Last year, I gave a presentation at a conference which had been organised to open up the discourse around forgotten Irish women (by which I mean anyone who identifies as a woman) poets. After the conference, I was approached to submit my presentation as a chapter for a kind of conference proceedings publication. I was subsequently asked to rewrite the piece twice, and it seemed clear to me that both rewrite suggestions were attempts to sanitise the piece; to keep my ideas about gender inequality in Irish poetry publishing safely in the past and out of the present. I decided to withdraw the piece. Here it is. I’ve chosen to publish it in its second iteration, which unsurprisingly turned out even more polemical than the original. I hope it will encourage others to speak out against ongoing inequalities of all kinds in Irish poetry publishing.

***

I’ve been told that we who fight for the fair representation of women poets, past and present, in the canon of Irish literature must make sure that our – women’s – voices are not “too grating.” I give no such undertaking, here or elsewhere.

Rhoda Coghill was born in 1903 and published her first poetry collection, The Bright Hillside, in 1948. Her second collection, Time Is a Squirrel, was published in 1956. She also published a translation of Rilke’s Angel Songs. Her short biography in 1,000 Years of Irish Poetry describes her as “better known as a musician”, and the website of the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland features a biography in its list of composers; according to this source, she began her musical studies as a pianist, studied with Arthur Schnabel in Berlin and “became the official accompanist in Radio Eireann in 1939 and remained in the post until 1969.”  Her rhapsody Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking (1923, based on a Whitman poem) has been described as “one of the few significant orchestral works written by an Irish composer before World War II.” A.A. Kelly, in Pillars of the House, notes that she “took to writing poetry after an illness” and was already very well known as a composer when she sent a poem pseudonymously to Seumas O’Sullivan, then editor of The Dublin Magazine, in the 1940s. O’Sullivan states in the foreword to her first collection that, if she had “signed her poem with her own name – a name which is held in honour wherever music is honoured in Ireland – [he] might have less cause to congratulate [himself] on that swift acceptance” of her first submission. In the same foreword he ironically concludes that Coghill’s poems “will eventually give their author full title to a place amongst the poets of our time, and to a hearing when many of the free-verse yodellers [his emphasis], and other disturbers of the peace have long since been brought to justice, and locked away securely in a well-deserved oblivion.” Coghill died in 2000. 

One of the things I love about Coghill’s work is how she has brought her musical sensibility to bear on the lines, how she has thereby made traditional verse forms new. Coghill also treats astutely and, in my view, subversively of women’s experiences. Her poem “To His Ghost, Seen After Delirium” has been described by Anne Fogarty as a request from Eurydice to Orpheus “for some sign of recognition of her identity” as a full subject.

In late 2017 the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, which featured four women out of a total of thirty poets, inspired Chris Murray, founder of Poethead, to reach out to Irish women poets to look into starting an awareness-raising movement, and Fired! was born. Our mission has been twofold: firstly, to raise awareness about the many forgotten Irish women poets and their work, and to educate each other about them; and, secondly, to challenge gender inequality in modern-day Irish poetry publishing. There’s a sense in the Fired! discussions that we’re all learning together – many of the poets we discuss have never had their names mentioned in academic settings before. To that end, we often use the hashtag “#HedgeSchool”. We presented a pledge on our website, “The Pledge: Fired! Irish women poets and the canon” (https://awomanpoetspledge.com), which all were invited to sign.

It states:

I pledge henceforth to withdraw my participation from publications, edited collections, conferences, festivals and other projects which do not make what I consider to be a good-faith effort to adequately represent the contribution women make to literature and literary criticism.

Hundreds of interested people signed, national and international: the list is available on the site, which has recently been archived through RASCAL and is available to view at http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon . Anne Enright signed, as did Jen Benka. There are literary festival directors, heads of university schools of English, head librarians, arts officers, and other key players in the cultural landscape. The signatures mean that good-faith attempts at gender balance will be made by these people in all the projects they develop. During the several years while the Pledge was live, no head of a major Irish poetry publishing house signed it to my knowledge.

