This article was originally published as 'The Work Of A Healing, Reclamation And The 'Re-Creative' Voice In Irish Women's Writing' by C. Murray
URL: https://archive.org/details/theworkofahealingreclamationandtherecreativevoiceinirishwomenswritingc.murray/mode/2up (ISSUU)
The essay was published in The Irish Times under the title 'Tackling the catastrophic canonical neglect of Irish women poets and writers
‘We need the voices of women in our national cultural narrative’
(Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 05:17) Irish Times Newspaper
[Excerpted]:
Faced with the catastrophic canonical neglect of Irish women poets and writers in very real terms, there are many responses. Those of interrogation, of anger, of reclamation, and of healing. These responses have all occurred, are continuing to occur among women writers across literary genres. In her article “A profound deafness to the female voice” (Irish Times, April 18, 2018) Sinead Gleeson examines our responses as the women who have been left to reclaim our narrative heritages,
once again, it is up to women to use their time to respond, to do the corrective work of calling out male editors, and how this eats up their creative time, steering the focus away from their own work.
Re-reading Gleeson’s article, I was struck by the above because of the truth of her statement. In the almost two years since the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, a melt of activity has occurred. Fired! Irish Women Poets was part of a response to that othering of women poets but it fed into other meetings, voices and attempts to work out, to formulate responses to neglect and omission that appears endemic in Irish Literature.
On the weekend of September 6th and 7th 2019 MEAS (Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector) organised a seminar, Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector, an Interdisciplinary Conference, an event which over two days examined gender inequality from a range of views, including contributions and performances from Kathy D’Arcy, Dr. Lucy Collins, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Dr. Ailbhe McDaid, Dr. Ken Keating, Jess McKinney and more. The weekend was lively and interesting, although one of the delegates felt it was ‘ultimately depressing’. Deirdre Falvey’s article “Two-thirds of published poets are male, so does poetry have a gender issue?” (August 17th, 2019) looked at MEAS research and figures in advance of the seminar. MEAS examined funding and found the biggest disparity in gender was closely aligned to the three most highly funded publishers. The numbers and their disparity was not a surprise to many of us who have tried to highlight these issues. We first heard the figures at the Missing Voices seminar in September of 2018, an initiative organised by Poetry Ireland under their Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2018-2020. The Missing Voices seminar (2018) was supported by Gerald Dawe in response to criticism on the gender balance of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017). In many ways, we have come full circle. (Read more here ...)
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A response to articles by Sinead Gleeson " A profound deafness to the female voice (The Irish Times, April 18th, 2018) and Deirdre Falvey “Two-thirds of published poets are male, so does poetry have a gender issue?” (The Irish Times, August 17th, 2019)
URL: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-profound-deafness-to-the-female-voice-1.3467144
A response to articles by Sinead Gleeson " A profound deafness to the female voice (The Irish Times, April 18th, 2018) and Deirdre Falvey "“Two-thirds of published poets are male, so does poetry have a gender issue?” (The Irish Times, August 17th, 2019)
URL: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-profound-deafness-to-the-female-voice-1.3467144
This article was originally published as 'The Work Of A Healing, Reclamation And The 'Re-Creative' Voice In Irish Women's Writing' by C. Murray
URL: https://archive.org/details/theworkofahealingreclamationandtherecreativevoiceinirishwomenswritingc.murray/mode/2up (ISSUU)
The essay was published in the Irish Times under the title 'Tackling the catastrophic canonical neglect of Irish women poets and writers: ‘We need the voices of women in our national cultural narrative’
