“’Athrú’ is the Gaelic word for ‘Change.’ There has been a recent extraordinary changing of the guard in Irish poetry. First, this is the result of the recent deaths of a series of the monumental figures: Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, John Montague, Seamus Deane, Maire Mac an tSaoi, Brendan Kennelly. Each was a major Irish poet, each highly influential for the main post-World War II strands of Irish poetry. Each worked within a relatively conservative lyric tradition, indebted to, and operating in the shadow cast by W.B. Yeats’s poetic achievement. Each thrived within an Irish poetry ecology that respected poets and sought their opinions on politics. Each was impacted by ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (1969-1995); all wrote over careers that also spanned a transformation of post-colonial Ireland from an inward-looking nation to a secular, affluent, globalized one. Most saw themselves as adapters of carefully-tended traditions in world poetry, yet saw themselves principally as Irish. Their exit from the scene means that the moment is ripe for a revolution in Irish poetry, a reevaluation of the very category of ‘poetry’ in Irish culture, a rethinking of the power of different poetries to speak to the nation and to represent the nation in the world.

The task this panel sets itself is to seize this critical moment. The speakers will first survey some of the exciting emerging trends in the now variegated field of Irish poetics, and second, suggest further possibilities for the radical changes that are already coming into view. These changes include the following. First, there has been an utter opening up of the way gender is dealt with in Irish writing—poetry at last wrestled from the patriarchy. Second, there are now Polish-Irish, Nigerian-Irish, Chinese-Irish as well as American-Irish poets--revolutionary influx of new cultural traditions, expectations, rhythms and voices. Third, poetry itself is transforming. Irish poetry has long mixed popular and elite genres, and engaged with other forms, especially music. Now, from hip-hop to street art, from e-poetry to spoken-word performance poetry, the new poetry crosses new genres. Fourth, an ambitious poetic tradition, self-consciously avant-garde, its forerunners Irish surrealists Coffey and Beckett, which combines the local and concerns lyric poets avoided (such as climate change), has burst upon the scene. Finally, the old division between English and Gaelic is now breached also. Drastically new rhythms, idioms and topics have arrived in Irish verse. This panel’s goal is to foster this—and find critical languages to keep up.

The first paper, by Prof. Eric Falci, is "What Sentences Do in Contemporary Irish Poetry" considers sentences and how several recent Irish poets have maintained them, abandoned them, deconstructed their logics, or made them move outside of the usual bounds of grammar and syntax. What experiments with sentences and their parts (syntax, grammar, punctuation) have Catherine Walsh, Maurice Scully, Trevor Joyce, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, and Gail McConnell undertaken, and what are the the stakes of such experiments?

The second, Prof. Laura O’Connor’s “Call & Response: Apostrophe as Gaeilge,” reads two contemporary poets writing in Gaelic, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's The Ghost in the Throat (2020) and Ceaití Ní Bhéildúin's Agallamh sa Cheo (Conversation in the Mist, 2019) use apostrophe to stage dialogues with their Gaelic heritage. "This is a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge-song," Ni Ghriófa declares in Ghost, as the poet-speaker weaves together details of her daily life and her response to Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (1773) into a "teacs baineann" or gynotext. Ní Bhéildúin's Agallamh mixes historical sources and present concerns in a conversation between Mount Brandon’s human and ghostly denizens. Both use the temporality of lyric apostrophe to interrogate their relationship to the Irish language.

The third, Prof. Enda Duffy’s “Tír Gan Teanga?: Globalization, Class, and the New Irish Poetics.” offers a materialist reading of contemporary Ireland in the world economic system, and on its role as a tax haven for digital information companies Apple and Facebook. He then connects this to the poetry’s possibilities, arguing that the use of diverse languages and rhythms in Irish poetry represents not a complex, often ambivalent response to how both money and culture are now flowing through, and being valued there. He then turns to the obscurities of the ‘Soundeye’ poets; their experimentalism, while it allows for a new political distance, can also be analogous to ‘world-bank heterogeneity.’ He asks how radical poetry can evade such networks and critique them.