In his 2003 review of Randolph Healy’s Green 532: Selected Poems 1983–2000 (Salt Publishing, 2002), Peter Riley instructs the reader to forget two things: that Healy is Irish, and that he is supposed to be “alternative, avant-garde, experimentalist.”1 Rather than describing Healy’s work, Riley is here intervening in its critical reception. Healy is part of a small cabal of Irish poets—including Trevor Joyce, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills, Geoffrey Squires, and the late Maurice Scully—whose writing has circulated mainly in small editions published by its own members or else by small presses abroad.2 For decades, the appearance of new work from these poets was an occasion for panegyric on an entity called by turns the Irish avant-garde, experimental Irish poetry, or Ireland’s neo-modernists. Healy undertakes to set the record straight in his preface to The Electron-Ghost Casino (Miami University Press, 2024), his first major publication since Green 532. Is our man “part of a neo-avant-garde”? “No, but thanks anyway.” Does he consider himself “an Irish poet”? Well, “[w]ho wouldn’t want to be an Irish poet?” (ix, emphasis in original).
In or around 1760, when James Macpherson’s Ossian was giving Homer a run for his money as Europe’s favorite literary cryptid, the figure of “Irish poet” acquired a mystique over and above contingencies of ethnic identity or geographical provenance. A century later, long after Goethe’s young Werther had found his sorrows mirrored in the heroes of Fingal, the figure had practically become gimmick. “The Celt,” Matthew Arnold pronounces in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), “has not produced great poetical works” at the scale of Dante’s Commedia or Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—yet his cold consolation reads like a prophecy of triumph in the marketplace. If Arnold’s collective Celt “runs off into technic, where he employs the utmost elaboration and attains astonishing skill,” so much the better; after all, it was command of technique, rather than any epic achievement, that enabled Seamus Heaney to dominate two-thirds of all sales by living poets in the UK at the turn of the century.3 By turning the question around on his readers (“Who wouldn’t want to be an Irish poet?”), Healy dryly acknowledges the term’s overdetermination—its status not as national identity but as signature commodity of Irish literature’s traditionally export-led growth model.
While Healy’s question remains unanswered in the preface, he returns to it obliquely in a poem whose punning title, “Outtakes,” refers both to corpses preserved in Northern Europe’s peatlands and to this subject’s global legibility as one of Irish poetry’s most iconic tropes. The poem’s unannounced conceit recalls the origin of that legibility: a sequence from Heaney’s volume North (Faber and Faber, 1975) in which “bog bodies” become figures both for Ireland’s distinctive landscape and its contemporary political turmoil. But whereas Heaney’s bog bodies are avatars of the “tribal,” atavistic violence of the Northern Irish Troubles, the poet of “Outtakes” casts a colder eye on his subjects. They are no longer figuratively Irish, nor even literally Danish: “A sign says they have no identity / peat having leached their DNA. / Someone wonders how much they’d go for” (5). Healy’s titular outtakes are victims of a less spectacular sort of violence than Heaney’s communal scapegoats: “stateless persons” avant la lettre, detached from the framework of national allegory. Another museumgoer’s idle speculation unceremoniously reduces them to mere commodities—a figurative displacement from exhibit to gift shop.
In his 2020 essay “Cultures of Poetry in Contemporary Ireland,” David Lloyd offers an incisive analysis of Irish poetry’s status in this marketplace: as “a reliably commodified form of traditional craft,” it “occupies a peculiar nook, long secured for it by the retailing of rural and decaying industrial backdrops” on one hand and an “insistent formalism and programmatic adherence to the constancy of ‘voice’” on the other.4 “Outtakes” models a different kind of poetic authority. By presenting the words of sign and spectator without comment, the poet withdraws from the poem, inviting us to recognize the incongruities for ourselves and becoming something of an outtake himself. This displacement dovetails with earlier accounts of Healy’s work, which often emphasized his use of procedural and constraint-based modes. In Green 532, for instance, “(The) Republic of Ireland” consists entirely of anagrams of its title, ranging from epigrammatic commentary on the Republic’s draconian social policies (“birth pill feared on cue”) and the legacy of partition (“creed liable if up North”) to a kind of Yeatsian pastiche alternately poignant (“brilliance of deep hurt”) and parodic (“punch of terrible ideal”).5 The lyrical “voice” and its often marketable authenticity are thus supplanted by modes that destabilize national identity as well as poetic authority.
