Greg McCartney, Honest Ulsterman Magazine Archive Network digital archive coordinator and current Honest Ulsterman editor, states in his introduction to this essay collection that giving the archive its acronymic title H.U.M.A.N. was motivated by "deliberately stressing the 'human effort'... in publishing and editing small magazines."[1] In evoking this ‘effort’, this fold-out title is expansive and has a burgeoning effect in dialogue with what it entitles: the Honest Ulsterman archived.It managed to touch on various vital and overlapping facets at once of what it means to explore the HU now.

Humans are - historically, consistently, definitively, self-confessedly, self-reflectively - flawed. It’s something each of us contend with at least daily. Flawed, that is, in relation to the criteria for ‘rightness’set by ourselves, by humans for humans, in the context of human expectation and schemes of morality that are constantly evolving with other dimensions of human development, across different groups, different places, different eras.

The content of the Honest Ulsterman, regardless of its irrefutable importance in the story and development of Northern Irish literature, is, of course, fraught with human ‘flaw.’ I refer primarily here to those apparent ethical niggles that emerge, come into focus, as time moves on and we look back. Moral discretions historically manifested, of course, can seem crystal clear with the benefit of hindsight, after a few decades of ‘moving forward’ and evolutions of ideas around morality, rights, equality, correctness.

To say this isn't a defence of such ‘flaws’ as the often emphatic misogyny, for example, that I can see so clearly in the HU pages as one 2019 reader of this historical little magazine. But it is an acceptance of sorts. An acceptance that as human experiences and insights are expressed and refracted in contemporary literature, any art produced in a moment of time, any question asked or idea given voice, they are so often limited by that moment’s prejudices, by the limitations of the speaker, blind to things that the future, or experience or a broadened perspective, might make clearer, or seem to.

It’s a recurrent issue in the old and irresolvable debate: value of the art vs. moral standing of the artist, or even ethical ‘content’ of the artwork. It is difficult, especially when matters of financial gain and social prestige come in to play, and when others have been walked over or silenced. I have always felt very clear on one thing, however: if humans are flawed, we need the art that comes out of that as much as that which comes out of moments of moral, and human, enlightenment. Art is the machine of our self-understanding, the more exposure we have to expressions of humanity with all its blemishes the more we are able to manage that humanity. To endorse any censorship of the morally questionable is more dangerous than the influence of that which we are inclined to question.

The HU has, over time, developed an aura. This has to do with its longevity, and its role as a platform for some of the most renowned and publicly significant Northern Irish writers of the 20th century, as well as the resonance of its self-declared resistance to and rebellion against (as a magazine of “revolution”) sectarian divisions dominating many other dimensions of Ulster culture during the course of its publication.[2]

But its aura is also facilitated by time, by its pastness and remove. In its original format as a print journal, it finished in 2003, having run from 1968. Since, and over the course of its publication period,  aside from in a couple of libraries, it has not been easily and wholly available to read in its original form for all of those who might experience or accept its aura of importance. The development of the H.U.M.A.N. archive, which makes photographic scans of the original pages of each issue available to anyone with access to the internet, is an attempt to change this.

The phenomenon of this archive, and its potential destruction of the aura of the HU, evokes Walter Benjamin’s formative conceptualisation of the aura vs mechanical reproduction: the idea that the technology of photography destroys the aura of original artworks.[3] However, in this case I would suggest that it was the general absence of the HU, its lack of circulation among actual 21st century readers relative to how well it is known of, referred to, protected, even, as one root of its particular aura.

Now, as computer screens back-light photo-scans of its pages into stark illumination, as it is “mechanically reproduced” (Benjamin), potentially endlessly, the HU’s auratic bubble is vulnerable to the needle of disillusionment as those who may have accepted its aura of importance may discover, what seem to us now, uncomfortable ideologies, echoed prejudices, moral miss-steps, sometimes painfully, sometimes angrily.[4]

H.U.M.A.N., aurally “human”, as a title hovering over this digital archive and the exchanges that take place between new or renewed readers and its aging traces of 20th century voices, allows for this, and might even be seen to subtly encapsulate an acknowledgement of it. It makes no excuses for the content but makes no dismissal of it either. (Baby, bathwater etc.) The content is not just the product of a very specific geographical and historical situation, it is human.And on that very basis it merits the contemporary engagement that the archive facilitates.

