‘Words were vacant shells’: finding new poetic responses to the relationship between subject, form, and society’s ideas of infertility in contemporary Western women’s poetry

Doyle, Bethany Ann (2023) ‘Words were vacant shells’: finding new poetic responses to the relationship between subject, form, and society’s ideas of infertility in contemporary Western women’s poetry. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between subject, form, and social ideas of infertility in contemporary Western women’s poetry, achieved through both a methodology of close reading and the expansion of infertility poetics through the creation of my own infertility poetry. I am not claiming to have discovered some wholly new poetics – rather, I believe that I have introduced new poetics to the topic of infertility in poetry. This has expanded the scope of what infertility poetry can include and broadened the techniques used to commit this intangible, absent, and silent topic to the creation of the concrete, written word. My contribution to knowledge also includes the curation of contemporary infertility poetry collections, with an in-depth analysis of these poems, which I hope can serve as a framework for future work that can encompass other aligned and atypical parenthoods. The contention of this thesis is that infertility is both silent and silenced – it is inherently silent, due to its defining absence and atypical ‘lack, rather than loss.’ However, infertility is also silenced by Western society due to its deviation from Western pronatalism. These various factors all contribute to a wider lack of discourse regarding the subject, rendering infertility incredibly difficult to talk and write about. This thesis examines the ways in which contemporary Western women create infertility poetry, despite these challenges. Through a methodology of close textual analysis, I have examined the infertility poetry of Gerrie Fellows, Julia Copus, Kerry Priest, Ada Limon, and the anthology I Will Bear This Scar in order to identify and study the poetic forms and techniques used that navigate infertility’s silence, intangibility, and atypicality. For comparison, I have also examined ‘ghost children’ poetry – that which is written about stillbirth, miscarriage, and abortion – examining the work of Wendy Pratt, Karen McCarthy-Woolf, Fiona Benson, Aoife Lyall, and the anthology Choice Words in order to compare and contrast the poetics utilized.