The Thrill of Rupture with Two Irish Poets (on Trevor Joyce’s Conspiracy and Randolph Healy’s The Electron-Ghost Casino)

To be online, especially very online, in recent years means receiving an intimate, seemingly infinite delivery of disparate conversations and media, some intersecting or repeating, all alongside hot takes, a comment on something linked from elsewhere, and then a joke, a poem, a plea for help, a strident objection about a trivial matter. If Web 1.0’s impact on literature was to introduce the sudden jump of hypertextual links and boasts of being big enough to contain the world, Web 2.0 gives us the feed, where we lap up the discourse and if we can, lob in something flashy of our own. Instead of navigating through a map for nodes of information, we scan through a series of voices and visions from millions of individuals. We hold this collage of writing and visuals in our hand and then in our head as we move through the material world. 

Collage refuses causality; it is not if/then, it is not even both/and. It makes us dwell in the slash itself. An artform deriving from the Surrealists, collage relies wholly on our associative mind. What connections do I draw, what meaning can I invent? The narrative drive of the human mind is unstoppable. Apophenia, I learned recently, is the term used in psychology for the perception of connections between unrelated objects or ideas. Making meaning from coincidence can be madness, or it can be poetry. 

Trevor Joyce’s newest book of poetry, Conspiracy, collages speech, text, and image. It is a long series of 144 twelve-line poems dated May 18 to July 10, written in 2020, interspersed with black-and-white photographs taken in the Los Angeles area, primarily of sidewalks and markings thereon in February 2020, just before the Covid pandemic took hold. Opening the book, poem 1 (May 18) begins, “despite hunger and panic / while incidents occurred / in nonrandom sequences / the bursts could be avoided,” offering a poem made from bureaucratic, passive-voiced language mixed with the urgency of human suffering. The book goes on to bring in language and images that clash in tone and syntax, and yet which the poet stitches together, as in the above quote, with prepositions and conjunctions and alignments in phrasing that at first glance give you the comfort of grammar. But it’s unsettling, the world pointed to in these poems just always beyond your grasp. As with many formally innovative poets, making you aware of discomfort is half the point. Trillions of dollars are being thrown at tech products that promise to take away all friction, but poetry like this adds sand to the gears of thinking, refusing to confirm assumptions and continuing the work of defamiliarization we need literature to do in this slickened, speedy world.

Trevor Joyce is an Irish poet based in Cork—a long way from Silicon Valley, if you’re not an electron. Yet the Ireland he writes from today is a country of pervasive connections to global networks of capital and communication. The Republic’s capital, Dublin, is bristling with offices serving as footholds for American companies that until 2016 enjoyed a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, thanks to neoliberal Irish politicians, as well as the provision of all the data centers they could want and short-hop flights to the rest of Europe. Ireland, no longer an agricultural and labor supplier to Britain, has become part of the global economy, staffing up call centers and lining the former docklands along the Liffey with glassy office buildings.

This Ireland is also the home of a small but persistent poetic avant-garde, which, after fits and starts in earlier decades, coalesced with new energy in the late 1990s and which has persisted. It’s a group that includes Randolph Healy in County Wicklow, whose recent book The Electron-Ghost Casino is also reviewed here (though, in Healy’s preface to this newest book, he writes, “I’ve also read several statements that have been attributed to me. For example, that I am part of a neo-avant garde [No, but thanks anyway]. . . .” So take that as you will). 

In 1997, Joyce founded the SoundEye festival, a gathering of Irish and international experimental poets, and that same year Healy founded Wild Honey, a one-man small press dedicated to publishing books of poetry that challenge the hold of the received lyric on the literary imagination. Wild Honey has published many of the poets Joyce hosted at SoundEye (and Joyce himself). 

I began to pay attention to Joyce and Healy, along with other Irish poets writing outside or against the lyric, because in both content and form, their poems interrogate the material conditions of living in contemporary Ireland, and how economic and political systems interact with physical being and material lives. Their poetry gets at the how and the hustle, the labor of being a creative person living through history who also has to pay rent while housing prices are going through the roof. Ireland’s economic boom, the “Celtic Tiger” that lasted from the mid-1990s until the 2008 banking and housing crisis, was premised on American and European investment and tourism flowing through the country. Like Greece and other poorer countries around Europe’s edges, it also was given an austerity diet post-recession. Emigration, which had dried up during the Celtic Tiger period for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, surged again. And so the Irish government leaned even further into the so-called knowledge economy as the path back to liquidity. The Republic actually appealed an EU ruling in 2020 that ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros in back taxes to the country—that’s how much they’ve hitched their hopes onto tech companies keeping an Irish address. 

