'The bright garbage on the incoming wave': Rubbish in the poetry of Derek Mahon

Textual Practice

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 323-343

  Haughton, Hugh ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Contemporary Irish Writing; Cultural Value; Derek Mahon; Ecology; Irish Studies; Modern Poetry; Modernity; Northern Ireland; Northern Irish Poetry; Poetics; Postmodernity; Rubbish Theory; Seamus Heaney

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249424269     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360210141510     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1999). Future references will take the form of bracketed page references to CP after the citation.
2. Quotations from 'Ricordi di Miseria' ('Memories of Misery') and 'Trionfa della Notte' ('Triumph of Night') from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), pp. 24, 53.
3. 'Sesso, Consolatione della Miseria', Roman Poems, pp. 146-7.
4. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), p. 26.
5. See, for example, Harold Rosenberg, 'Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers', in Katherine Hoffman (ed.) Collage: Critical Views (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989).
6. Jeeven Vasager, 'Amusement at cleaner's judgement on Hirst's art', Guardian (20 October 2001).
7. In 'The Small Rain', Hudson Letter XVIII, he imagines a redemptive twist to the process whereby durables prove transient: 'When the present occupant is no longer here/and durables prove transient, as they do,/all will survive somehow; the pictures too/prints, posters, reproductions, such as they are' (CP 221).
8. Mahon Papers, Emory.
9. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 161.
10. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999).
11. Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb, War on Waste: Can AMERICA Win its Battle with Garbage? (Washington: Island, 1989).
12. See also Martin V. Melosi, 'Down in the dumps: is there a garbage crisis in America?', in Melosi (ed.) Urban Public Policy: Historical Models and Methods (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
13. Don De Lillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 287-8.
14. David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in 19th Century Art and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
15. See also Marjorie Garber's review 'Spitting, sneezing, smearing', London Review of Books (10 August 2000), p. 16.
16. In Rubbish Theory Michael Thompson notes that 'in British society, Gypsies are seen as social rubbish and they have only to tow their caravans on to the suburban verge to provoke the ferocious rubbish response of the sedentary residents' (p. 93).
17. Mahon remembers his mother, who had previously worked in the linen industry but became a housewife on marriage, as 'very house-proud in the obsessive way that a woman in that position often is. . . . She'd keep dusting and keep everything as bright as a new penny. Of course, this was a bit of a strain on the child, an irritant. In fact, with my mother, no harm to her, I think it was pathological.' Eamon Grennan, 'Derek Mahon: the art of poetry LXXXII', Paris Review (spring 1980), p. 155.
18. Mahon notes the 'weird poetry' of a variant of this slogan painted on a wall in Portrush: 'We shall never forsake the blue skies of Ulster for the grey skies of an Irish Republic', Journalism, p. 218.
19. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 3.
20. In 'Life in the fast lane', Mahon quotes Jay McInerney: 'Downriver the Statue of Liberty shimmers in the haze; you watch the solemn progress of a garbagebarge, wreathed in a cloud of screaming gulls, heading out to sea', Journalism, p. 235.
21. Thompson, Rubbish Theory, p. 92.