“Environmental Justice and Posthuman Poetics in Contemporary Irish Poetry”
Anne Karhio, National University of Ireland
This presentation addresses the idea of environmental justice in contemporary Irish poetry in the context of an emerging posthuman consciousness, and a posthuman poetics. This means the questioning of the centrality of the category of “human”, and exploring forms of engagement with the world as more than an “object of knowledge” or “thing”, a creation of “the productions of knowledge [by] the human knower”, as Donna Haraway has argued (“Situated Knowledges”). In the poems addressed here, environmental justice or injustice is addressed in specific contexts related to the consumer society, the effects of multinational capitalism, or the destruction of human and non-human habitats. There is also, however, a more profound paradigm shift in the implicit challenging of the human perspective as a foundation for a sustainable ethics, or the human as “the food chain’s top banana” as Leontia Flynn writes in “Second Dialogue” (The Radio, 2018). In a number of poems, this is expressed through a recalibration of the first-person verbal-visual point of view, as well as of sense of scale. The perspectives of non-human animals or machine perception often replace the presumed subject-position of the speaking voice. In Derek Mahon’s “Being a Dog” (Against the Clock, 2018) there is “no inter-species dialogue” to translate what the dog “knows” into human terms (or into human knowledge”), and Peter Sirr’s “Vision” similarly recognizes the “dog’s eye view of the world” (Gravity Wave, 2019). In the long sequence that forms the second part of Justin Quinn’s Fuselage (2002), the distinction between human and machine vision is blurred in the repeated image of eyes monitoring individuals at different stages of the global trade on consumer goods (“Two eyes watch the earth”, “The two eyes watch them all the time”, “the sky-hooked eye…of fluidity and ochlocracy”). At the same time planetary and microscopic scales co-exist in the flow of goods and pixels on screen, across the planet. Mahon’s “A Country Road” moves beyond the familiar trope of a rural landscape and senses, and recognizes how “cloud swirls on the globe” while “bacteria, fungi, viruses [are] squirming in earth and dirt” (Life on Earth, 2008). The speaker of Nick Laird’s “Feel free” (Feel Free, 2018) similarly seeks to “interface / with Earth” and while sensing “the presence of numerous and minute quanta moving…in unison”. In these poets’ writing, such an imaginary of the more-than-human domain is also a prerequisite for a meaningful framework of environmental justice.
“From the ‘Dim Coming Times’: The Call to Justice of Ireland’s Spoken Word Poetry and Internet Culture”
Charika Swanepoel, University of Turku
In W.B. Yeats’s 1892 poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times”, he writes of the artist’s work as the making of song in order to “sweeten Ireland’s wrong”. Yeats suggested that politics is “an effect of art, not a cause of it; that poetry instigates action, instead of responding to external events”1. Certainly, the same can be said today of the younger generation of artists who attempt to “sweeten Ireland’s wrong” when one considers the recent rise in spoken word poetry in Ireland and its call for justice. Spoken word poets are no longer limited to open mics at small-time pubs but form an integral part the cultural hub of Ireland. These artists are, for instance, seen performing outside the Dáil Éireann and on popular television programs on public broadcasters such as RTÉ.
In line with these spoken word performances and the written poetry that emerges from them, the global development of internet culture further allows for immediate and worldwide attention to injustice. Spoken word poetry performances often draw hundreds of thousands of views online and gain further interest by being shortened and shared on various online media and social platforms. This paper therefore hopes to illustrate how current spoken word poetry and internet culture in Ireland succeeds in challenging the established social order. This will be done by providing an overview of the issues addressed by young Irish spoken word poets Stephen James Smith, Emmet Kirwan, Emmet O’Brien, and Natalya O’Flaherty. On the whole, these issues include the housing crisis, the Irish identity, mental health and addiction, global warming, and the effects of the internet culture itself.