and spatial investigations. The speaker —or, more accurately, the walker—in these poems regards the multiple interests of international, national, regional, local, and individual identity as intersecting and competing claims to territorial determination; weaving them together, Kinsella's speaker/walker maps an alternative space that cannot be exclusively accessed by any one of them. Less from the perspective of a flaneur than that of a postmodern, postcolonial surveyor or cartographer, Kinsella writes Dublin as he reads it. His work thus combines two poetic perspectives, which we might reductively call the geographical and the personal, or the systemic and the subjective. The first perspective is exemplified by Dublin geographer Anngret Simms. In "The Inner City: Conflicts of Reality," Simms argues that historical geography can offer a privileged perspective on Dublin's urban planning: "The inner city of any town is multifunctional in character," but in Ireland, unlike the Continental viewpoint, "we do not realize the importance of our city-centres." 22 Consequently, the inevitable conflicts arising from the multifunctionality of the city center are aggravated, Simms argues, by the fact that "market forces are allowed to set the trend." The resulting loss of private investment in urban housing has meant that "practically all new residential buildings in the inner city are built by the [Dublin] Corporation." 23 On one street after another, Georgian residences have been replaced with monolithic office blocks. Government incentives for urban renewal, as another critic notes, "have tended to result in the redevelopment of land rather than the rehabilitation of buildings." 24 Although urban planning may seem remote from the characteristic concerns of poetry—love, death, and the artistic act, as Kinsella has defined them—it is in fact integral to Kinsella's poetic project. From the establishment of the Wide Streets Commission in 1757 to Patrick Abercrombie's 1922 road proposals, Dublin has been repeatedly targeted for planned development. More recently, city planners responded to suburban flight and plunging industrial employment first with major development and then with urban-renewal schemes based on centralized projections of growth that threatened to transform, and sometimes to destroy, the social life of the remaining communities.25 Such planning efforts, characterized by a willful ignorance of local architectural forms and an exclusively functional Kinsella, Geography, History 153 view of social space, are "modernist," in David Harvey's sense: urban space is "something to be shaped for social purposes and therefore always subservient to the construction of a social project." 26 Like urban residents elsewhere, many Dubliners have mobilized in force against what they see as the collusion of city government (the Dublin Corporation) with developers. The localism of such popular mobilization might therefore be called postmodernist, since it resists the generalized effects of steamroller urban planning, It could just as well be called historical, however. Indeed, community resistance to development in Dublin has often taken a specifically historical turn. Residents have opposed Corporation development and urban-renewal plans not only because they destroy the social fabric of vibrant neighborhoods, but also because they destroy the Georgian houses that constitute part of the city's distinctive architectural heritage and thus the very history of Dublin. Many of the eighteenth-century houses constructed during the heyday of the Ascendancy survived into the 195os, weathering both the collapse of the Ascendancy and the street violence of the Independence struggle; during World War II, these residences were spared the bombs of the Blitz by Ireland's neutrality, even as they succumbed to dilapidation and decay. Yet after the war, having survived bad times, Dublin's architectural heritage was threatened by good times. As geographer Andrew MacLaren describes it: As late as 196o, Dublin retained a virtually intact eighteenth century core. Only then was serious attention devoted to ruining the city's most precious architectural heritage. . . . During the next 3o years, no expense seems to have been spared in this project of ill-considered vandalism, making up for lost time with unparalleled 'enthusiasm. The destruction of a significant proportion of that endowment was effected by the combined efforts of property developers and the Corporation's road engineers, eager to equip the city with the symbols of the new age: concrete, glass, and tarrnac.27 Thomas Kinsella's assessment of the situation in "One Fond Embrace" is similar to MacLaren's. He even lines up the same suspects: Invisible speculators, urinal architects, and the Corporation flourishing their documents in potent compliant dance 154 David Kellogg —planners of the wiped slate labouring painstaking over a bungled city to turn it into a zoo.28 Most critics of development focus, like MacLaren and Kinsella, on the Dublin Corporation and its chummy relationship with developers. Indeed, urban planning in Ireland is characterized by what MacLaren, echoing Simms, calls a "dependency on capitalist development interests," which is nourished by the state's "inherent favouring . . . of private property rights." 