Poetics of Combination in the Work of Maggie O’Sullivan and Barry MacSweeney

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the poetries of Barry MacSweeney and Maggie O’Sullivan register and respond to British deindustrialisation through what I term an ‘aesthetics of combination’. If ‘combination’ typically describes the ‘joining together’ of two or more distinct entities, here it denotes the disjunctive ‘joining together’ and juxtaposition of distinct media and styles and attempts to explore how modes of political organising might function within the arena of cultural production. Through this two-fold poetics of combination, MacSweeney and O’Sullivan help us understand deindustrialisation, not merely as a political or economic event, but rather as a set of interlocking processes through which capital attempts to reorganise socioecological life and relations in order to stymie its internal crises at the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, I argue that MacSweeney and O’Sullivan attempt to develop material and discursive strategies adequate to these conditions of upheaval.