Atlantic Fret: Climate Change and the North Atlantic in Irish Poetry since 1960

This PhD will be comprised of two parts centred by the Atlantic. The critical component will focus on the poetic ties between two schools either side of the Atlantic: the Belfast Group and the New York School, and how their poetry and their approaches to poetry manifested in similar formal and linguistic ways in response to their cultural environments. The creative component will be a collection of poems where the Atlantic offers a space in terms of Plato's conception of Khôra to position themselves between the influence of both groups and capture the in-betweenness coupled with migration and locality.
Research Questions: 1. To what extent do the Belfast Group and the New York Schoolshare poetic similarities?
2. To what extent did the social contexts influence the approaches to poetry of these poets in terms of poetic form, such as their poetry's musicality, subversion of traditional form, employment of allusion and collagism?
3. How do our interactions with the Atlantic, direct or indirect, influence our connection/disconnection to our physical and metaphysical lives?
Research Context: The New York School (1950s-1960s) and the Belfast Group (1960s-1970s) have been the subject of extensive discussion among poets and academics for decades. Poets associated with both groups record their societies' state of flux, they challenge the dominant poetic trends of their time, and they have influenced poetry writing for years. Despite this, there has not been any meaningful critical discussion about the groups together.

The New York School, a coterie of painters, musicians, and poets replaced the perceived stuffiness of poetry with the quotidian. Their influence, according to David Lehman in The Last Avant-Garde, is akin to the Paris avant-garde of pre-World War I. Their infusion of wit, irony, and conversationality was a tonic to confessionalist poetry that dominated poetry in the US. The poetry of Frank O'Hara, the common connection of the group, exhibits these qualities whilst turning against traditions in poetic form and nuancedly illuminating the beginnings of civil unrest in the US while James Schuyler's interiority documents the inner violence of marginalised homosexuality. Poets associated with the Belfast Group have had a more apparent and immediate influence on their society - foremostly, Seamus Heaney's poetry of the 1970s offered commentary on the Troubles, receiving world-wide acclaim. Carson and Muldoon, though writing later, offer other perspectives of a mutable society - Carson enriched the cultural memory of the period while Muldoon's contemplation on Irish history speaks to the island's centuries-long tradition of emigration.

The Atlantic has been the means of travel and connection between Ireland and the United States. It is itself a kind of vessel, or Khôra; a concept introduced in Plato's Timaeus as "characterless and non-being" yet is a "receptacle of all creation". It is through this lens the creative component will take shape and similarly seek to address the academic gap in the critical component.
Research Methods: The critical component will assessthe poetic parallels of key poets associated with these groups who foreground poetry's musical qualities, and turn to extensive allusion and collagism in response to their societies' fluidity. Taking music as societal expression, this component will examine how jazz and Irish traditional music informed Frank O'Hara's and Ciaran Carson's poetry respectively. O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency and Lunch Poems exhibits jazz's breathlessness through polysyndeton and subversion of poetic norms. Carson's The Irish for No is similarly backlit by music where his demonstration of the long-line forged his ability to make language the subject in First Language which sees this further developed whilst demonstrating his mastery of collagism - a trope, critically unexplored in his work, connecting him to James Schuyler.