29 Responding to the Corporation's collusion with developers, Dublin residents have formed historical-preservation groups—among them the Irish Georgian Society, An Taisce, the Dublin Civic Group, and the Dublin Living City Group—as well as numerous neighborhood associations. These groups have opposed unrestricted development in a number of ways, shifting their tactics to adjust to the changing patterns of flexible accumulation. Sometimes the best community efforts have not been enough. All in all, though, the history of resistance to development in Dublin seems to confirm John Emmeus Davis's thesis that, given the right combination of consciousness and organization, communities can and will take collective action based on locality.3° For her part, Simms identifies five major ways in which historical geographers can intervene. First, they can "raise consciousness about our historic city centres" as a way of helping "to identify the problems and choices facing us." Second, they can conduct "proper scientifically-based surveys, so that we are informed about existing building stock in a particular area." Third, they can investigate "the role played by firms, organisations and individuals involved in the ownership, design and implementation of changes in the building fabric." Fourth, they can examine the "decreasing population density in the Inner City over the last one hundred years," with an eye toward critiquing development plans that concentrate on the periphery at the expense of the city center. Fifth, they can directly engage, both individually and collectively, policy decisions affecting the future of Dublin. For this type of action, Simms endorses the recommendations issued by the Friends of Medieval Dublin "for [its] protection . . . and its modern development." " Simms's proposed responses to obtuse and amnesiac city-planning efforts are some of the same steps that Kinsella has taken in his own work as an activist. In 1974 he helped to form a residents' group that success- Kinsella, Geography, History 155 fully blocked Corporation plans to ram a freeway and a building project through his Percy Place neighborhood.32 He also played a significant role in the long-running but finally futile fight to save Wood Quay, the site of Dublin's medieval core. Leading the first group to occupy that site during a crucial 1979 protest, Kinsella read aloud the Declaration of the Friends of Medieval Dublin at the beginning of the occupation and even composed a poem for the Wood Quay Occupation News." While Simms's proposals constitute an effective systemic and collective rejoinder to the efforts of city planners, such resistance has the disadvantage of opposing development on the developer's own terrain. Then, too, her model allows responsive action to drag on indefinitely, requiring an investment of considerable time and capital. How might an individual without such resources take up Simms's challenge? Michel de Certeau has a suggestion: take a walk. One of the objectives of de Certeau's remarkable Practice of Everyday Life is to show that action, far from waiting endlessly on the mobilization of powerful political forces, is always already taking place; his project, as he has described it, is "a continuing investigation of the ways in which users— commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules— operate." 34 Throughout this collection of essays, he demonstrates that "users" act: reading is writing, consumption is production. "Walking in the City," for example, nicely illustrates what I call the subjective or personal approach to urban space. In this essay, de Certeau suggests that the walk, properly conceived, opposes the logic of the "concept-city." Such a city, "founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse," uncannily resembles the Dublin envisioned by the Abercrombie road plans or the ideal city of the Dublin Corporation: rational, synchronic, autonomous. " 'The city,' like a proper name," argues de Certeau, "thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties."" Against the proper name of the decaying concept-city, the walker constructs active, mobile enunciations: The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple "enunciative" function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and 156 David Kellogg it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic "contracts" in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker, and puts contracts between interlocutors into action). It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.36 In the written text that records and (re)presents a walk— a poetic text, for example, such as Kinsella's —things are necessarily more complex and multilayered, but not altogether different from "the long poem of walking" itself.37 Turning now to Kinsella's investigation of spatiality—a term I use in Edward W. Soja's sense of "the created space of social organization and production" 38 — a particular poetic sequence proves instructive. Kinsella's "St. Catherine's Clock" exemplifies the way in which the geographical and the personal are combined in his poetry's construction.39 Yet, heeding Bhabha's warning about local circumstances vis-a-vis migrant knowledges and respecting the local context in which Kinsella's work is produced, we should guard against the temptation to use this work as a springboard for launching either postcolonialist or poetic generalities. Certainly, "St. Catherine's