Another thing that the H.U.M.A.N. acronym activates in relation to the journal issues it platforms is that: the notion of the human in the sense of the universal, the common. And that, necessarily, brings us to the emotional, and also, as as I will come to, to awareness of death. This sense of the universal operates in dynamic tension with an inclination to engage with the specifics of the HU: the historiographical situation, individual contributors and editors that set it apart from other little magazines.

                                                                                              …

"... literature starts and finishes with men talking to men, and the most important thing for a man talking to men to be is honest. It is the height of human ambition." [5]

So states James Simmons in the first editorial of The Honest Ulsterman, inching toward manifesto-territory, and inarguably attempting to set some sort of tone for his new little magazine.Though it might lend itself to various interpretations, this statement chimes somewhat with the notion of the human content I have touched on above. Blurring out the ‘of its time’ sexism embedded in the phrase “men talking to men”, we might be allowed to discover here an extremely simple, but essential, definition of literature. Humans talk to humans, and in doing so attempt to be honest about what they know, and that means about the experience of their own being human. The first section of Neil Astley’s Being Human anthology chimes with this, with an epigraph from Donald Hall: “A poem is a human inside talking to a human inside”.[6]

This might seem an outrageously vague point to be stressing. Of course that is what literature is, at root; what more could there be to say here? But sometimes it is important, when the general inclination is to deal with the specificities of something  - such as with this very specific little magazine produced in a very small place over a limited stretch of time, dominated by a small group of recurrent contributors – to keep the general, the universal, in sight. To remember, that is, to find it in the details, though to do so can risk making your vision a little fuzzy.

Literature embodies the attempts of individuals to discover their own truths in language, and manifests as an attempt to 'express' and memorialise  often the most basic and fundamental quivers of our experience. Love, loss, the knowledge of death, the knowledge of birth, the knowledge of other people, and the knowledge of everything we will never know. These are, of course, literature’s big subjects, what it rolls back into again and again and again through time, throughout human developments.

There are others, right here in this very collection of essays and elsewhere, who will rigorously examine the specifics of this little magazine, pull into focus the crisp details of its identity, its web of relations to other idiosyncrasies, in history, literature, politics, theory. Such is what academic practice is built on, and how crucial that is. It is of course the hope of those of us who worked on H.U.M.A.N. that such research, such negotiation of the minutiae, will be facilitated by its accessibility. But the minutiae is not my concern here.

It is better that I leave such negotiations to the expertise of others. Although I am from Belfast, write poetry, work on literary magazines, and, OK, took a short module on it once, I am no expert in the canon of Northern Irish literature, its big names or its primary political contexts. It isn’t something, perhaps to my shame, I have ever consciously engaged with in any serious way, academically or creatively. It was always there, in the background, but, perhaps adolescently resistant to the familiar, I didn’t look closely. So was the HU.

When I came to work on the archive, I came relatively fresh with respect to the details of its entanglement in N.I.literary history, with few predispositions, certainly not pre-conditioned by scholarship. I was primarily a (human) reader necessarily preoccupied, not by scholarly direction, mapping what I discovered onto pre-existant skeins of knowledge, but, page by page, by emotional experience.

Roland Barthes contended that meaningful “text” is produced at the site of the reader, the moment of reading, something like a “network”, (as opposed to authorised by the ‘writer’ at the time of writing).[7] Exploring the HU, this is what I am interested in: the ‘text’ (texture) of the little magazine, generated between human reader and pages that make it up, first issue to last. What comes into play in each phenomenon of reading is, of course, prior knowledge, prior associations, and affect. Reading, embodied and affected and never clean, is always “sticky” (to borrow from Sara Ahmed on the nature of affect).[8] That’s what makes discussions of affect in scholarship so difficult: as sensual and sensitive human beings, we get in our own way.

But it’s essential that we try, because it is honest, within our humanity, to do so. Whatever his authorial intention at the time, as readers, we might find such an implication, an intention, embedded in James Simmons’ first editorial, wherein after arguing that “the most important thing” for literature “to be is honest”, he defines literature, as it is intended to manifest in the HU, as “... language inspired by feeling, awakening feeling in the reader.”[9] And perhaps it might prove similarly valuable to find the Barthean concept of the “network” as reader-generated “text” in the archive title “Honest Ulsterman Magazine Archive Network”.[10] Effectively, as so many readers, new and old, engage with the pages of the HU on the archive platform, generating “texts”, it is not only a network of little magazines that will glimmer in constellation, but many “networks” of feeling, memory, empathy in “sticky” and “muddy unmediated relatedness” with the content of its pages.[11]

                                                                                   …

          I didn’t know it was you, Susanna

          Or I would have struggled less fiercely

          Against the unconcerned commissioning of my life

          For other purposes; its sudden ruthless annexation.