It doesn’t surprise me then that some of the most consistently patched-in pieces of language Joyce uses in Conspiracy are financial, and Robert Kiely’s readings of Joyce’s recent work show this is not a one-off for the poet. “[T]he demand for clarity / will resume trading” announces poem 40, “unencumbered assets” starts off 25, while 118 begins with “major business concerns,” and officious, corporate language mixes with language reporting on government and military actions. And in addition to the aforementioned confluence of “chains” and “goods” there is in one poem a sarcastic phrase that I see as a response to the solemn term “essential workers” being extended to food delivery contractors in order to justify putting them at ongoing risk for the benefit of those who could afford to stay home—“together we toast those / our very lives rely on / value them don’t / make me laugh.” Joyce’s poems draw the reader’s attention to the construction of our existence in the languages of authority and to conventions so familiar we forget we can ask why they exist at all, so that we might question received stories told in predetermined language.

Yet we are not only the systems of power that we live under: we’re also bodies in space and time, people forging relationships with those who live alongside us. Joyce and Healy challenge themselves to write at the point where the body in place meets these social and political forces, making poetry from the contradictions and conflicts that emerge. The infinite scroll that can distract the mind from the body is still entangled in the same material conditions we breathe and talk and live in. Joyce’s attention to how language and thought feel is part of how we really experience the world, just as the storage of all our words and images and videos requires so much natural gas be burned that in Ireland the percentage of electricity dedicated to maintaining data centers for international tech companies has now just outstripped that used by every single household in the Republic, combined.

Joyce uses computers and algorithms as tools to connect, to challenge, and to estrange, always keeping at the center of his work the politics of the systems that so easily slip into invisibility. He learned the programming language Fortran in the seventies, worked for decades in Cork at Apple’s European headquarters after getting a degree in math, and used spreadsheets and algorithms to organize his two-part poem “Syzygy” (published by Wild Honey). He set in motion a series of collaborative, multi-authored online poems called Offsets that many experimentally oriented poets from the U.K., U.S., and Ireland took part in, starting in 2004. He also created the website that hosted these trees of linked poems. His awareness of computing as offering tools of creativity and connection is a reminder that we can stay curious about what our relationship is to the tech we live among, and how we can turn the machine against its purpose to our own delight.

Reading Conspiracy feels like a walk around the neighborhood while scrolling, neck kinked down and the screen in focus above the gray pavement sliding by. (I see the squares of concrete, I try to make sense of it all.) These twelve-line poems are uncapitalized and unpunctuated blocks of text. Ideas seem to bleed across line breaks, but each phrase is a link in a chain, one next to another, intersecting, but distinct. Conjunctions and the accoutrements of dependent clauses give us the illusion of syntactical order, but you get lost in it when you try to follow one string from beginning to end, because it has neither. Eric Falci, another sensitive attender to the formal innovators in Irish poetry, has pointed to their “ongoing resistance to the normative, hierarchical sentence.” 

Trevor Joyce loves a constraint, any restriction that forces transformation. Twitter’s original character limit was 140, and so the ampersand reigned supreme. From its foundation in 2006 until its purchase and rebranding as X by Elon Musk in 2023, the internet as contained by Twitter was a mostly textual world where favorite quips and aphorisms were shared and reshared and accreted a shell of reactions, and where you eavesdropped on conversations long underway before you logged on. My reading of Conspiracy as an experience of the internet as it felt in 2020, especially to writers, is not in the least bit arbitrary. And reading this book in the present moment, I appreciate that instead of just letting the LLMs suck up all our language and use it for the most banal, predictable purposes, Joyce is picking pieces out in his own hidden poetic algorithm to create what are on the surface surreal language forms that are actually much more grounded in reality than the hallucinations of a program that can only imitate what already exists.