I represented Fired! at the Missing Voices symposium organised by Poetry Ireland to explore these issues last year, and opened my presentation by reading the poem of Coghill’s which has had the greatest effect on my life and work, “Hail, Posterity”:

  But thou shalt ever lie dead nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or ever, for thou  

  hast none of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander unnoticed, even in the houses of 

  Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead.

                                                                                                         – Sappho

  I have robbed the wild bee of his honey, and

  hidden it among the rafters;

  I have buttoned my jacket over that which you

  cannot steal.

  Listen!  I dare not hang a lamp in the tree-tops

  to light a flight to heaven; nor dance and sing

  to the gay mode that wins a cheap affection,

  the right of amadans, minstrels and fair-clowns;

  nor play the noisy patriot's hurdy-gurdy;

  I have not set a footprint on that rock-face

  where the adventurous, in the fine air

  achievement breathes, have waved a brave salute

  and disappeared, to map wisdom's frontiers.

  Nor have I forged a strong link in the chain

  that grounds the anchor of heredity

  in distant Genesis, have sowed no acorns

  to furnish future forests with proud wood;

  my present fingers cannot stain a canvas

  with the coloured flux that seems all life, all knowledge,

  to conjure up a universe of beauty

  till even fools shall gape and cry: "Praise God!"

  No one will seek my grave, or mark the date

  when I shall leave the world: no one imagine

  my swift enrolment in the choir of saints,

  and institute a celebration for me,

  a day of pious prayer and memory,

  dedicate to the evergreen repeating

  of a gold calendar of worthy deeds.

  I do not claim a clear chorus of praise.

  What in my life deserves a plume of fame?

  But yet, although the might of Time remains

  unmoved by my small bickering - (for hawks will rest

  after their domination, and forget

  the scattered feathers blossoming on the slopes,

  the little bloodstains sinking into clay,

  the stiffened claws, and the dull film on eyes

  that saw the moon, and saw no farther) - yet

  what though I earn no wreath of immortelles,

  having no immortality in history,

  and bear no posthumous weight of dignity,

  nor win a place in glory's breviary?

  Leaving a name that echoes into silence,

  in some form I shall be valued, when my spirit,

  the ghostly sap that lends its comfort to

  my human body, withdraws to its eternal

  source in the divine Ground: when my dust,

  learning new figures in the atoms' dance,

  has blown and settled into this planet's mass:

  when all that is pitiful has been resolved

  in colour and leaf-stirrings, in clover-flowers,

  bowing before your lordly Person's procession. 

A few years ago I had started researching forgotten Irish women poets of the nineteen-thirties, forties and fifties, Coghill among them. As I was researching, spending time in the archives reading letters and manuscripts, I began to realise that the poets I was studying had, for the most part, realised during their lifetimes that they were going to be forgotten. Some suffered from strange, possibly somatisation-related disorders (where mental and emotional pain are expressed in the body) that seemed to run alongside this process of extinction-in-life. As I worked, I started to come apart as a writer. How do you go on when your heritage is being burned behind you? I was thinking constantly about who would read the research I was toiling over. Almost certainly just academics. Almost certainly just feminist academics. Would these writers’ voices ever make it back into the wider conversations about Irish poetry?

In the end I moved away from that mode, and began a huge poem (13.12.18) where I rejected the history of Ireland and Irish women I had grown up with and imagined a new one, with women’s voices at the centre. It was a cathartic experience, and I recently gained my doctorate in Creative Writing with it. But I felt guilt about the writers I had been studying. I still wanted to bring them into the conversation properly, and not be another person who had allowed them to stay forgotten. Sitting underneath my desk was a collection of Coghill’s letters, given to me by members of her family, which I had been to afraid to read for years. This essay is about those letters, and it is the best I can do to fulfill that early promise.