Clock" is not "about" urban planning as such. It traces a two-hour walk in the area around St. Catherine's Church, on Thomas Street in Dublin, and, by means of its internal dating, traces a longer sweep of time as well—one that gestures toward the political history of the neighborhood and revisits moments in the speaker/walker's childhood. In terms of the trajectory of Kinsella's career, "St. Catherine's Clock" continues the serial poem that began in 1972 with Notes from the Land of the Dead, a work in which subjects and themes overlap, interpreting each other.4° Some of the personal material in the sequence is thus clarified by reference to earlier Kinsella poems, while other allusions, personal and social, remain obscure 4' Crucial to the sequence is a cluster of three "historical" poems, one dated 1792 and two dated 1803. These poems engage key moments in Dublin's political history when St. Catherine's Church became a significant site. Readers familiar with Irish history will recognize Kinsella's deployment of a nationalist architectural icon and memorial: on 20 September 1803, the nationalist martyr/hero Robert Emmet was hanged, drawn, and quartered outside the church. An anonymous 1877 engraving of Emmet's execution, Kinsella, Geography, History 157 Figure I. The Execution of Robert Emmet (Anon., 1877). Reproduction in the National Library of Ireland (R. 1378). with his severed head displayed to a Dublin crowd, has become an icon in its own right (Figure 1). Here is how Kinsella describes the scene: And Robert Emmet on the scaffold high, as close as possible to the site of the outrage, is dropped from his brief height into a grove of redcoats mounted with their rumps toward a horrified populace. The torch of friendship and the lamp of life extinguished, his race finished, the idol of his soul offered up, sacrificed on the altar of truth and liberty, awaiting the cold honors of the grave, requiring only the charity of silence, he has done. The sentence pronounced in the usual form, he has bowed and retired. 158 David Kellogg The pasty head is separated and brandished aloft, the dead forehead with the black wet lock turned toward the Fountain.42 Entitled "From a non-contemporary nationalist artist's impression," the poem does not represent itself as an eye-witness account of Emmet's execution, but rather as one viewed through the lens of an earlier representation. The event is thus inflected by time ("non-contemporary"), ideology ("nationalist"), aesthetics ("artist"), and phenomenological quality ("impression"). Several times removed from the event itself, Kinsella's impression of an impression highlights its own impossible distance from its subject. While appearing to respect the intentions of the "original" perspective, moreover, the "nationalist" position of the visual representation is undercut (which is not to say, refuted) by the verbal nature and medium of the poem, especially as exemplified in its title and its apparent use of several versions of Emmet's "Speech from the Dock." 43 Clearly, a complex tonal negotiation is being undertaken here. This poem is the second of two dated 1803; the other, "After the engraving by George Cruikshank," is based on an illustration in W. H. Maxwell's royalist history of the 1798 and 1803 Irish uprisings (Figure 2). Cruikshank's engraving, The Murder of Lord Kilwarden, depicts the Lord Chief Justice being piked to death by a mob in Thomas Street, near St. Catherine's. (The deaths of Kilwarden and his nephew during the insurrection were central not only to Emmet's trial and conviction, but also to the site chosen for his execution.) Overtly racist, the engraving portrays Kilwarden, in Kinsella's words, thrown back rhetorical among a pack of hatted simians, their snouted malice gathered into the pike-point entering his front. While Cruikshank's visual representation is emotionally charged, Kinsella's verbal refraction of it suggests cool calculation on the part of the artist: Kilwarden's "two coachmen / picked, like his horses, from a finer breed / register extremes of shocked distress." 44 Kinsella's two "screened images" of St. Catherine's in 1803 are then followed by a poem based on a very different 1792 view of the church in an Kinsella, Geography, History 159 Figure a. The Murder of Lord Kilwarden, engraving by George Cruikshank. Reproduced from William Hamilton Maxwell, History of the Irish Rebellion in 5798: With Memoirs of the Union, and Emmet's Insurrection in 1803 (London, 1845), National Library of Ireland (F. 91, Dr. so). engraving by the English architect and artist James Malton (Figure 3). Malton's aquatint volume, A Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin (1792-1799), renders a cosmopolitan Dublin of late-Ascendancy splendor; as one contemporary reviewer put it, "Dublin never before appeared as respectable." 