          The transformation of very blood and bone.

          I sensed every moment of my weird metamorphoses -

          A constant unnerving rearrangement -

          I was put out.

          Then after the long, slow blindfold anticipation

          Sharpened by strange fears at the edge of raw love

          I expected to know you

          My warm vulnerable bundle I had carried and clung to

          But there you were, as if existing only now

          Startlingly new and different

          Emphatically, outrageously yourself

From “Waiting for my Daughter,” Janet Galbraith[12]

So, like any reader coming to any book or journal, I came to the archived HU with feelings, memory, and associations. I also came as myself, and my mother's daughter. It would not be honest to write about my experience of the Honest Ulsterman without acknowledging my familial associations with it prior to any real engagement with its pages. This poem, “Waiting For My Daughter,” constitutes a significant dimension of that association. My mother is the poet, and I, or rather the newborn that I was, am the subject. Associated from the outset with this poem, for me the Honest Ulsterman aura was tinted with personal love, and, as ever with love, with a sort of loss. (This may seem “outrageously” personal to “[my]self”, but I have a point that, I hope, refracts...).

Janet Galbraith, has never published a pamphlet or a collection, and is one of those who lives and writes but would never have the confidence to refer to herself as a ‘poet’. But during the 1990s, a number of her poems were published in Honest Ulsterman issues, “Waiting for my Daughter” one of them. This is a significant dimension of the little magazine medium worth drawing attention to. They are rarely just platforms for the ‘big names’, but host fragments of the work of those who never pursue or realise a ‘public’ career as a writer or a poet. With the HU this is especially easy to overlook, considering the number of ‘big names’ featured regularly on its pages.

When I was a child, the Honest Ulsterman was, vaguely, the important thing that helped mark my mother as poet in my eyes. Her name and her words were printed forever in its pages, and that mattered. Whether the attitude was valid or not, it did something to define her practice. This is still what happens in the world of literary journals and little magazines: to be published therein is usually the first time any writer feels like a writer, like they have been recognised and, by extension, have the right to recognise themselves as writer... but more on this shortly.

                                                                                          …

“... the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first “ravished”;” in his A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes posits that loss is inherent in love, mourning and desire fundamentally intertwined.[13] I think about this when I reread the opening line of “Waiting” on huarchive.co: “I didn’t know it was you.”[14] What I experience is the simultaneity of love and loss. The love is obvious, both that which is so poignantly palpable in the words on the page, the expressed “raw love” for the infant that was (astonishingly) me, as well as that which I return to the page, in answer to the idea of the speaker, my mother, who I know deeply, whose name and words are there. The loss is more complicated, but it is important. It has to do, largely, with time.

Little magazines are, somewhat, the residue of a moment in time, and they are collages, assemblages. Every issue of the HU is subtitled with the date of its publication, reinforcing the temporal specificity of the collection of its fragments into one object, and the release of this, with limited print run, into the public sphere. Journals and little magazines, are made up of fragments. One poem here, one poem there, one story here, then a memoir, a drawing, a miscellaneous digression.

In her Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives,Susan Howe reminds us of the etymological root of text: textus, textere: “to weave, to join, fit together…” [15] Any enterprise in language is a forging of connections, but of course journals and little magazines, like anthologies and readers, are a “fitting together” on a larger scale. Text, texture, textile... Perhaps such assemblages as the little magazine should function as a reminder to always question the apparent wholeness of any text. (Especially, perhaps, when we are asked to articulate the identity or character of a particular magazine, as if it is one thing, when it is always a collection of fragments, albeit often gathered by one editor or curator (though perhaps equally often by various editors through time, as with the HU)).

The HU, as little magazine, is made up of fragments bound together with the seams showing, separated and stitched together, at the same time, by the white of the page, the issue number, the date of issue, a couple of recurrent voices among many. The white of the page is both the crack and the glue. I'm fascinated by the paradox of this whiteness: there is so much loss down cracks, and glue is so sticky...