The letters are housed in two battered old brown A4 envelopes. As I read through them, I catalogue them carefully by order and theme. As with the other poets I’ve researched, I try to find a sense of Coghill’s personhood in one-sided conversations, nuances and turns of phrase, and variously indecipherable handwriting styles. I have talked about Rhoda Coghill for years now. I’ve copied cassette tapes given to me by her family, recordings from the radio of RTÉ interviews on the occasion of her 90th birthday where she describes going home through the ashes from the burning Four Courts after a music exam. I’ve listened to her Rhapsody, teased out the tone-poems she created with it. She, like the others, is so far away from me, so inaccessible. Like the others, she is visible almost exclusively in the backgrounds of men’s lives, hardly there. I squint and strain my eyes. I don’t want to create a being of my own imagining, like the murderous goddess in my long poem.

The letters date mainly from the years around 1948, when The Bright Hillside was published. Themes emerge. Coghill seemed to work extremely hard to connect with other writers, and to have been successful; there are countless letters thanking her for sending her collection and describing favourite poems which the letter-writers already know well. Letters of enthusiastic praise come from Kate O’Brien, Kathleen Hoagland, Valentin Iremonger (requesting poems for his new Magazine, Envoy), Maeve Brennan’s father Bob, Dorothy Macardle, and very many others. Hoagland (editor of the remarkable 1,000 Years of Irish Poetry), writes in a 1946 letter, “I am amazed at your two-sided genius”. Macardle closes a three-page late 1948 letter with: “I do hope that your book will have a really good reception & bring you intelligent appreciation. To have [hid/had] such talents as yours is quite remarkable. I would like to think they bring you happiness.” Among several exuberant communications from Kate O’Brien is a 1948 telegram which reads “WITH DELIGHT I SALUTE THE POET OF THE BRIGHT HILLSIDE SHE IS TRULY MAGNIFICENT AND OFTEN AGAIN MAY WE LIFT OUR GLASSES TO HER GREAT RENEWING GIFT AND TO HER DEAR NAME”.

Coghill’s poem “The Robin” is singled out for praise in many of these letters. A single rejection letter from the editor of The Capuchin Annual in 1945 reads, “Perhaps it is because I am a Franciscan that I don’t want the robin banished away out of Christendom to the world of Pan. Since poetic legend has associated him with Our Lord I think it is nicer to keep him. But you don’t need me to tell you that you write beautifully as I know already that you play beautifully.” Someone has underlined the words “Christendom to the world of Pan” and added an exclamation mark in the margin.

There are, of course, many official-but-friendly communications from Seumas O’Sullivan. He and his intriguing foreword are much mentioned also, and Coghill’s anxiety about this introduction to her first collection is palpable even without her side of the conversations. Several of her supporters offer reassurance about the foreword, telling her not to worry about it and that either they think it positive or (more often) insignificant. O’Sullivan himself, bafflingly, writes to beg her not to use it. In a three-page missive all about The Bright Hillside, Kate O’Brien notes “that Seumas O’Sullivan hasn’t said at all what is to be said about these blindingly true and brilliant poems…” Geoffrey Taylor writes “S.O.S. might have given you Emily Lawless as a companion in his galaxy of Irish Poetesses but I dare say he has never heard of so real a poet. But I mustn’t be catty. And once the poems are looked at no one will worry about the introduction.” A typed draft obituary for the composer Arthur Duff, signed “R.S.C.” (Coghill often used her father’s matronym, Sinclair), contains what I see as a kind of engagement with the issue:

“In his idiomatic use of Irish folk-music, the simple beauty of those modal tunes which he loved is naturally revealed and emphasized by some gift of understanding peculiar to himself, and not often found elsewhere. Writing now of this gift, I am reminded of a character in one of George Moore’s novels, to whom someone made this suggestion –  ‘The first line written in one of the ancient modes, and, underneath the melody, chromatic harmonies.’ The reply was (it would have been Arthur Duff’s answer too) – ‘No, that would   be horrible. That is the infamous modern practice. I seek the harmony in the sentiment of the melody I am writing, in the tonality of the mode I am writing.’”

