"Some sweet disorder" — the poetry of subversion

Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Medbh Mcguckian

Elmer Andrews

pp. 118-142

in: Gary Day, Brian Docherty (eds), British poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

Making a significant contribution to the "extension of the imaginative franchise"¹ which Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion have identified as a salient feature of contemporary British poetry are those poets outside the dominant social wisdom — not necessarily in overtly political terms, but in the sense of having at their disposal historical or symbolic resources, allegiances and affiliations denied to those who write straight out of the depthless, dehistoricised English mainstream. This may be a matter of class (Dunn, Harrison) or race (Braithwaite, Markham) or gender (Selima Hill, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian) or region (Muldoon, Paulin). This essay examines three of the younger Ulster poets in whose writing the marginal becomes central, to both memorable and subversive effect. For the work of these poets may be seen to have a countercultural ambition, a transgressive function, in giving voice to what lies outside the law, outside the dominant (social and linguistic) value system. In their different ways, these poets open up, for a brief moment, onto disorder and illegality, tracing the unsaid and the unseen of culture, that which is silent, invisible, made "absent" because it lies outside the dominant categories. Given the traditional rigidity of the Ulster social formation out of which these poets wrote, and seeing the disastrous consequences of such obduracy, there were perhaps added incentives for an Ulster poet to try and extend the "imaginative franchise".