The In-formal Poetics of Medbh McGuckian

Abstract

When a woman poet uses tropes of birth in her work, she seems to be consigned by our culture to a distinctively female poetics. Given the ways in which masculinised concerns are valued as universal and representative, and female concerns considered of interest to women only, then a woman writer, writing from her own maternal experience, appears to be disqualified from the sphere of the high-minded and serioutsly poetic. Pregnancy and gestation are the 'central events'l of Medbh McGuckian's Marconi's Cottage and when giving readings from this volume, McGuckian noted how her audiences reacted with indifference if she introduced a poem saying, 'this is a poem about early pregnancy', or 'that is a poem about late pregnancy'.2 She observed that 'all these men are sitting there, and the women are bored, and the men I think are not too excited either, you know'.3 The prospect of listening to poems about birth obviously did not satisfy an audience expecting more traditional poetic subjects and themes and this boredom would appear to stem from a belief that such subjective exploration of a gender specific experience can have no objective correlative with general appeal. However, in this article I will argue that resistance and indifference to birth as a poetic theme does not result from such experience being too particularised and too far outside the ambit of what is properly poetic, but that the explicit treatment of such experience overloads a poetics already deeply imbricated in incarnatory metaphors. The disinterest of McGuckian's audience has thus less to do with this being a site of difference and more to do with the fact that it is a site of too much sameness: a poem about actual gestation is not too 'different' from prevailing poetics but far too alike. Poetry that deals with the materiality of motherhood is highly problematic in an economy that prizes euphemistic birth in linguistic and abstracted terms. This poetic economy masculinises voice, and feminises form, that is, the body of the poem. Therefore, within such an economy, a woman poet's voice, (regardless of whether she deals specifically with incarnation or not) undermines the inertness of the