The ‘functional white’ of the publication page also functions to signify, not only the site of both connection and distinction between fragments of literature, of different voices, but everything, every context, that is forgotten through time, in the spaces between writing, publication and various 20th and 21st century reading experiences. As readers, we know that so much seems hidden, disappeared into the wordless weather of the white page, and this makes loss an integral dimension of the little magazine and archive experience.[16]

This is particularly potent, I think, when the fragments we come across in any given issue aren’t those attached to the ‘big names’, those that we could ‘extract’ and recontextualise in the narrative of an authorship, filling in the gaps. Such could be the case with Heaney, Carson, Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, to name a few. Or similarly with regular editors or contributors whose fragments and conversations constellate across the issues, Simmons, Foley, Ormsby, and many others.

It’s easy to focus on these authors when dealing with the HU phenomenon, those who provide some consistency, some recognisable definition. It makes sense, in a lot of ways. But between the works of such names on the HU pages persist the fragments of other literary voices, who perhaps never published a collection, maybe published only once or twice in a magazine, maybe only wrote for a few years; at least, never because widely known for their literary practice. The average reader doesn’t recognise these names. The loss of the author, the individual nerve-centre of articulating intellect and emotion, is immanent in the moment of reading, of empathy, of touching, echoed in the frame of white.

My mother’s is one of those names. (I don’t think I am showing bias to say that her lack of public life as a poet is a reflection on the quality of such poems as “Waiting For My Daughter”). It is because of personal connection that I can map her HU fragments onto the context of a human being, historical, embodied, flawed, complex, beautiful. But to the average reader, I know her name will have the impact of an absence. And index. A tiny heartbeat, trace and echo, of an I was here.

The words of “Waiting” make this particularly potent. Any reader is made particularly aware of the body of the speaker, the intimacies of her “blood and bone”, and the “weird metamorphoses” of pregnancy.[17] This, combined with the emphasis on “struggle”, the confession of “fear” and embodied vulnerability to it, is likely to especially encourage (human) empathy in a reader. The body’s trace is in the confession, but the embodied person is gone, and even, effectively, somewhat anonymous - named, but not really knowable (or Google-able, for instance...)

The “I” is absent, but so is the infant subject and addressee “you” in more ways than one. The “you” is, at the time of writing, a newborn, therefore not established as an identity, as the ‘person’ they will be. The tradition of the tabula raza, the purity of infancy, implicitly puts pressure on the speaker’s insistence on identity and specificity. “If I had known it was going to be you/ If I had known it was going to be you”is the refrain at the end of the poem that begins with the naming of the newborn, “Susanna”.[18] The named, born and seen, daughter is set apart from the invisible but transformative expected baby.

The main drive of the poem is the suggestion of a mother’s recognition of their child, and also a “raw love”-at-first-sight phenomenon that neutralises, or at least manifests a forgiveness and acceptance of the “annexation”, “fear” and “jungle-pain” of pregnancy and childbirth.[19] But there is a key tension at work, and that is between this insistence on knowing and the emotional power of it, and the simultaneous impossibility of knowing, of the speaking mother knowing, at the time, the human the newborn will be, though they seem “Emphatically, outrageously [them]self”. The speaking mother’s sense of self is disturbed as she undergoes the “rearrangement” and “metamorphoses” of pregnancy, being “put out”, but moreover her ability to know, as she feels she knows, the daughter is ambiguous.[20] In this is something of the Barthean loss-in-love concept. And, moreover, it can be felt as an echo in the average reading experience: though empathetic and touched by a fragment of expressive communication,it is, all-the-same, impossible for any reader not personally connected to the poet, speaker, or addressee to know them.

I write this as the fully-grown daughter, the adult human that the “you” has become. My experience of strange loss in reading this is different from other readers’, perhaps even more complex. I can identify and contextualise the speaker and poet: they are my mother. I know them. But I also am faced with a strange sort of loss of them, and other losses at that. Firstly, there is the anticipation of loss that comes with the feeling of time passing, and with explicitly dated ephemera such as each HU issue (this one, 1998) and the archival in general. But then there is the return to a fragment of time from before my own birth, the return to a time when my mother didn’t indeed “know” me. I am lost from the context of her, as I read the poem, knowing now that of course she didn’t fully know “it was [me]” because “I” was not.[21]

I love this poem, of course, and it means a tremendous amount to me personally. To read it, as the subject, as the named daughter of the poet, is an exceptional experience. But, in terms of its basics, this is almost definitely not unique in the context of the HU. There are numerous poets by other ‘non-established’ poets writing about people in their lives, effectively anonymous to many, but no doubt there are potential readers of the HU (especially as a new online archive) who might experience something similar to the above. That, the personal, is definitely another vital dimension of any little magazine, especially one so rooted in a small place as the Honest Ulsterman, that should be acknowledged and embraced. This poem is, honestly, a large part of what the HU means to me.