Reading Joyce’s poems, I have the sense of being a body in space at a particular time even as my mind is bouncing line to line, as from headline to headline. For instance, poem 74, from June 7:

The line “chancers and last-chancers” sings out above the rest. I can imagine this phrase clipped and plucked in delight by the poet, who surrounds it in a cluster of unrelated detail. I cannot resist looking up the phrase, and it’s the title of a blog post from January 12, 2020, by Chris Smaje, a small farm advocate, on rejecting ecofascism and techno-optimism, but that context matters less to the poem, I think, than the rhythm of the phrase. The other unusual, unique-enough-to-be-sourced phrase is “scarlet and very white,” drawn, as it turns out, from a description of a stalagmite in art critic John Berger’s 2002 essay upon the occasion of being one of the very first modern people to enter Chauvet and witness the Cro-Magnon cave paintings therein. Joyce wrote in a 2001 essay on his poetics that “language arrives already filthy . . . filthy always with experience, not the world, but heavy with it.” These two unattributed quotes hang like tarnished charms, more beautiful for their reuse, in and among the drier phrases that make up much of this poem, which also seems to collide phrases together that refer to chains and trade, leading my mind to associate those perhaps unrelated pieces of language with the supply chain snarls that defined the early years of the pandemic. As the poem cascades, its focus shifts and skips, leaving us questioning the referential, indexical promise of language’s relationship to the real, as there are no stalagmites or farmers as subjects in this poem, and so instead, language’s distance from the world it usually points to balloons into absurdity. 

Joyce’s poetry is quite formal, as he told me in 2009, in an interview since published in the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. It’s just never written in any received form. One other insight from Joyce during that entertaining conversation in Cork that stretched over tea and then dinner and a pint struck me as so helpful to thinking about what poetry can aim for, and what his poetry aims for: “writing things which embody, which echo things structurally.” He wants to look at a situation and not try to write about it, not try to fit it into a lyric or a pre-given form, but rather create a form that in its structure embodies or mimics an experience of being in the world, of a moment in time or an experience of life. 

Instead of writing about the barrage of information and the static, shallow-breathed feeling of dread that was 2020 through metaphor or sensorial detail, Joyce looks to register and tone, to constraint and form and grammar to convey it. How can language feel real? He creates an immersion that is a phenomenological and intellectual experience, not a comment or analysis. 

What this results in is a medley of registers, and at first I started to read Conspiracy like I read Joyce’s ambitious long poem “Trem Neul,” which collages particular historical texts together to speak to his family history rooted in Galway and Irish colonial history. With “Trem Neul,” if I could find the sources, I could unlock the argument. So I read it through a search engine pointing to Google Books. “Trem Neul” and Randolph Healy’s “Arbor Vitae,” a beautiful multi-part poem exploring the politics of language and disability, in my reading, are both holders of the modernist tradition of exploded cultural references, the mix of high and low. But I think these new poems of Trevor Joyce’s are better read as explorations—as walks, if you will, through the language and the time-space that was early 2020.

Henri Lefebvre wrote of the role of ordinary citizens in defining urban space through their presence, and Joyce’s Conspiracy engages with that idea through the inclusion of the photographs of the pavements and streets of Los Angeles, a city he is visiting, and claiming, if only for a time. By being present as readers and interpreters, reinscribing the language we snag on the internet into poetry, we, like Joyce, can also claim and define our new vernacular. 

Knowing that Joyce’s collaborative, collage-y poetics always draw in pieces of others’ voices and texts, phrases pop out that are eminently googleable, leading me to wander from ecology books—“megafaunal assemblage” in poem 69—into farming reports “equipped with provender” asserts 8—and into the territory of theological debate—“feels the punishment condign” from 21. But these searches don’t turn a key in Conspiracy; the phrases are rather the sticky pieces of language that adhere to the walker as he also navigates through all-too-common language used more as filler than to inform, which he also brings into the poems, like the “names of the officers / responsible were withheld” (62, June 3)—we all still remember what the nameless officers were doing in May and June 2020, yes? The mooring of these phrases in sentence-like structures makes their meaning even looser, since they take on different parts of unfolding, run-on sentences as each line both links and disorients, tripping us on the enjambments that are the only structure:

In these poems, Joyce moves us between tones and registers, the reader getting restless and seeking a subject, an object, any relationship of grammar that could show us where to focus. But the poem keeps going, the feed keeps running. Joyce, clashing languages that we usually switch between without noticing the jar of that context shift, asks what happens if we apply the language of instruction, of the law, of zoological papers, of the snippets of text we glean from the internet, to help convey the experience of lockdown, its claustrophobia and uncertainty. As Jan Baetans discusses in “Free Writing, Constrained Writing: The Ideology of Form,” the imposition of constraints has been seen by avant-garde writers as a way of demonstrating that what we perceive as “natural speech” is in fact utterly determined by culture. It all comes to us filthy. Can an assemblage of the pre-processed information we encounter, scrolling, scrolling, strolling, strolling, ever knot together into an expression of feeling and experience? 

