Current PhD Student

Francisca Fernández Arce

Thesis Title:

Editing the Early Troubles in the Honest Ulsterman (1968-1974)

Supervisor:

Professor Matthew Campbell

Description:

A two-page spread from the first issue of the Honest Ulsterman shows, on one side, a poem by John Hewitt and, on the other, two by Derek Mahon. At the time of this publication in 1968, following the release of his Collected Poems 1932- 1967, Hewitt was an established representative of a regionalist vein of Ulster poetry. Mahon, on the other hand, had just published his first collection, Night Crossing, with Oxford University Press. The layout of these two pages side by side, accordingly, created a dialogue between a figure in the process of being canonised and another at the beginning of his career.

My doctoral project begins with what is absent in this description: that is, the authority exerted by the editor to place these contributions like so and deliberately form this exchange. It reads the Northern Irish literary magazine, the Honest Ulsterman, through the work of its first three poet-editors–James Simmons, Michael Foley, and Frank Ormsby–between 1968 and 1974. This seven- year period covers what historians have begun to identify as ‘the Early Troubles,’ beginning with the emergence of the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement and ending with the collapse of its first ceasefire, the Sunningdale Agreement. It also coincides with a moment in Northern Irish literary history, commonly referred to as the Ulster Renaissance, which introduced its contemporary poetic canon with the works of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Mahon.

My thesis traces this collision of sectarian violence and literary resurgence by paying attention to how this period was edited on the pages of the Honest Ulsterman by three authors traditionally discussed as poets, first and editors, second. To edit, I argue, embodies a dialogue between authority and self-effacement, dictating the placement of each contribution and constructing the identity of every issue by removing themselves from the page. My interest, therefore, lies in exploring how Simmons, Foley, and Ormsby challenged ongoing definitions contained by the label of ‘Ulsterman’ at a time when this marker embodied uncertainty and conflict, and how this was achieved by virtue of their absence from the visible space of the magazine.