But, as I hope to have demonstrated, its words also lend themselves well to some other suggestions to be made in exploration of the HU. The significance of the personal, love-loss, and of the forgotten or unknowable, in human engagements with its pages.

                                                                                            …

In the second issue of the Honest Ulsterman, June 1968, James Simmons’ editorial draws attention to “a certain emphasis on birth and death” that had emerged in the gathering-together of the issue.[22] He follows this acknowledgement with two personal accounts, one of the birth of his daughter, another of a funeral he recently attended. In the latter, he calls for honesty when we talk about death, honest stories told by those personally involved with the deceased, and, by implication, the grief, in contrast with the general professions of religious “professionals”. Read in correlation with his first editorial, there is an implicit suggestion here that the honest feeling that is the basis of the true literature that the HU was intended to platform, offers an alternative and honest grappling with death. Regardless of whether these early ideals of honesty were fully realised in the HU, they are significant in relation to what is discoverable throughout its issues and how we might contend with it as readers and responders. While this “certain emphasis” is, albeit, most explicit in this particular early issue, host to numerous memorial poems, it never really goes away throughout the Honest Ulsterman’s lifespan. This brings us back to the notion of the (human) universals, and (human) loss.

My role while working on the H.U.M.A.N.archive was to manually input metadata to facilitate the search facility: that included titles, authors, genres, places, key words, key references, and themes & topics. (No doubt this process, and the resulting search data, is inevitably “flawed”, despite my best efforts to overcome subjectivity. But isn’t that human...) When I look back over the data, the topic that arises throughout the HU content almost more than any other (marginally surpassed by “love”) is “death”.

There are so many examples of this there to explore in depth I can’t facilitate in the present essay. Why not try typing “death” or “grief” into the search bar on huarchive.co yourself and explore. You’ll see what I mean, I’m sure. The old relationship between literature and memorialisation is established early in the HU, for example, with so many ‘in memory of’ poems and prose pieces scattered throughout its issues. Although I won’t launch into an examination of it here, I’d like to draw attention to Pamela Gillian’s “EIGHT POEMS” sequence that opens the October 80 – February 81 issue of the HU as an important example of a grappling with this topic on HU pages that has really stayed with me.[23] And, significantly, hers was not a name I had recognised.

To point out that death is a frequent topic in the HU is not a profound observation by any stretch, nor is it surprising. There is of course, nothing more human than death, one of literature-in-general’s primary themes throughout history. The specificity that comes into play with this theme and the HU is the Troubles context. But the ‘universal’ is also there, the day to day personal and familial loss that doesn’t necessarily derive its main meaning from socio-political contexts, and many equivalents to “Waiting For My Daughter’s” grappling with birth (something of the ying to death’s yang, as implied in Simmons’ second editorial). (Not to say that socio-political contexts aren’t always, somewhat, underlyingly active, as many would argue). It is on the relationship between this prominent and definitely human theme and the mechanisms of the HU platform, both print magazine and online archive, that I want to conclude.

                                                                                        …

In Archive Fever, Jaques Derrida stressed a definitive relationship between the archival and humanity’s relationship with its knowledge of death, bringing in Sigmond Freud’s ‘death drive’ principle.[24] We archive because we are susceptible to loss. Not only the ultimate loss that is the finality of death, but its constant trickle through life that is forgetting, a reminder and anticipation of oblivion.With H.U.M.A.N., the archival, in relation to this little magazine, is a framework that carries the implication of loss and death, and our fear thereof, into a new reader’s experience of the literature in its pages, perhaps reinforcing, on the level of medium, the prevalence of death and grief topics throughout. Not only is temporality reinforced by the timely-ness of each issue, its date and ephemerality as little magazine, but H.U.M.A.N. as archive, a tool and depository of memory, implicates its antithesis (which I have already touched on above): forgetting.