45 Coming on the heels of the violence described in the poems representing moments in 1803 Dublin, the implication is that Malton's engravings specifically, and picturesque renderings of Ireland more generally, glossed over the brutality of colonial rule. Thus, even in this speciously idyllic urban landscape, Kinsella—while remaining faithful to Malton's representation—detects signs of the social stratification, invisibility of the poor, and indifference of governing authorities that underwrote Ireland's colonial history: Centre, barefoot, bowed in aged rags to the earth, a hag Figure 3. St. Catherine's Church, Thomas Street, engraving by James Malton, in A Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin (1792-1799). Reproduced from the fascimile edition held by the National Library of Ireland and published by Dolmen Press (Dublin, 1978), in association with the Irish Georgian Society. toils across the street on her battered business, a drained backside turned toward St. Catherine's; everybody, even those most near, turned away. Right, foreground, a shade waits for her against a dark cart humped man-shaped with whipstaff upright. Set down to one side by unconcerned fingers, a solitary redcoat is handling the entire matter." Consistent with de Certeau's argument that the act of walking "implies relations among differentiated positions," we find that St. Catherine's is Kinsella, Geography, History 161 never foregrounded but always presented relatively, relationally; relations are explored both across different representations (such as the three artistic views of the area) and within each individual representation. In this poem, for example, Kinsella transforms Malton's pleasant topographical scene into a richly variegated social drama, a site of territorial competition and struggle for dominance involving two horsemen, a pair of children or dwarfs, a man and women with buckets, a couple of mongrels worrying the genitals out of each other, "a hag," her waiting "shade," and "a solitary redcoat." Even the speaker/ walker is drawn implicitly into the "distant dream" beyond the frame of poem and watercolored engraving alike, into the perspective from which a pale blue divides downhill into thin air on a distant dream of Bow Lane and Basin Lane.47 In organizing his sequence, Kinsella proceeds not chronologically but in a kind of "forth and back" movement,48 a spiraling of past and present, exploration and return, which is characteristic of his recent poetry's persistent self-explanation through evolutionary and organic metaphors. Although this organization may be intended to authenticate the poet's search for meaning, it does not authorize the past as a site of meaningfulness. Indeed, these three poems in the "St. Catherine's Clock" sequence repeatedly stress how the present subject, although made by the past, is never in actual contact with it. Such scrupulous segregation may reflect a kind of respect for the past's otherness. Thus the shift from Kilwarden's murder to Emmet's execution in 1803 is chronological or linear, but the subsequent move backward to 1792 and then radically forward again to a number of autobiographical poems creates a sense of juxtaposition that is not quite ironic (although it would have been if Kinsella had included any reference to Malton's 1803 suicide). Rather, we are in the realm of genealogy, and of my opening allusion to Foucault. Back to the beginning, then, but not to the origin, for, as Foucault re- 162 David Kellogg minded us, the pursuit of origins "is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities"; it "assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession." By contrast, if the genealogist "refuses to extend his [sic] faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds . . . not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms." 49 The scrupulousness that Foucault advocated can also be found in the epigraph to "St. Catherine's Clock": . . . chosen and lifted up against the light for the Fisherman's thumb and the bowel-piercing hook.s° What holds for listening to history holds for observing space: such a genealogy of geography as Kinsella's "will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other."" As it turns out, the other's face is Kinsella's. Indeed, one measure of his recent poetic achievement is the degree to which Kinsella has managed to implicate himself in his analysis of local geographical dynamics. "St. Catherine's Clock" demonstrates this self-implication from the beginning, with the speaker, apparently angry, having just rushed from a building: "The whole terrace / slammed shut." We do not know what has prompted this exit, which recalls the distressed openings of other "walker" poems such as "A Country Walk" and "Nightwalker," but here the speaker, once outside, immediately identifies with the outcast, exiled, and antisocial perambulator of the urban night: "I inhaled the granite lamplight, / divining the energies of the prowler."" The (apparent) anger that spurs the poem into being is thereby implicated in the social geography of Dublin, while the lamplight here, echoing "every passing street-lamp" in "Nightwalker" as it will be echoed by the Corporation streetlights in From Centre City, is correspondingly implicated in Kinsella's poetic geography." Once again, a "personal" situation goes public, a site of articulation both remains subjectively hidden and becomes geographically marked. The speaker's investment in the anonymous social life of Dublin is driven home by the rest of the poem, which opens this section of "St. Catherine's Clock" and sets the tone for much of what follows: Kinsella, Geography, History 163 A window opposite, close up. In a corner, a half stooped image focused on the intimacy of the flesh of the left arm. The fingers of the right hand are set in a scribal act on the skin: a gloss, simple and swift as thought, is