No Foreign Sky: Censorship and poetry in the Soviet Union and Northern Ireland

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This project examines the relationship between censorship, surveillance, violence, and art using the models of Northern Ireland, Poland, and Romania in the 1980s to establish a means for evaluating the effects of censorship on poetry and a language to discuss those effects, as well as to address the existing gap in research regarding these cultures. The critical component will assess poetry from all three countries, illuminating the interplay between the public and private in poetry, the distance between the reader and narrator, the use of omissions and secrets both textually and formally, and the looming threat of surveillance and its accompanying violence. I appraise the ways in which other texts and contexts, including materials drawn from archives and galleries, and poems in translation from a number of languages, can be employed to extend and develop the scope and range of my creative project. Additionally, I analyse how formal devices such as dramatic monologue, voice, musicality, and syntax, as well as overarching themes, translate cross-culturally. I also consider the various forms that censorship can take-self-censorship, political censorship, and media censorship, for example-in order to assess current censorship issues. The critical component largely influences the creative component, a poetry collection set in the late days of the Soviet Union in an amalgamated city using translation and linguistic features of various Slavic languages. Nods to the poetry of the Troubles via epigraphs and allusions artistically bridge the cultural gap between locations. Throughout the collection, the narrator moves from a stance of suspicion and distance toward the reader to becoming a conspirator with the reader, to encourage the reader to enact and empathise with the discomfort of censorship, surveillance, and ever-present threat. Because suppression and censorship exist across many cultures and time periods, this collection aspires to investigate historical moments to draw attention to present-day injustices and to expand the critical language of censorship into a creative one. To ensure authenticity, my research will be informed by the archives at Belfast's Linen Hall Library, which include 350,000 pieces of printed materials such as books, leaflets, manifestos, and newspapers collected throughout the 1980s by Linen Hall staff who, "during the height of the Troubles...literally climbed over barricades to retrieve items" for the archive (McCombe). I will also conduct research at the National Academy of Arts in Kyiv, Ukraine, analysing the rise of right-wing paramilitary groups who censor working artists, and on assessing Ukraine's rating as one of the top countries practising media censorship in order to better understand and creatively write about the effects of political unrest on art of various forms.