“Watch Your Language”: Speculative Theory and the Poetry of Rita Ann Higgins

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore how looking and watching, speculation, and the specular informs question of class and gender in the poetry of the Galway poet Rita Ann Higgins. In an essay in which Ailbhe Smyth questions the validity of boundaries that empathically separate genres and “disciplines,” Smyth embeds a Rita Ann Higgins poem between two dictionary definitions in order to perform a critique of the claim to objectivity of institutionally endorsed and reproduced critical and philosophical practices and to test the much-vaunted boundaries of the “disciplines.” Smyth chose lines from “Oracle Readers” (Higgins, 1988: 40-43), as part of her anzalduan mediation on how feminist practices that complicate the relationship between the creative and the analytical have helped to “reveal into theory” heretofore missed, relegated, or neglected aspects of humanity and experience to change the shape and codes of knowledges. Higgins was an inspired choice, for like the work of Smyth herself, Higgins’s engaging poetry not only makes those who are overlooked emphatically perceptible, but her work also directs the reader to reconsider theories of the proper place and function of poetry. Like the work of Smyth, which champions those without representation and voice, Higgins’s poetry provides a testimony to and an interrogation of the intertwining of aesthetics and politics in Irish culture, and of the interlocking of culture and aesthetics in Irish politics.

And for Christ’s sake

At all times

Watch your language.

“Be Someone.”

—Rita Ann Higgins (Higgins, 2005: 39)