planted there. The point uplifted, wet with understanding, he leans his head a moment against the glass. I see.54 Why the addict? Kinsella's readers will recognize familiar elements here, including his obsession with acts of self-mutilation and his association of violence to the body with writing. In fact, this poem is a tapestry of reflexivity, laced and layered with recycled bits of earlier poems. On the less personal level, however, Dublin has a huge heroin problem, and the area of the Liberties around Thomas Street is particularly notorious. The figure of the addict thus indicates and indicts a desperate and demoralized present in Dublin's geographical history, against which the various scenes of its past (including those of 1792 and 1803) will be set. In bearing witness to the addict ("I see"), the poem opens itself to a social reading that merges the fate of Dublin's built spaces with that of its people. As the terrace gate opens Dublin's streets to the speaker/walker, the addict's window opens Dublin's inner life to this witness. Further, the speaker's intimate glimpse of the addict shatters the neo-Victorian boundary of inside/outside, violating the sanctity of the home as an interior space of privacy and protection. Having just turned his back on such an interior space, the speaker is not securely established as the addict's other (although the walk certainly "posits another opposite"), even through the "window opposite." Indeed, having already identified himself with the prowler (outside), the speaker/walker cannot easily align himself with the addict (inside), whom he can only "see." The tense shift from past to present, however, brings speaker and subject into alignment and grounds the poem firmly in the social space of Dublin now. 164 David Kellogg The temporal framing of this scene is further engaged by the one that follows, set in "Thomas Street at the first hour" and the first of three spatiotemporal intersections.55 These have a parallel structure, suggesting the route of a two-hour walk from St. Catherine's west to Grand Canal Place, then east again to Francis Street—a framing device that, like most such devices, provides a stabilizing reference point. Yet this stabilizing timecourse is juxtaposed with two others: the historical time(s) and place(s) of the area around St. Catherine's, and an autobiographical context that is implicated in both the two hours of (present) walk-time and the more than two centuries of represented historical (past) time. Furthermore, these other two stabilizing points are undercut even within their own articulation, for while the conceit of the two-hour walk is never exactly abandoned, it is imploded at the walk's halfway mark: Grand Canal Place at the second hour. Live lights on oiled water in the terminus harbor.56 Presumably marking the spatiotemporal center of the poem and its twohour frame in the present of contemporary Dublin, Grand Canal Place is nevertheless no longer a "terminus harbor," having been filled in earlier in this century. The temporal order makes sense only if the scene is set both in the present and in 1938, the time in which the poem is nested. The third stabilizing point is even less secure, shifting to 1740, twentynine years before St. Catherine's was built, and conjuring up a premonition of the "hag" in the 1792 poem: About the third hour. Ahead, at the other end of the darkened market place a figure crossed over out of Francis Street reading the ground, all dressed up in black, like a madwoman.57 Like the hour and the scene of Grand Canal Place, this final interlude configures a speaker who is both "in" the present and in a position to experience the past (1740 in this case). The date may have been chosen for Kinsella, Geography, History 165 any number of reasons, perhaps to mark the Dublin bread riots of late May and early June 1740—a reading supported by the "market place," or Cornmarket. In any event, this scene is further destabilized by the absence of the yet-to-be-constructed church clock, hence its setting at "about," not at, "the third hour." By ending on a moment before St. Catherine's existed, Kinsella destabilizes the monumental sense of place inherent to ideologies of national identity. Here the poem also entertains an alternative popular rooting of Irish identity in feminine mythography — a hag-iography that recurs in Kinsella's social/poetic geography of Dublin and its (timeless?) material conditions. "St. Catherine's Clock" turns out to be less a meditation on this church than a poetic mode of relating, temporally and spatially, to the social organization of urban Irish cultural identity. Through the device of this building, Kinsella explores, but does not pin down, the effects of colonial rule on a specific geographical area; at the same time, geography is also the means by which Kinsella can show how the perpetuation of social inequity is not determined by any one institutional site (such as the colonizer's church) even as it is being underwritten by such a site. As far back as Kinsella's poem takes us, it never reaches a spatiotemporal point at which the speaker can say, This is what ails you— a refusal to define a determinative event that leaves room for freedom and action. The social history of the church is nested in the subjective frame of the walk, yet the personal present of the walker is not affirmed as the ultimate site for the production of meaning. Rather, meaning, like action, remains dialectical. Undermined in turn by the trickling matter of history, the personal presence will return again and again to walk the poem, "to flourish a while in freedom / on the surface of our recollection." 