Technology in Contemporary Irish Poetry: Data at ‘the Edge of Language’

Abstract

This chapter considers Irish poets’ responses to emerging digital technologies and networked communication, particularly in the context of data, data infrastructures, and various platforms of information exchange. It examines poems by Paula Meehan, Paul Muldoon, Billy Ramsell, Peter Sirr, Derek Mahon, Randolph Healy, Justin Quinn, and Eavan Boland, and their addressing of the interrelated (if not identical) concepts of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’. These concepts participate, in complex ways, in social and material practices of meaning-making, alter the role and function of personal and cultural narrative memory, and raise questions as to the role of literary language in scrutinising the sociopolitical underpinnings of new media platforms and supply chains. Implicitly or explicitly, many of the discussed poems also explore how data relates to information as ‘meaningful data’, and how both of these concepts are connected to embodied, perceptual experience. An approach to data as objective, abstract, or neutral is discarded to demonstrate how data must be understood as always situated in relation to personal, social, economic, historical, and material processes, and structures of power.