Gail McConnell

Gail McConnell Gail McConnell and Kelly Sullivan gail mcconnell is a Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast. She is interested in living with the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness, and the politics of language and form. Her debut poetry book The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, the poetry pamphlets Fothermather and Fourteen, made two arts features based on her poetry, and presented a program on Seamus Heaney for BBC Radio 4. ________ Kelly Sullivan interviewed Gail McConnell by Zoom on 16 February 2023. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. kelly sullivan: I’ve been starting with a general question. You grew up in Belfast. Do you remember when you first encountered Heaney’s poetry? gail mcconnell: I probably first encountered his poetry in secondary school at about fourteen. And I’d say the poem we read first was “Mid-Term Break,” a classic on the syllabus for people of that age. We also read poems like “Digging,” “Personal Helicon,” or “Bogland”—those early, mid-and late-sixties poems. Our image of Heaney was of somebody who came from where we came from: Northern Ireland rather than the south. And we heard the classic stuff about rural life, probably read Heaney alongside a poet like Robert Frost, and thought about the life of a farmer. I think we read more Heaney poetry than I can specifically remember because I often describe to my students a feeling of “Heaney fatigue” that people have when they’ve come through Irish schools. [End Page 162] Many young people who have read Heaney until they leave school encounter him at university and think “a Heaney poem again!” And the version of the poet they’ve been given is uncomplicated—not particularly political or not political in a complicated way: he was Catholic, and nationalist, and he represented that community. And he was one of the first people from his background to achieve global standing. But politics and controversies weren’t central—rather the Heaney of “Digging” and the agricultural and imaginative labor he wrote about. sullivan: I’m really struck by what you said about Heaney fatigue. Do you encounter that with your students who come into the program now? And do you teach Heaney? Do you put Heaney poems on your syllabi? Or are you saying, we’re not going to talk about this figure anymore, even though you’re at the Heaney Centre? mcconnell: No, we do teach Heaney. You can’t not. But Irish and American criticism has responded quite differently to Heaney’s legacy. And some of the critiques over the decades have been harsher in Belfast and in the North than they have been in the States. So with a book like North that we teach for the M.A. in poetry, you’ve got Ciaran Carson calling Seamus Heaney a “laureate of violence” and, in the same issue of the Honest Ulsterman, Edna Longley, also critical of how North mystifies history; then on the other side of the sea you’ve got Helen Vendler praising so much about the same book. Because of the historical and geographical proximity to the conflict and its legacy, there’s a history of being more critical of Heaney in the very place where he lectured in English in the sixties and taught Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Medbh McGuckian. Because I did my M.A. in Irish literature at Queen’s, as a student I encountered Heaney through that critical approach to him—and that’s probably informed how I teach him as well. I’ve inherited and carried on the feminist debates; obviously, there are always going to be controversies about the gender politics of Heaney’s work although I think I’ve changed my mind about some of that over the years. For the M.A. in poetry at Queen’s we teach North as a controversial book. We look at some of those critical responses and think about why they came about...