58 Notes See Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, 1977), 139. 2 Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London, 1986), 237; Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta, 1989), 63, 57, 6o. 3 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Verse, ed. Derek Mahon and Peter Fallon (London, 1990), xix. Placing Kinsella first puts him ahead of several older poets, notably John Montague and Richard Murphy, while younger poets follow in order of birth. 4 Thin B6 Cuailgne, trans. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford, 1970); An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed 1600-1900, trans. Thomas Kinsella, with notes by Sean O'Tuama (Dublin, 1981); The Nov Oxford Book of Irish Verse, ed. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford, 1989). 166 David Kellogg 5 Thomas Kinsella, "One Fond Embrace," in From Centre City (Oxford, 1994), i. 6 Deane, Short History of Irish Literature, 236. Most commentators on Kinsella's reputation have, like Deane, assumed that the collapse of his readership and the recent rise of other Irish poetic reputations in America are related, as indeed they are. But the relationships among nationality, aesthetics, and reputation are complex. For all his recent localism, in his early career Kinsella helped to internationalize post-Yeatsian Irish poetry; understanding the role he played then is crucial to understanding Mahon and Fallon's recent decision to open the Penguin Book with his work. Recalling Kinsella in the 195os, Vincent Buckley may overstate the case, but he is right about the poet's early renown; "His reputation had not quite yet reached his home town, which was preoccupied with other culture heroes; and, besides, in being a lyrical poet influenced by Auden, he was perhaps a little un-Irish"; see Buckley's Memory Ireland (Victoria, Australia, 1985), 191. 7 Ibid. The phrase "meditative and brutal" is from Thomas Kinsella, Blood and Family (Oxford, 1988), 39. See also Declan Kiberd's respectful, if somewhat bewildered, introduction to the selection of Kinsella's poetry in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane (Derry, 1991): "The quiet, wry style is not lacking in intensity, but achieves its subtlest effects through intermittent moments of insight or fantasy set against a usually prosaic background" (3: 1341). 8 Kinsella, "One Fond Embrace," 9 Thomas Kinsella, One Fond Embrace, Peppercanister 13 (Dublin, 1988), 7. The Peppercanister series began with Butcher's Dozen (Dublin, 1972), written in response to the Widgery Tribunal's report on Bloody Sunday exonerating British troops. Since then, all of Kinsella's poetry has first appeared in these limited editions before being published by a trade or university press —with the exception of "One Fond Embrace," an even earlier version of which (referred to as a "sketch" in a note to the Peppercanister edition) had been published by Peter Fallon's Gallery Press (Dublin, 1981); the Peppercanister edition, however, was much revised. io Thomas Kinsella, "I have known the hissing assemblies," in From Centre City, 69. 11 Thomas Kinsella, "Apostle of Hope," in From Centre City, 14. 12 Thomas Kinsella, "Rituals of Departure," in From Centre City, 18. 13 David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, 1993),1; my emphasis. A more extended comparison of Lloyd and Kinsella could address Kinsella's refusal of "major" status in the context of Lloyd's study of James Clarence Mangan, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, 1987). 14 Lloyd, Anomalous States, 2, 3. 15 Something similar holds for non-American poets writing in languages other than English, although the reception of their work is determined by the availability of translations. Still, the different American receptions of work by foreign poets in English and in English translation may be partly due to issues of "authenticity" as well as to the tendency of American reviewers to fix on one poet per country, who then attains a quasi-ambassadorial status. By this means, non-native poets writing in English and those published in translation can equally achieve a celebrity and acquire a readership in the United States that is rare for American poets. This is what the would-be ,gad- Kinsella, Geography, History 167 fly Desmond Fennell, in a mean-spirited yet sometimes insightful critique of Seamus Heaney, calls "the gratuitous advantage of being a foreign poet," an advantage illustrated by the following joke: "'You know the four great poets in this country in recent years?' an American poet said to me ironically. 'Heaney, Brodsky, Milosz, Walcott'"; see his Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. i (Dublin, 1991), 29. 16 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, xii. I am alluding, of course, to the revisionist movement in Irish history, the mixed results of which should not obscure the profound impact revisionism has had on contemporary discussions of Irish nationhood and identity. For an excellent collection of essays covering the revisionist movement and the critical response to it, see Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938-1994, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin, 1994). 