Poetics of Combination in the Work of Maggie O’Sullivan and Barry MacSweeney

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how the poetries of Barry MacSweeney and Maggie O’Sullivan register and respond to British deindustrialisation through what I term an ‘aesthetics of combination’. If ‘combination’ typically describes the ‘joining together’ of two or more distinct entities, here it denotes the disjunctive ‘joining together’ and juxtaposition of distinct media and styles and attempts to explore how modes of political organising might function within the arena of cultural production. Through this two-fold poetics of combination, MacSweeney and O’Sullivan help us understand deindustrialisation, not merely as a political or economic event, but rather as a set of interlocking processes through which capital attempts to reorganise socioecological life and relations in order to stymie its internal crises at the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, I argue that MacSweeney and O’Sullivan attempt to develop material and discursive strategies adequate to these conditions of upheaval.

KEYWORDS:

• Deindustrialisation
• strike action
• militant
• experimental poetry
• Maggie O’Sullivan
• Barry MacSweeney

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels map a growing contradiction between a proletariat growing in number and a mode of production increasingly reliant on labour-saving machinery (Marx and Engels 1848, 14). On the one hand, these developments both increase productive forces. On the other, machinery is said to obliterate ‘all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level’, increasing ‘competition among the bourgeois’ and making the lives of proletarians increasingly precarious (14–15). Faced with these fluctuating social and political boundaries, workers organise themselves into ‘combinations (Trades’ Unions)’: ‘they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision’ (16).

2. As Elizabeth Bakker argues, state’s social contract with labour should itself be understood as an investment in certain gender and sexual relations and identities ‘based on assumptions and incentives around the availability of unpaid caring labour in the household, the economic sharing within family households, the ability of primary caregivers to access a social wage, and the definitional boundaries of who constitutes a family’ (Bakker 2003, 74). Indeed, because men as participants in the labour force were the ones entitled to access state benefits, women’s access to social assistance was entirely dependent on their husbands; homosexual people, as well as unmarried women and their children, were effectively barred from such resources.

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Notes on contributors

Tom Crompton

Tom Crompton is a poet and critic living in Leeds. He co-organizes the Poets' Hardship Fund.