If Healy’s early poems ignore the Yeatsian exhortation to vatic performance—“Irish poets learn your trade / Sing whatever is well-made”—The Electron-Ghost Casino represents another way forward.6 The volume’s valedictory poem, “Dalek Not Included,” exemplifies this shift, combining a digressive, conversational mode with a homophonic conceit: “I like that talk / ends in a k. / Otherwise it would be talc” (76, emphasis in original). This line, coming halfway through the poem, retroactively organizes preceding anecdotes and observations around this sonic interplay: “Mick talks / like he’s playing dominoes,” the poem begins; a subsequent question fuses this initial line in a reference to “milk”; “Then there’s magick of course” (75–76, my emphasis). Later, a quasi anagram combines with alliteration to extend the conceit: “‘Where’s the real stuff in life / to cling to?’ sings Tony / not really interrogatively,” with Tony [Bennett] taken to task for “prepositions” that concern “themselves / with charm rather than logic” (76, my emphasis). As Healy remarks elsewhere in the collection, “It’s hard for questions / when pro-forma answers swarm” (38); Bennett’s own prescription (“Love is the answer”) remains unquoted but is about as “pro-forma” as they come. A willingness to “sing whatever is well-made”—by Broadway’s measure, if not that of Yeats—allows the crooner to peddle easy answers. But the poet of “Dalek Not Included” asks how we might “sing” such questions “interrogatively.”
To wit, “Dalek Not Included” has two punchlines, only one of which is explicitly rendered, and neither of which offers a definitive answer to the singer’s question. The first of these concludes the poem, punctuating its final anecdote:
When my sisters didn’t want to wash their hair they would douse it with talc then brush it out. Teenage-I tried it once but got the dose wrong aging a decade per minute frantic brushing increasing oil production. People laughed in the street. Happiness is closer than you think. (77)
In the idiom of advertisement, the last line converts public humiliation into a kind of perverse moral uplift, giving us the tribal allegory of Heaney’s own bog bodies in reverse while surreptitiously invoking the refrain of Bennett’s “Make Someone Happy,” the tune quoted above. The teenage poet has indeed made “someone” happy—a whole street’s worth of someones—albeit at his own expense. The poem’s governing conceit—the sonic interplay between “talk” and “talc”—dissolves into neither voice nor powder but thought, abstracting derisive laughter into “Happiness” irrespective of its cause. It’s not “talk” that has the final word, nor “talc,” but a gesture toward interiority tinged equally with stoicism and paranoia. The clinging properties of “talc” find their figural resolution—but no timely remedy—in the injunction to “think,” thereby preserving the critical detachment on which the poem’s comedy depends.
The poem’s second punchline emerges only through a triangulation of its title, an endnote, and the conceit of another poem in the collection. The “Dalek” of the title is in fact “included,” if we replace its voiced alveolar plosive /d/ with its unvoiced counterpart /t/. A prior association between these fictional aliens and the problem of poetic voicing is cited in Healy’s endnote, which attributes the title “to a lively exchange between Tom Pickard and J. H. Prynne at the Festival of Sparty Lea, in 1967,” but refrains from further exposition, adding only, “It’s worth looking up” (84). (For the curious: the exchange in question involved Pickard telling Prynne that he “read like a fucking dalek.”7) The rigor and erudition of Prynne’s oeuvre notwithstanding, his name comes to signify a kind of gimmick: a mode of poetic authority grounded in elaborately figured surfaces and allusive density, the veritable antithesis of the Irish lyric’s vatic performance. “Dalek Not Included” also extends its conceit across textual coordinates. But by doing so in the colloquial rhythms of anecdote and badinage, it gives rise to a different kind of lyric voicing: a dry, granular analysis of the experiential residues that cling to thought. In a word, not a “talk-poem”—like “Crash,” the volume’s homage to David Antin—but a talc-poem.