With a poet as curator, it’s possible. By this point, it should be clear that the poems in Conspiracy are not exercises in pure ventriloquism. Per Baetans, the imposition of constraints, of a form, is what turns the management of information into art. The curation of these phrases wraps them into surreal poems that surprise, delight, amuse, and create arresting mental images. The placement of these poems alongside photographs of language discovered in situ around LA emphasizes the found nature of language; we learn all our words from hearing others use them. These nuggets of words in urban life—traces left of messages and protests, of advertising and graffiti—are matched by Joyce’s inclusion of verbal gold like “thews” and “vengolina’s song” and “exequies” in and among the banalities of investment bankers and excessively passive-voiced phrases denying all conceivable responsibility. Both elements, together, can be understood as something to pull us up short, to make us attend to the world we’ve been wandering through.

You learn to read Joyce by reading Joyce; you let the words wash over you and notice where you glitch, where the hitch and hiccup catch you off balance. He doesn’t offer notes on sources, as compared to Randolph Healy, who told me, when I spoke with him in Dublin in 2009, “There was a public element to ‘Arbor Vitae’ and while I had to write in a particular way for myself with my own limitations as a writer, I felt it would be a shame if I managed to obliterate what were very important issues.” And that desire to share, not exclude, is apparent in his explanatory and bibliographic notes in his new collection as well. Yet Healy shares Joyce’s affinity for the use of constraint and the incorporation of nonpoetic texts into poetic forms, and the notes are necessary in the first place because of the often elliptical relationship of the poem to its references.

Healy has taught science and math for years, especially physics, and also written poetry all the while. The poems in The Electron-Ghost Casino often appear to be in lyrical form, but rarely does an “I” appear as anchor. Like Joyce, he often arranges language in poems through collage and parataxis. Healy can be quite punny and playful, and often just as resistant to sentence structure and open to readerly engagement in meaning-making as Joyce. The most (Trevor) Joycean of Healy’s poems is “Twelve Russian Dolls,” a poem which stacks twelve sets of four words, which each derive from the one preceding (or following), for instance: “entitled / tinted / tide / id” and “see / sense / screens / recession.” Scramble and match the words together, and you can create all kinds of poems from these accordions of characters. Meaning only comes when you as reader jump in. 

The power of play is especially sharp in the poem “Anthem,” in which Healy, inverting the old Myles na gCopaleen trick of writing English using Irish orthography, rewrites the lyrics of the Irish national anthem in similar-sounding English words, turning it to strange nonsense that nonetheless in its satire offers a critique of official patriotism. “Sinne Fianna Fáil / atá faoi gheall ag Éirinn” or “Soldiers are we, whose lives are pledged to Ireland,” becomes “Sheen a fin with oil / A tall failed owl egg roaring” and then, transformed again in the third stanza, becomes “Zinnia firemen fail / A tat-free ghoul age erring.” And in between these versions of the Anthem are verses that perhaps offer a more direct commentary. Stanza two contains the lines, “Vows cost nothing / In a clapped out country run by villi / With nothing left but sots and bullies”—a mix of disappointment, anger, and the sense that the nation as a concept, as a people, is wrung out. 

Healy’s helpful notes guide us toward an intertextuality that draws occasionally from other works of literature, but far more often from the language and rules of math and science. He brings poetry out of its rarefied place in language and back into conversation with modes of “nonpoetic” discourse, just as Joyce finds the poetic pleasure in forms of language usually refused entrance to poetry. The beautiful lyric “Erratics,” beginning in the grief of “My hand wakes before me / reaches out to phone you / forgetting your absence,” explores ideas of memory and of how the mind relates to the body. In the fourth stanza, Healy draws from theories of memory maintenance in cognitive neuroscience to defamiliarize the act of remembering: “Props that vanish in the absence of rehearsals / . . . / or a game of whispers altering with each iteration?” His dip into the science that demonstrates memories are in fact always inventions underscores the loss in the poem, the yearning, and the worry that one day we won’t remember that person we’ve lost at all.

I appreciate the beauty he finds in technical or scientific language, revealing it is ripe for appropriation into poems. Alison Hawthorne Deming wrote in her 1998 essay “Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide,” “I have always been struck by a fundamental similarity between the poet and scientist: both are seeking a language for the unknown.” In his poem “Out,” a gorgeous meditation on a moment of play at a beach, Healy writes, “Then all at once inside / the strafing spectra / prism of babel // lighting up the stones / still skipping across my mind / little moons // pulling in every direction,” drawing on the language of optics to help us see how light moves through water. Through placing these phrases next to each other without explicit conjunctions or punctuation to guide our understanding of their relationship, this earthbound moment becomes metaphorically connected to the searing power of the sun and the gravitational pull of the moon on all earthly waters. 