17 Mahon and Fallon, eds., Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, xix. Expressions of frustration toward American audiences are not confined to those who, like Mahon and Fallon, dispute the idea of a Northern Irish Renaissance. Edna Longley, a harsh critic of Kinsella and a leading proponent of the uniqueness of recent Ulster poetry, declares that "misty-eyed Americans add to the problem. Complicity between Irish axes and foreign tears confounds it"; see The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1994), 9. However, Longley's frustration with American audiences is different from Mahon and Fallon's; she believes that while there is a U.S. market for Ulster writers, it is limited to nationalist writers. She argues, for example, that the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing exhibits "a symptomatic yoking of 'Irish literature' to nationalism" and that the anthology itself is "a directive encyclopedia, an interpretive centre packaged and signposted— especially for consumption abroad" (23). 18 Kinsella, ed., New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, xxx. 19 Rand Brandes, "The Dismembering Muse: Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Kenneth Burke's 'Four Master Tropes,' " in Irishness and Postmodernism, ed. John S. Rickard (Lewisburg, 1994), 191. Obviously, Brandes has to some extent bought into the international media image of Ireland, an impression reinforced by his opening gambit here— an assessment of Sinead O'Connor's notorious performance of a Bob Marley song on Saturday Night Live. Having already confounded national boundaries by her choice of song and venue, O'Connor crossed the one between entertainment and politics, art and action, at the end of her performance by tearing a photograph of Pope John Paul II in half and commanding a bewildered New York studio audience to "fight the real enemy." Missing the opportunity to raise complex questions about the instability of national audiences, Brandes insists that "despite the predominantly American audience, . . . Sinead O'Connor's gesture was clearly beamed toward Ireland" (177). It is precisely this notion of "beaming," with its Star Trek resonance of infinite transportability, that I hope to complicate here. 20 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 214. 21 Thomas Kinsella, "The Irish Writer," in Deane, ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3: 629; Bhabha, Location of Culture, 12. 2 2 Anngret Simms, "The Inner City: Conflicts of Reality," in Geographical Perspectives on the Dublin Region, ed. A. A. Homer and A. J. Parker (Dublin, 1987), 96. 23 Ibid., 98, roo, 168 David Kellogg 24 Andrew MacLaren, Dublin: The Shaping of a Capital (London, 1993), 223. 25 See Richard Haworth, "The Modern Annals of Wood Quay," in Viking Dublin Exposed: The Wood Quay Saga, ed. John Bradley (Dublin, 1984), 16-18. The history of urban planning and renewal in Dublin is too complex to cover fully here. Suffice it to say that throughout this century Dublin has undergone one crisis after another, experiencing both the economic upheavals of other modern European cities and crises more specific to a postcolonial city. As often as not, economic growth in rural Ireland has been financed at Dublin's expense, with particularly high costs to its inner city. There has been a steady decline in both city-center population and jobs in manufacturing. See MacLaren, Shaping of a Capital; Arnold Homer, "From City to City-Region— Dublin from the 193os to the 1990s," in Dublin: From Prehistory to Present, ed. F. H. A. Aalen and Kevin Whelan (Dublin, 1992), 327-58; and Pauline McGuirk, "Economic Restructuring and the Realignment of the Urban Planning System: The Case of Dublin," Urban Studies 31 (1994): 287-308. 26 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1989), 6o; but see also McGuirk ("Economic Restructuring"), who argues that, rather than serving an overall state project, the effect of state intervention in Ireland's urban economy "has been to create a role in which planners are directly facilitative of private capital and are increasingly restricted to creating the conditions which attract private-sector investment and facilitate profit maximisation" (287). Although McGuirk admits that classifying Dublin as a post-Fordist city is "dubious," she also argues that "changing socio-economic conditions have had impacts which have created new demands on urban planning in line with suggestions of a new planning practice under conditions of economic restructuring" (291), effects similar to those of post-Fordism. On the more practical level of the built environment, Dublin's developers and planners still seem to be operating in accordance with modernist paradigms of homogenization: the new Corporation offices on the Wood Quay site are a prime example of the sort of redevelopment that ignores both history and the local architectural forms in the pursuit of its own monumentalization. 27 MacLaren, Shaping of a Capital, 12, 28 Kinsella, "One Fond Embrace," 2. 29 MacLaren, Shaping of a Capital, 94,79. 3o John Emmeus Davis, Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighborhood (Ithaca, 1991). For a history of some significant preservation efforts in Dublin, see Kevin Corrigan Kearns, Georgian Dublin: Ireland's Imperilled Architectural Heritage (London, 1983). 