This digital archive, in its present state, seems to remain almost a ‘pure’ digital replication of the HU magazine, every issue reconstructed through scans of its pages, their words, typeface, errors, and white space. (More magazines are, however, gradually being added to the “Archive Network”.) This particular type of archive, with simple boundaries dictated by those of the publication’s pages (as opposed to an archive that includes contextualising documents and objects) facilitates a recognition of the little magazine as a genre that is somewhat inherently archival in mechanism. That is, it is a collecting together of fragments considered significant enough for posterity, and the leaving out of others, objects and contexts. There are gaps. The selection of works and publication of issues were the first steps toward the archival in the HU story. H.U.M.A.N., in its attempt at complete replication, reproduces the gaps they left as well as the content. Again, the white space: functional and, necessarily, full of forgetting.

In Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars she quotes Emily Dickinson: “Emerging from an Abyss and re-entering it/ that is Life, is it not, Dear?”[25] (“It is the imperfection of memory that allows us to live,” echoes the Guardian’s “Top Ten Books on Forgetting”…[26]) Living (that is, being human) is a constant negotiation with forgetting, and, that is, with an echo of death. And this is manifest both in the compulsion to archive, and the compulsion to write and, moreover, publish.

Howe describes her examination of “The Telepathy of Archives” as a “swan song to the old ways”.[27] That is, it explores the experience (particularly the affective experience) of physical archives, driven by a certain nostalgia in the context of the digital-archive era (its convenience, but its distance). H.U.M.A.N., as digital archive, exists in a strange limbo. It is definitively digital, as opposed to physical. We do not touch. But, with its direct photo-scans, there is something of the virtual. We are at least, looking at a reproduction,invited to touch, even though we can’t quite do that. And, moreover, the pages of the HU may be first editions after all, but they aren’t ‘original’ papers, touched, handwritten, annotated by their authors. As a publication, its pages are already at a significant remove from the presence of the writers and names we read therein. It’s complicated.

But regardless of this limbo, our experience of the archive here can be and necessarily is, as Howe’s affectionate “swan song” reminds us to acknowledge and as I hope to have demonstrated, emotional and embodied, even in dynamic tension with the digital, the printed, the facsimile, the removed, the lost, the forgotten. “[T]o reach is to touch.”[28]

                                                                                        …

Above is an exploration of my experience of the Honest Ulsterman while working on H.U.M.A.N., and the thoughts that emerged during this engagement. As an essay, vague, digressive, foggily emotional and heavily tinged by subjectivity, no doubt it is flawed. But I have tried, as a human ambition,to be honest.

This essay is from A Magazine of Revolution? An Exploration of the Honest Ulsterman edited by Gregory McCartney. HUMAN archive can be accessed at www.huarchive.co 

[1] Gregory McCartney, “Because,” Explorations of the Honest Ulsterman, 2019.

[2] James Simmons, “Editorial: First Steps in Revolution,” The Honest Ulsterman, Issue 1, May 1968, (Belfast: 1968), 2.

[3] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, 1935, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Adrent, (London: Pimlico, 1999), 215.

[4 ] Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 215.

[5] Simmons, “Editorial,” May 1968, 2.

[6] Donald Hall, cited by Neil Astley, “Introduction,” Being Human, (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2011), 21.

[7] Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” Image Music Text, trans.  Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana, 1977), 159-161.

[8] Sara Ahmed characterises affect as “sticky” between things, arguing that the orientation of perception and consciousness in a world of objects is directed by affect, that we are “moved by things”: Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 29, 33.

[9] Simmons, “Editorial,” May 1968, 2.

[10 ] Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 159-161.

[11] Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” The AffectTheory Reader, ed. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 2010), 4.; Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 29.

[12] Janet Galbraith, “Waiting For My Daughter,” The Honest Ulsterman, Spring 1998, (Belfast: 1998),14.

[13] Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 

[14] Galbraith, “Waiting,” 14.

[15] Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, (New York: Christine Burgin/ New Directions, 2014), 19.

[17] Galbraith, “Waiting,” 14.

[18] Ibid., 14.

[19 ] Ibid., 14.

[20] Ibid., 14.

[21] Ibid., 14.

[22] James Simmons, “Editorial,” The Honest Ulsterman, Issue 2, June 1968, (Belfast: 1968), 2.

[23 ] Pamela Gillian, EIGHT POEMS, The Honest Ulsterman, October 1980 - February 1981, (Belfast: 1981), 2-8.

[24] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1995, trans. Eric Prenowitz, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

[25] Howe, Spontaneous Particulars, 18.

[26] Alastair Bruce, “Top 10 books about forgetting,” Guardian, 30 September 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/30/top-10-books-about-forgetting.

[27] Howe, Spontaneous Particulars, 9.

[28] Ibid., 60.