It’s impossible to know how Coghill felt about being roundly set in opposition to the avant garde by O’Sullivan. As a woman poet setting out her stall for the first time, she would not be the first or last to have to decide whether to disavow her newly published work or to continue to inhabit the role allotted to her.

An undated slip of paper signed “Lennox Robinson” reads “I am asking Donagh to write to you about the anthology, I am not certain what poem or poems we hope to use –”. At Missing Voices,as I had done so many times before, I retold the story of the book to which Robinson is almost certainly referring here. It is one which has been well-documented by now, by Eavan Boland in particular. In 1958, Donagh MacDonagh and Robinson edited The Oxford Book of Irish Verse. It contained poems by eighteen women (Coghill among them, of course), which was an exceptional proportion at the time and, in fact, still is – it’s almost impossible to find an anthology of Irish poetry that has better than 70:30 representation. Then, in 1986, Thomas Kinsella brought out The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. I asked the audience if they knew how many women were in it, and they did. One – Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. I recounted that she appeared only in translation, and asked if they knew who the translator in that instance had been. Again they did, and they answered, laughing. Kinsella. The one piece by a woman in the book was essentially paraphrased in the editor’s own words.

Every time I recount this story, it becomes more incredible to me. Where had the others (including Coghill) selected by MacDonagh and Robinson gone, and had there not been a single other woman poet in the intervening years who merited inclusion? Had no-one involved noticed – or had they simply not cared? And why did everyone continue to not notice or care when that pattern of erasure and omission of women kept repeating itself over and over in the Irish poetry anthologies that followed, right up to today?

An unattributed, undated typed draft review of Time is a Squirrel notes that Coghill “shows once more her gift for original and unexpected imagery. The contrast to Mr. Kinsella [sic], she uses imagery, so to speak, in a positive rather than a negative way and so it is exciting rather than depressing.”

Another review, from 1949, bears the evidence of having been sent by Francis MacManus – then General Features Officer at Radio Éireann – to “Messrs Hodges Figgis”. Its author is named as Padraic Fallon, and the tone is familiarly patronising – perfectly in tune with how established male authors spoke about the two other poets I studied (Samuel Beckett described Blanaid Salkeld’s work as ‘personal and moving, when not rendered blue in the face by the sonnet form’ [i], and John Betjeman felt that Sheila Wingfield’s first memoir was ‘a book which only a woman can write, but which a man can enjoy’ – this was actually praise). [ii] The reviewer (presumably Fallon) notes, “it is not a book that breaks into wings or throws the horizons about, it doesn’t clamour but neither does it freeze into still life, it is without pretensions of any kind and yet, for me at least, it has thrown up a couple of little platforms outside the limits of my own experience. And that has real value.” He continues, “Now, it doesn’t do this with the expertness of the experienced craftsman or with the dervish-dance of the inspired. Miss Coghill has not yet reached the stage when she can use the forceps to draw out the living [here the word ‘orgasm’ has been typed; the author has obscured it with the handwritten word ‘organism’] from the background, she doesn’t make one word do the work of ten by fusing image and experience, she concentrates too much on the setting.” He quotes a poem (“Within My Dream”) in full to illustrate his point, then edits it as one might a young student’s offering in a workshop, using phrases like “a more experienced poet would have...” He uses the pronoun “he” exclusively when talking about this hypothetical better poet. He allows that her poems about myth, the moon and so on (more appropriately ‘female’ themes in his view, perhaps?) are good if “simple”, and concludes “It is impertinent for any reviewer to advise a poet, but it seems to me that it is in the unselfconsciousness of poems like SHINING BRIGHT that Miss Coghill might feel most at home since she can pour all into the image and let it speak for itself [my emphases]. A deeply interesting first book.”

