The Honest Ulsterman and poetic depictions of the Troubles (1968–1986)

Abstract

Quite often cited as the beginning of the Ulster ‘Troubles’, summer 1968 was also the season the poet James Simmons established the Honest Ulsterman. This little magazine would run until summer 2003 and was reestablished as an online journal in 2014. From its first issues, it published work by prominent writers from across the globe as well as Northern Irish poetry, prose and criticism. Conterminous with the rise of the Heaney Generation, the Honest Ulsterman was instrumental in providing a platform for Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian, as well as already established poets such as Padraig Fiacc. All too aware of the international turmoil of 1968, in his editorial for the debut issue Simmons identified the moment as a ‘watershed in history’. Although he may have hoped, he didn’t know that the Honest Ulsterman would become the site of a very specific aesthetic watershed in literary history, where Irish poetry was forced to confront head-on political violence. Throughout the mid-1970s, as the ‘Troubles’ intensified, the Honest Ulsterman became a forum where writers debated – often heatedly – the ethics of addressing sociopolitical upheaval in verse. The eminent instance is Ciaran Carson’s review of Seamus Heaney’s North from the 1975 winter issue. The young poet took issue with what he perceived as unethical historiography, crass image-making and poetic exploitation. This paper will investigate the extent to which contributions to the Honest Ulsterman throughout the mid-1970s played a role in forging new aesthetical and ethical understanding of poetry’s relationship with politics, one which would have drastic formal consequences in ‘postmodernist’ Northern poetry in the succeeding decade. Key here will be Heaney’s and Carson’s still-unacknowledged debt to Fiacc, who incorporated violent sectarianism within his poetry years before North, whilst holding to self-described principles of verisimilitude and authenticity decades before Carson’s long-lined and kitchen-sinked collection the Irish for No (1987).<br/