Despite his droll evasiveness, Healy does venture two normative claims in his preface: “I’d like to think that anything can be a poem, unless it doesn’t want to be. Or that a poem should be at least as interesting as good conversation” (ix, emphasis in original). If “Dalek Not Included” evokes the quality of that conversation, the first (and more tentative) of these propositions is perhaps best illustrated by “Willy,” whose more pointed challenge to conventional expectations of what an Irish poem—or a poem written by an Irish writer—entails is couched in a kind of displacement:
My father was a writer too working right on the edge maintaining an amorous correspondence with a large number of different women simultaneously until having repeatedly placed one person’s letter in another person’s envelope he shorted the entire network down to one final pen-friend in Scotland. Leaving nothing to chance, he got on the boat and asked her to marry him. “I suppose so,” she replied, and they did, he returning to Ireland, she remaining. (35)
Whatever expectations the word “writer” might initially conjure are subverted by degrees in the lines that follow, tongue staunchly in cheek. Nor is the father much of a lover: his proposal to the poet’s mother receives only a tepid “I suppose so,” and though she later follows him to Dublin, “her heart” was apparently “not in it.” But the poem’s oedipal travesty takes a turn in its final lines:
He wrote ballads too, one in the person of a mother grieving for her son cut short by means of capital punishment the refrain being They hung my Willy on a tree. (35)
The adverbial “too” of the poem’s opening line links the poet’s own vocation to the avocation of his father; here, the same word connects the father’s letter-writing with his work in other modes. In verse, too, the father has left nothing to chance: the quoted refrain gathers in a single (punch) line all the customary stock-in-trade of the native doggerel. The mater dolorosa who laments her son’s (presumably political) martyrdom embodies that familiar synthesis of Marian iconography with the nationalist cult of Kathleen Ni Houlihan, found in the likes of Patrick Pearse’s “The Mother.”8 The father, that is to say, is unquestionably an “Irish poet.” But the son’s ironic refraction of this fraught patrimony reflects a sensibility less given to displays of solemn patriotism: the wry description of the titular Willy “cut short” registers both a departure from the hackneyed original and, more reflexively, the father’s own libidinal implication in the death his ballad supposedly mourns. By bungling its hallowed formulae, the father inadvertently discredits the tradition to which he turned for material supposedly more “suitable” to poetic rendering than his own fairly ordinary life. The poet, by contrast, secure in the conviction that “anything can be a poem,” discovers the material for an elegy by cross-referencing this occluded biographical substance with his father’s rather uncreative writing. “Willy” renders the transmission of Irish poetic patrimony allegorically, staging its “primal scene” not as solemn rite but as a comedy of errors—a series of misrecognitions, overdetermined by the ambivalent affects of the paternal relation.
But if the quoted refrain constitutes a sort of punchline at the father’s expense, the poet gives the measure of his own art in a final, epigrammatic remark:
I aspire to leave as worthy a legacy to my children. (35)
The high-handed treatment of the father’s mawkishness gives way to genuine, if understated, pathos: a tonic note of wry appreciation elicited not by superego injunction but by the disquieting image enfolded within the poem. In the end, it is the father who laughs last. His dispassionate wife is also the mother of our cerebral speaker; the speaker himself cannot help but see himself in the headless son, whose name makes his mutilation that much more suggestive. Despite the father’s best efforts at solemnity, he unwittingly authors a travesty of inherited models that distinguishes itself from said models by its power to destroy repose. Just as Healy himself arrives at the title of Irish poet by misdirection—broaching its reification obliquely, without quite relinquishing the term itself—“Willy” uses the ballast of (Irish) poetic convention as the ground of its own elegiac figuration.
Earlier in The Electron-Ghost Casino, “The Road to God Knows Where” quotes Keats’s dictum that “if poetry comes not as naturally / as the leaves to a tree / it had better not come at all.” It also offers its riposte in the form of a conundrum: “if we from natural processes result / is it possible for us to be artificial?” (16, italics in original). The denouement of “Willy” represents a sort of solution to this riddle. Here, the furniture of Irish balladry, a corpus of expressive forms hardened into cliché, has unexpectedly (not to say unconsciously) become a conduit for the overflow of powerful feelings. The tension between the natural and the artificial has long been a thematic benchmark in Healy’s work. In Green 532, poems that unfold from logical premises or within fixed constraints sit alongside others which, like “Storms” and “Scales [XI],” depict the analytical mind encumbered with or embarrassed by a body it cannot fully master. But in The Electron-Ghost Casino, where this tension is registered in the form of poems that couch their scrutiny of “pro-forma answers” in the more casual rhythms of anecdote and conversation, what emerges is a distinctive mode of poetic authority—one deriving not so much from the persuasive voicing of tradition as from the capacity to make another’s gaffe or one’s own garrulity an occasion for disconcerting reflection. It remains possible to write from the heart: it is, after all, “the world’s first organic word processor,” as Healy quips in his prefatory note to “(The) Republic of Ireland.” But being that “[t]he constitution of our country was written by President Eamon De Valera, by looking into his own heart,” a great deal depends on the person encumbered with said heart, as well as the object of his writing.9 This method can produce something far more grotesque than sentimental poetry: a sentimental constitution, suggestively aligned with the products of a native poetic tradition.