As I read through the letters, familiar questions start to recur. Are you better? We heard that you were unwell? Friends refer to Coghill being on “sick-leave” and “over-done” and hope she is recovering. These sentiments occur at the same time as the rest – the months before and after the publication of The Bright Hillside. It has been suggested to me by those who knew her well that Coghill turned to poetry due to illness, or maybe heartbreak. The correspondence archives of Wingfield and Salkeld were filled with discussions of illnesses which seemed inseparable from their difficulties with writing and being heard, so much so that I developed their symptoms as I read [iii]. Not having Coghill’s answers to hand, I have no idea whether she told these well-wishers that she was getting better or not, or even what was wrong with her.

One of the last documents in the envelopes is a long handwritten biographical note which is missing its first page. It is unattributed, and much-edited. I believe it to be Coghill’s own work, her life in her own words – presumably for an event or publication of some kind. The rhapsody is mentioned:

“This very strong work stands out among Irish music written before the last war, and is to be   recorded later this year by the Guinness Choir RTÉ Concert Orchestra. This will be the first   complete performance, though it was played in a scaled-down form years ago by the then   newly-formed and rather small Radio Orchestra with Robert McCullough as Tenor Soloist   and a quartet of soloists instead of the full choir for which it was written.”

Research would indicate that the significance of this composition has not been overplayed here. The “complete” performance mentioned happened in 1993, on the occasion of Coghill’s 90th birthday – meaning that it had never been performed as intended until then. Phrases like “rather small” and “instead of the full choir for which it was written” are telling.

“Rhoda is known also as a poet,” the text continues. An asterisk alongside the list of publications that follows corresponds to a note in the margin which reads:

“She remembers with immense pleasure her collaboration with so many artists – Irish, or of  foreign birth resident or visiting – as well as the equally [much overwritten: ‘demanding’  and ‘interesting’ are legible] work with younger [‘inexperienced’ erased] [‘performers’   erased] who had to be [‘coaxed’ erased] helped over their reserves & inexperience. One of her happiest moments was when she received the Jacobs [superscript: ‘broadcasting’] award with special recognition of her [‘work’ erased] contribution to the encouragement of young performers.”

The fact that formal recognition of Coghill in her lifetime was as a helper of others rather than as an accomplished artist in her own right comes to the fore insistently in this found poem of a palimpsest-paragraph.

Two letters signed “Jack B. Yeats” thank Coghill for invitations to tea, and accept. One of the only ways she and the others were searchable when I was doing my research was in her role as a salon hostess – that work of nurturing male artists always to the fore. I also found them through their husbands and sons. I mostly did not find them. The conversations mostly have not changed – but I continue to try to change them, as do many excellent feminists.

It has been heartening, in the last two years, to see the rich, nuanced discussions that have developed on social media around Fired! It has been a clear demonstration that there are other avenues alongside or outside of academia where we can disseminate information about forgotten and silenced people, learn together, thrash out differences and keep raising awareness effectively – where we can actually enter those wider conversations into which I have yearned to bring the women I study. So many people have contacted us to comment that they were completely unaware of the women and the problem of unbalanced representation until they interacted with our social media platforms, and that they are now interested to read more. We have embedded poems and papers into twitter posts, and the wealth of information of all kinds that is gathered on “The Pledge: Irish women poets and the canon” is only a click away. People with questions can ask them and have them answered, not just by us, but by the supportive community that has grown around us. Women writers and others experiencing silencing and invisibility today can be given some hope, some motivation to continue. I had hoped that the publication this piece was intended for would create a similar inclusive space for discussion, but I no longer believe that it will.