31 Simms, "The Inner City," in Homer and Parker, eds., Geographical Perspectives, 505-6. 32 Although Kinsella's work as a community organizer has been directed at historical preservation, he is not wholly allied with the preservationists who concentrate on the city's Georgian heritage. His own house on Percy Place is a nineteenth-century building. As he told Vincent Buckley, "No, I don't want an eighteenth-century house; I wouldn't like to be always reminding myself that I was living in something built on slave labor" (Buckley, Memory Ireland, 211). 33 See Carolyn A. Rosenberg, "Let Our Gaze Blaze: The Recent Poetry of Thomas Kinsella" (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1981), 205-6. For background on the fight Kinsella, Geography, History 169 to save Wood Quay, see Thomas Farel Heffernan, Wood Quay: The Clash over Dublin's Viking Past (Austin, 1988); and Bradley, ed., Viking Dublin Exposed. A revised version of the poem Kinsella wrote during the occupation, "Night Conference, Wood Quay: 6 June 1979," is included in From Centre City, 25, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 34 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xi. 35 Ibid., 95, 94. 36 Ibid., 97-98; his emphases, The quoted phrases are from Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris, 1974). 37 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, mi. 38 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, 1989), 79. 39 Thomas Kinsella, "St. Catherine's Clock," in Blood and Family, 67-85; see also Thomas Kinsella, St. Catherine's Clock, Peppercanister 12 (Dublin, 1987). 4o Thomas Kinsella, Notes from the Land of the Dead (Dublin, 1972). The terms "sequence" and "series" have acquired special resonance in postmodern poetry criticism, especially with regard to American poems and poets. The concept of the "sequence" was developed most fully by M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence (Oxford, 1984), but this model has been faulted for failing to attend to postmodern compositional methods. The most powerful alternative model for the postmodern long poem is Joseph M, Conte's careful typology of "serial" and "procedural" form; see his Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (Ithaca, 1991), in which the term "serial poem" is identified mainly with the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer. Neither the Rosenthal/Gall nor the Conte typology is entirely adequate to Kinsella's achievement. Taken together, however, they do satisfactorily describe his poetry's basic patterns, so I split the difference here and use "sequence" to refer to individual installments of Kinsella's open-ended poem (e.g., "St. Catherine's Clock") and "series" to refer to Kinsella's work since 1972 in general, since it fulfills Conte's model of the "infinite serial" poem. 41 Until recently, the only comprehensive examination of Kinsella's use of source material has been Rosenberg's dissertation, "Let Our Gaze Blaze." Now we have Thomas Jackson, The Whole Matter: The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella (Syracuse, 1995), the first book-length examination of Kinsella's mature poetry (which appeared only after this article had been completed). 42 Kinsella, "St. Catherine's Clock," 72. 43 "The sentence pronounced in the usual form" as well as "bowed and retired," in the next line, paraphrase prosecuting barrister William Ridgeway's account: "His Lordship then pronounced the sentence in the usual form, and the prisoner bowed, and retired"; see Robert Emmet, "Speech from the Dock," in Deane, ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 939. The seven lines beginning with "The torch of friendship" and ending with "he has done," however, seem to have been drawn from later, nationalist versions of Emmet's speech (938 n. 12). As the introduction to the Emmet selection in the Field Day Anthology states: "The speech may be said to have two levels of existence, one incompletely known and probably incomplete, and the second well-known, well-rounded and in part at least more mythical than historical. The fame of the latter, however, is 170 David Kellogg ironically attached to the broadcasting of the former because in the first place it was the government that appears to have exploited the speech for propagandist purposes" (933). 44 Kinsella, "St. Catherine's Clock," 71. 45 Quoted in E. E. O'Donnell, S.J., The Annals of Dublin, Fair City (Dublin, 1987), 126. A number of versions of Malton's engravings are extant, some of which, such as the view of St. Catherine's on the cover of Kinsella's Blood and Family, were also watercolored by the artist. 46 Kinsella, "St. Catherine's Clock," 73. 47 Ibid, 48 Ibid., 28. 49 Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 142. 5o Kinsella, "St. Catherine's Clock," 68; his ellipsis and emphasis, I have not been able to trace the source, if there is one, of this epigraph. 51 Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 144. 52 Kinsella, "St. Catherine's Clock," 69. 53 Thomas Kinsella, "Nightwalker," in Peppercanister Poems 1956-1973 (Dublin, 1979), 103; see also Kinsella, From Centre City, 29, 37. 54 Kinsella, "St. Catherine's Clock," 69. 55 Ibid., 7o. 56 Ibid., 80. 57 Ibid., 85. 58 Ibid., 83.