“Who wouldn’t want to be an Irish poet”? The poetic voice of The Electron-Ghost Casino constitutes a kind of second-order realization of the figure of the Irish poet by its careful troping of familiar emotive signatures and conventional usages, replacing both vatic performance and pastiche with calculated incongruities. Rather than derive authority from patrimonial convention, the poet draws on the substance of a usable tradition in order to demystify it from the standpoint of an outtake. It is only by conjuring Heaney’s bog bodies that “Outtakes” can confront the national allegory they once embodied with their supposedly alien residue: the asylum seekers marginalized in the present-day Republic. Similarly, “Willy” engages the cultural patrimony of the ballad in a sort of contrapuntal commentary, burlesquing the conventionally elegiac to unexpected ends. On the one hand, this paradigm could be extended to still other poems in The Electron-Ghost Casino: in “Carbon Footprints,” for instance, the opening analogy between a father’s manual labor and a son’s literary efforts refracts the opening gesture of Heaney’s “Digging,” the paradigmatic Irish lyric in its equation of agricultural labor and poetic métier. On the other, nods to poets like Antin, Prynne, and Ed Dorn signal a refusal to shore up national tradition as literary genealogy. Instead of a literal or figurative claim to territory, the category of “Irish poet” is recast as a peculiar kind of monopoly on a highly specialized literary commodity.
Born in 1956 in Scotland and raised in Dublin, Healy left school at fourteen to work a string of odd jobs—Hoffmann presser, Telex typist, security man—before studying mathematics at Trinity College Dublin and teaching physics and math at the secondary level. That he spent more of his working life within Ireland than many of the “Irish poets” whose global legibility enabled them to teach abroad aligns him, broadly, with other writers of experimental Irish poetry named above. But what distinguishes him from that cohort in turn is his refusal either to jettison or denounce the contested materials of Irish lyric, along with a concomitant leveraging of these materials to satirical ends—measuring their resources against the forms of experience, Irish or otherwise, they were meant to comprehend. Real bad faith inheres in the turn to reverence for tradition as an alibi; compared to the cynicism of those who trade on the cultural capital they pretend to inherit as traditional patrimony, outright invective seems embarrassingly sincere. The poems in The Electron-Ghost Casino reject reverence and renunciation as equally unpalatable alternatives. Instead, they estrange us from the putatively sincere in order to expose its constructedness—and, more significantly, the expressive possibilities of what is constructed, as distinct from what is reified or commodified. Following a reading in the fall of 2024, in response to a question about his poetics, Healy quipped, “you avoid the sentimental by avoiding the ordinary.” It is a characteristic bit of misdirection. Rather than avoid the ordinary as such, the poet of The Electron-Ghost Casino refuses commonplace formulae, rejecting pro forma answers even to the most ordinary questions. If the poet’s oblique approach to the machinery of convention is marked by irony, this irony is not cynical but profoundly constructive, transforming cultural resources into the raw materials for a more exacting kind of witness—one adequate to the contradictions entailed by the labor of the “Irish poet.” As Healy says himself, “It’s amazing what can work” (76).
Notes:
- Peter Riley, “‘anxious fuchsia ocean’: The Accomplishment of Randolph Healy,” Chicago Review 49, no. 2 (2003): 135–36. ↩︎
- In the new millennium, relevant publishing operations have included Trevor Joyce’s revived New Writers Press and SoundEye; Catherine Walsh and Billy Mills’s hardPressed poetry; and Healy’s own Wild Honey Press, which after a decade-long hiatus seems to be showing new signs of life. There are others. ↩︎
- Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature; and, On Translating Homer (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 79. ↩︎
- David Lloyd, “Cultures of Poetry in Contemporary Ireland,” in Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020, eds. Eric Falci and Paige Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 44–64, 44. ↩︎
- Randolph Healy, Green 532: Selected Poems 1983–2000 (Applecross, Australia: Salt, 2002), 40–41. ↩︎
- “Under Ben Bulben,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 327. ↩︎
- See Jeff Nuttall, “Bill Griffiths: An Appreciation,” Poetry Information, no. 15 (1976): 13–17. ↩︎
- Guinn Batten, “Ireland, Poetry of,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 728; Patrick Pearse, “The Mother,” in Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789–1939, ed. Stephen Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 393–94. ↩︎
- Healy, Green 532, 40. ↩︎