Acts of omission create real pain and hurt, as was intensely obvious during Missing Voices, where more than one person cried while presenting or listening. Acts of uncomplicated recovery, which work hard to remind us of voices which were silenced in the past but overlook or refuse to engage with the silencing which is still happening in the present, are themselves further erasures. Scholars like Ken Keating and Ailbhe McDaid of MEAS have begun to do vital work cataloguing and analysing the publishing statistics for Irish poetry presses, and the figures relating to gender thus far are startling and disappointing – as are also those relating to race, which have been much criticised and dismissed by elements of the Irish literary establishment.[iv] This tenacious work is finally making our challenge impossible to dismiss. Alongside gender, we need to look also at intersections with class, race, ability, language, citizenship status, and other loci of discrimination and silencing. We need to not be naive about barriers to participation and about outdated cultural biases around worth and merit.

It would have been easy to have made my Missing Voices presentation a diatribe, and it might have been healthier. It would have been easy to end this piece the way I started, unrepentant and defiant about the “gratingness” or otherwise of my voice when I speak up about inequality. But I spent 2018, along with hundreds of others, allowing people who said appalling things about me to unburden themselves so that we could have a conversation, and the Eighth Amendment was repealed. So when people who have failed to listen well in the past choose to enter a dialogue, if I have the strength I’m going to show up with an open heart. Yes, I know this is emotional labour. And those of us who are able will continue to do it, though it isn’t our responsibility, in the hope that young Irish women writers and other silenced writers in the future won’t have to. I want us to be able to talk about moving forward compassionately together; to have the courage to hold our hands up when we’ve been part of, or silent bystanders to, an act of exclusion; to be brave enough to call out exclusion and silencing when we witness it happening, no matter how important or intimidating the person or organisation involved; to have the integrity to step aside from projects which reinforce exclusionary practices even when our careers are screaming in the background; to start talking to each other, understanding each other, and supporting each other so the Irish poetry conversation – and the canon – can grow in a meaningful, inclusive way. 

Coghill’s work is filled with a beautiful, gentle wisdom, even when she speaks about her own erasure. Confounding the very concept of temporal persistence on which the canon (and patriarchal history) is based, she maintains that, “Leaving a name that echoes into silence / In some form I shall be valued.”I’m returning her letters to her family, for whose patience and generosity I will be forever grateful [v]. The difficult work of ‘complicated’ feminist recovery remains incomplete, as does my own recovery. I hope that other researchers can do more with the clues that are left to us, including these letters, and can build a brighter past for other young writers. I am hopeful for the future.

View the Pledge at http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon

Join the conversation on Twitter @FiredIrishPoets

Kathy D’Arcy is a feminist poet, academic and activist based in Cork. She was the Chair of the Cork Together for Yes campaign and is currently working to highlight misconduct in Irish poetry publishing with #WakeUpIrishPoetry. Her collections are Encounter and The Wild Pupil, and in 2018 she edited the collection Autonomy to raise funds and awareness for the Together for Yes campaign. Her doctoral studies were supported by an Irish Research Council Postgraduate scholarship. 

Website: www.kathydarcy.com

Twitter: @KathyDArcyCork

[i]  In his 1934 essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry.’

[ii]  Foreword to the memoir Real People (Cresset 1952).

[iii]  I did some research into the possibility that Wingfield in particular suffered from fibromyalgia – a condition more prevalent in women and only recently taken seriously. I found an article in a medical journal where the physician had drawn a sketch of Botticelli’s Three Graces to illustrate where in their bodies women perceived most pain with the condition.

[iv]  MEAS (Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector) published their report ‘Gender in Poetry Publishing in Ireland 2008-2017’ in December 2018. It showed for example that, during the period analysed, Gallery Press received over €1.5 million from the Arts Council and published 77% male authors. The report is available here: http://measorg.com/poetrypublishing.html. The MEAS reports on poetry reviewing in the Irish Times, which include statistics on race, are available here: http://measorg.com/irishtimes.html. All of the MEAS reports are worth reading.

[v]  I have digitised the archive, and it is available for study once the permission of the family has been granted. I am so grateful for the generosity and support Coghill’s family members have shown me in this research.