Ciaran Carson

‘Belfast Confetti’ from Irish for No

Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion.Itself - an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire...I was trying to complete a sentence in my head but it kept stuttering, All the alleyways and side streets blocked with stops and colons.

I know this labyrinth so well - Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street - Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again.A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie- talkies. What is My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks.

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at the moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

(Foucault “Of Other Spaces” 1967)

The sectarian spirit; adherence or excessive attachment to a particular sect or party, esp. in religion; hence often, adherence or excessive attachment to, or undue favouring of, a particular ‘denomination’.

(“sectarianism”, n. Second edition, 1989. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/174584.)

The biggest and first peace wall in Belfast runs along Cupar Way and was erected in 1969. It divides the east Belfast loyalist area of Shankill Road from the Catholic Springfield/Falls Roads area of west Belfast. Photograph by Antonio Olmoshttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/gallery/2012/jan/22/belfast-peace-wall

A five-metre high wall and fence runs from the junction of Springfield Road and Springmartin Road to near Upper Ballygomartin Road, west Belfast. It can be seen for miles. The compound at the end is a police stattion. Photograph by Antonio Olmos http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/gallery/2012/jan/22/belfast-peace-wall

Background to the ‘troubles’ - CAIN http://cain.ulst.ac.uk1910-1916⚔3rd Home Rule Bill approved (1912)⚔Easter Rising (1916)✍W B Yeats publishes ‘Easter 1916”

1920s⚔Partition of North and South (1920)⚔Anglo-Irish Treaty designates Eire as a 'sovereign, independent, democratic state’ (1921)⚔Civil War (1922)✍Sean O’Casey’s play Plough and the Stars sparks riots in Dublin (1926)

WWII⚔De Valera announces Eire’s neutrality in WWII (1939)✍Yeats dies and Seamus Heaney is born (1939)✍Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice publishes “Neutrality” (1943)

1948-1968⚔Republic of Ireland is created (1948)✍Ciaran Carson is born in the Republican Lower Falls area of Belfast (1948)✍1962 Philip Hobsbaum sets up ‘The Group’ in Belfast which includes emerging poets like Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon (1962)⚔50th Anniversary of the Easter Rising (1966)⚔Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist is published and he is appointed as lecturer at Queens University, Belfast (1966)⚔Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association is formed (1967)

1968-1969 – Civil Right and the ‘Troubles’ begin

⚔Saturday 24 August - First Civil Rights March in County Tyrone

⚔Saturday 5 October - Civil Rights March in Derry

⚔Wednesday 9 October 1968 - People's Democracy Formed

⚔12 -15 August 1969 - Battle of the Bogside, Derry

1970s

✍July 1971 - Carson graduates from Queen’s University, Belfast

⚔August 9th 1971 - Internment is introduced

⚔January 30th1972 - Bloody Sunday

⚔March 1972 - Direct rule by Westminster means the suspension of the NI government

✍1971-2 - Carson is involved with ‘The Group’ poets

✍1973 - Carson publishes his first pamphlet Insular Celts

⚔November 29th 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act

✍1975 Heaney publishes North. In a review Carson calls Heaney the “laureate of violence”

✍1976 Carson publishes his first full-length collection The New Estate

“Bernard McGuigan after he had been shot”, Rossville Street, Derry, 30 January 1972. Photograph taken by Eamon Melaugh.

Heaney seems to have moved […] from being a writer with the gift of precision, to become the laureate of violence - a myth maker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for the situation, in the last resort, a mystifier.

[…]

Being killed for adultery is one thing; being tarred and feathered is another […][Heaney] seems to be offering his “understanding” of the situation almost as a consolation. […] It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution. It is as if there never were and never will be any political consequences of such acts; they have been removed to the realm of sex, death and inevitability.

Ciaran Carson, “Escaped from the Massacre?” in The Honest Ulsterman, 50 (Winter 1975)

“The idea of art being on the page was one thing, and the idea of art being a form that can expand itself, involve a lot of things, like conversation, dancing, singing, playing music was another. In that it was of the world and in the world. The stuff I had been doing up until then, in terms of writing seemed a bit thin, pale, contained, too aesthetic. So, I just went off the whole idea of being a ‘poet’.”Ciaran Carson qtd. in David Laskowski, “Inventing Carson: An Interview” Chicago Review 45.3-4 (1999), p. 92.

“It [Tar] gave me the idea that you could do something, with the extended poem, the long line. In that sense it could give you a story, a narrative, include the real world in a sense. It wasn’t the kind of poem that was about art, or form, but the world. I mean, the kind of poetry he was doing, C K Williams, wasn’t too far removed from storytelling that you heard in bars. So I embarked on it, playing with the apparently sprawling line, which to my mind, had a shape in terms of the line of the song.”Ciaran Carson qtd. in Laskowski, 93.

Anything can be told this way or that way. There’s no final way of telling a story, or explaining the totality of whatever it was that happened at any given time. […] I’ve lived in Belfast all my life and I still couldn’t tell you a fraction of what’s going on. All I can do is tell you stories.

Rand Brandes, “Ciaran Carson: Interview” The Irish Review 8 (Spring, 1990), pp. 77-90.

My aim was, in that work which deals with the ‘Troubles’, to act as a camera or a tape-recorder, and present things in a kind of edited surreality. An ear overhearing things in bars. Snatches of black Belfast humour. If there’s one thing certain about what was or is going on, is that you don’t know the half of it. The official account is only an account, and there are many others. Poetry offers yet another alternative. It asks questions, it thinks. It asks about the truth which is never black-and-white.

Brown, John. In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland. Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Publishing, 2002, pp.148-9.

1980s

⚔5th May 1981 - Bobby Sands dies in the Maze prison after 66 days on hunger strike

⚔15th November 1985 - Anglo-Irish Agreement

✍ 1987 – Carson publishes Irish for No

✍ 1989 – Carson publishes Belfast Confetti

⚔ December 1993 - Downing Street Declaration

⚔ 1996 - Peace Talks

⚔ 10th April 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement

⚔ Between 1969 and 2001, 3,526 people were killed as a result of the ‘Troubles’

Bobby Sands Mural Sevastopol Street

The ambient light of yesterday is amplified by talk of might-have-beens,Making 69 – the year – look like quotation marks, comment-ators commentating on

The flash-point of the current Trouble, though there's anyGod's amount

Of Nines and Sixes: 1916, 1690, The Nine Hundred Years’War, whatever.

Or maybe we can go back to the Year Dot, the nebulous expanding brain-wave Of the Big Bang, releasing us and It and everything into oblivion;

It’s so hard to remember, and so easy to forget the casualty list – Like the names on a school desk, carved into one another till they’re indecipherable.

(“Queens Gambit” BC)

Linguistic Violence• “bits and pieces of language littered across the streets of Belfast.”• “Ulster Says No” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zSWlAHD29M



Carson “notes the relative power of the poetic act by textualizing physical spaces, apparently putting them under the control of the poet as manipulator of the text, and then dramatizing his own vulnerability within those textualized spaces”

Cone, Temple. “Knowing the Street Map by Foot: Ciaran Carson’s Belfast Confetti.” New Hibernia Review 10, no. 3 (2006): 79.

City as Textual Space



“The city is a map of the city”



It asks questions, it thinks.It asks about the truth which is never black-and-white.

A fusillade of question-marks.

Not to find one’s way about in a city is of little interest...But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses way in a forest, requires practice...I learned this art late in life: it fulfilled the dreams whose first traces were the labyrinths on the blotters of my exercise book.

Walter Benjamin A Berlin Childhood [1932] in Belfast Confetti

Ciaran Carson

Spiritual

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