Ciaran Carson Belfast Confetti - seminar presentation notes PDF

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Practical for he seminar on Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti...

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LIFE •

born in Belfast, in his poetry the streets of Belfast are his unstable territory. Born in 1949, is a decade younger than Heaney

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attended Queen’s University, Belfast

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Won the Irish Literature Prize for Poetry

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traditional arts officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland  I will explain later on the significance of this

WORK •

some of his collections of poetry are the following: •

The New Estate is his first collection, it was published in 1976 and although it was well received, his next collection did not appear until 1988

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The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; more than ten years have passed between these two and the reason for this is that Carson had a different opinion about poetry and art compared to his contemporaries. His job as the traditional arts officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland pulled him away from the written word towards oral forms. His idea was that poetry as art couldn’t be compared to other forms of art, the main reason being that this is one that is written on art and the others can expand themselves, can involve a lot of things like conversation, dancing, singing or playing music. This is why after his first collection he felt the need of a break from being a poet. After a few years after reading a poem by C. K. Williams he had the idea to extend his idea of poetry by combining it with narration. Moreover in his new collection he did not want to create art, he also wanted to create the world. SOOOO starting from this collection, with the exception of some, his poetry has been characterized by his use of long line and by his appropriation of other features of the ballad and oral storytelling traditions, one of these being the use of long narratives. The title of this collection is also interesting because there are no words for negation in Irish.

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Belfast Confetti (1989);

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First Language: Poems (1994), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize;

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Breaking News (2003), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize; enacts a radical shift in style

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For All We Know (2008);

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On the Night Watch (2010);

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Until Before After (2010).

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his work is political, personal and urban. He represents a generation of poets who entered into adulthood in a context of extreme political turbulence. He is always open to surprise, to distraction, to digression, unexpectedness of language; uses the instability of these to present the traumas of a place and a culture devastated by years of violent conflict (this is what we see for example in Belfast Confetti.

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I really like that in his work he is inspired by other artists, for example in “The Irish for No” there are allusions to Keats’ ‘Ode to Nightingale’, also there are references to Seamus Heaney’s early poetry

BELFAST CONFETTI 

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title: o euphemism  an inoffensive word’phrase which replaces a more unpleasant or harsh one o euphemism for miscellaneous objects that were thrown during street riots: “nuts, bolts, nails, ,car keys”. Sometimes they were added to IRA bombs to cause more injury. It is ironic that nuts and bolts, which usually hold things together here are used for destruction. Also confetti is usually thrown over a new bride and groom to celebrate happy union but here small pieces of metal or even bricks are thrown to break up relationships and create disharmony o refers to small home-made missiles used in street battles o debris from the explosion start: o in medias res, it starts as suddenly as a missile may blow up The fracturing of the narrative evokes a city which is also disrupted, not only the city is disrupted but the narrative is also interrupted not only by the ideas and feelings of the speaker but also by the lexical field of punctuation which makes understanding the poem harder, and by adding these sequences he deconstructs history, thus the poem becomes a deconstruction itself The poem is set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, about which we have already learned, it is a period of violence between the nationalists (mainly Roman Catholic) who wanted independence from the UK and the unionists (mainly Protestants) who believed in strengthening the political ties between Northern Ireland and Britain. In this period of about 30 years of violence there were lots of terrorist incidents between the two afore

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mentioned groups of people. The narrator is caught up in a riot, a bomb incident in Belfast. written in 1st person, giving a dramatic description of what it felt like to be caught up in the violent riots in the 1970s. In the aftermath of an IRA bomb, there is chaos and the ‘riot squad’ moves in. In his confusion and terror the poet cannot find his way through the maze of Belfast streets that he usually knows so well, nothing makes sense to him anymore. street names Balaklava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street  deepen the receiver more into the maze (labyrinth)  these are all linked to the Crimean war Belfast is a city where nothing is stable and the mind’s attempts to make a sense of it is always stopped because it’s constantly changing. According to Sarah Broom, a scholar whose ideas were used to create this presentation of mine argues that maps are useless, no map could truly represent a town, “the only adequate representation is the thing itself, the city is a map of the city. She also writes that there is a huge difference between the mental and the physical map, the first being fluid and provisional, continually responsive to the external events, the latter on the other hand does not possess any of these features. The middle part of the poem the city is presented as if it would be seen in a book of photographs as it has changed throughout the years. The poet is aware that everthing is transitory and what he is observing is a huge milestone in the history.[ CITATION Mat97 \p 186 \l 1033 ] The whole poem seems to be an extended metaphor for the way that violent conflict destroys language o raining exclamation marks from the first stanza suggests the sudden shouts and cries of alarm caused by the attacks o an asterisk on the map looks as though there has been an explosion on paper o streets blocked with stops in the same way that full stops stop a sentence o stuttering has two meanings, one that the poet cannot get his words out coherently, and the other is a metaphorical meaning that gives the sound of “the burst of rapid fire” o fusillade usually means that a weapon is firing one shot after another, but here there is a fusillade of question marks which has the effect of one question being fired after another as the narrator struggles to answer in his uncertainty and fear

TURN AGAIN Points to consider: 1. How do maps tell the story of a city? 2. Maps are supposed to explain things, give you a sense of where you are. This is not the way the poet sees the map of the city in Turn Again.

3. Extended metaphor explaining an individual’s confusion in life 4. The poet creates a landscape which has nightmarish aspects. Can you select and explain phrases and words which create this effect?

PUNCTUATION the bullets fired at the poem’s narrator are registered as ‘dot dot dot’ – symbols linked with violence YES the poet is prevented from quoting Basho when an explosion interrupts his journey

CONCLUSION Carson as a poet chose his own way of responding through poetry to the pressures of the Northern Irish context; his poetry urges us to confront the disturbing aspects of our surroundings and to be conscious of the provisionality of our beliefs...