When they talk about mothers: Writing and investigating queer kinship in contemporary poetry
Quirke, Elizabeth
Quirke, Elizabeth
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Publication Date
2022-09-15
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
This creative practice thesis combines creative writing in the genre of poetry with literary analysis to explore aspects of queer kinship, particularly representations of queer motherhood and grief in contemporary poetry. The creative work of this project comprises two collections of poetry, The Road, Slowly (2018) and How We Arrive In Winter (2021), both published by Salmon Poetry. They present a poetic exploration of critical questions around queer kinship and the ways it is formed and reformed. The Road, Slowly (2018) is a collection of poems derived from my lived experience as a non-biological lesbian mother. In this collection, I examine what queer family formation can look like in a polymaternal family. The poems begin in questions surrounding biology and kinship and end in the formation of a mothering identity that co-exists with another mothering counterpart. How We Arrive In Winter (2021) is concerned with the fracturing of kinship and contains poems that examine the illness and death of my father along with the end of my marriage, while navigating the differences between enacting kinship as a daughter and as a mother. Whereas the lyric poems of The Road, Slowly (2018) invoke other poems of motherhood and of a queer tradition, How We Arrive In Winter (2021) lets the poems’ subjects fracture the form, allowing the grief to have a visible representation. This collection stands as an example of kinship remade through queer resilience. Ultimately, the two collections of poetry combined with an academic enquiry into queer kinship in contemporary suggest that queer kinship is evolving and that as kinship forms alter, so too do the poems that kinship development inspires. Specifically, the academic research investigates how non-heteronormative forms of kinship are represented in contemporary poetry. It asks to what extent a poetic tradition of queer mothering has evolved in response to social change, and how the various forms (poly-maternalism, fictive kinship, and other types of lesbian motherhood) are represented in contemporary poetry. The first critical section looks at the work of Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mary Dorcey, and Jackie Kay as queer poetic foremothers and examples of poets who have queer kinship at the core of their work. I consider my own work in The Road, Slowly as a representation of contemporary queer motherhood and explore how I negotiate my own identity as a non-biological queer mother. The second section of the critical research investigates queer kinship in contemporary poetry predicated on loss, grief, and bereavement. Whereas the first section of the thesis is concerned with how lesbian-led families are formed and represented in poetry, the second section asks how families that are queered can remake kinship after the death of a loved one or the disruption of a personal relationship. This section investigates the extent to which poetry by Colette Bryce, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Jane Clarke can be read as queer poetic responses to real-life grief. I analyse How We Arrive In Winter, the second collection in this thesis, to discuss personal trajectories of grief following bereavement and marriage breakdown in order to point to aspects of queer resilience.
Publisher
NUI Galway