Sometimes Healy’s play leans well over into banter, including in a poem titled “The Hall of Near Fame” that lists rock band names that are a letter or two off and in “Calibrating a Broomstick,” which is a word problem about finding out how much heating oil is left and includes the handwritten diagram and equation needed to solve it. 

But as always with Healy, whose poem “Arbor Vitae” grew out of the experience of his daughter being born deaf, I come back to his attention to sound, in the buzz of language on the tongue and in the ear, and how that matters to our experience of language as much as dictionary definitions. The book opens with the poem “Pegasus x2 at Powerscourt,” a garden at a former English aristocratic estate in County Wicklow. It begins, “Students bob up and down, boisterous in thickets / of language they think foreign to us.” And later, listening in on two visitors, Healy reports their speech as “ ‘Fabless,’ he says, ‘fabless’ ”—with “fabless” being both a transcription of how the word “fabulous” sounded in one man’s mouth and also, perhaps to the amusement of a science teacher and computer guy, the word used for a model of manufacturing of hardware and semiconductors where the actual fabrication of the device is outsourced. The poem continues a few lines below with an implied simile: “notes / in a robin’s call (run your fingernail / along a comb).” The attention to sound and language in the poem runs from the opportunity for mishearing to the physical roots of both in rubbing and moving parts of our animal bodies. Healy’s attention to the different ways in which information about the world is transmitted and absorbed frequently leads to an emphasis on the physical body in his poetry, perhaps in an effort to strip political or societal definitions away and allow us to access a shared experience of being in the world as packets of sensation-translating neural pathways. Healy makes language in this poem into not a window, but a rope, twining pieces of the world together. 

Whereas in Joyce’s work we’re necessarily skimming along, jumping block to block, line to line, noticing the feeling of disjuncture, in Healy’s I find entrance in the sonic, visual, and punny pleasures with which he offers the reader, in the feel and look of stanzas like the following from “Solation”:

Just reading these words in my mind, I feel the tongue flips and the soft pursing of lips needed to sound them. Healy is not working in a predetermined form, yet the confluence of sounds and the visual and sonic echoes here give us the same elements of form found in all poetry: repetition that creates rhythm. And whether or not these words depict an actual experience in an actual church, I sink into a hallowed space made by how the words look and sound together, a lush moment like listening to a burbling stream and the hush of willows.

Our minds are always working on the world, predicting what we will encounter and trying to fit reality to the story we’ve already told ourselves about it. But where we differ from the prediction machines that are processing all our language online and churning it into AI slop is that we can also create rupture, and with that, an unpredictable delight. Poetry of all kinds, it seems to me, relies on parataxis; that is, the volta, the gap, the break. And poets rely on us to leap with them as they swerve. 

Within the absurdity of collaged phrases like “fixed or arbitrary rules / trimmed with novelty braid” from poem 24 in Conspiracy is an opportunity to make new meaning through the implied metaphor and look at decrees as decorative garments we can drape and/or discard. What other revisions might our apopheniac minds make to the world when we spend time among these poems, in words loosened from their origins and rearranged so they might startle?

Both Healy and Joyce not only expand the possibilities of poetry in the Irish tradition, but also remind all of us on the fuzzy side to stay curious about the possibilities that inhere for language and creativity way over there on the tech side. Observation is the root of both science and art, as is the startlingly illogical leap past the predictable. In these poems, we are all bodies and brains in motion, inside both language and calculation at every turn. The “electron” of Healy’s title, he informs us in the preface, is an allusion to the experiment proving that what appears to us as solid stone and flesh is, in a scientific truth, empty space and electrical fields. Our perception leaps over the gaps, collaging the world into pieces that seem, for the moment, whole.

When we cock our head to the side and skew our view of the known world, whether through the lens of Joyce’s pirated phrases or Healy’s geeky jokes and jargon, our never-ending efforts to translate experience into meaning suddenly have new possibilities, new shapes they can take that don’t in any way resemble the stories that came before.

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*An essay-review of 
Conspiracy. By Trevor Joyce. Surrey, U.K.: Veer2, 2023. 216 pp. £11.00.
The Electron-Ghost Casino. By Randolph Healy. Oxford, Ohio: Miami University Press, 2024. 85 pp. $17.00.