A Poetic Ethnography of the Post-Mining Communities of the South Yorkshire Coalfield

This project aims to create a body of poetry with a critical framework which explores how the identity of adults of working age in the South Yorkshire Coalfield has been affected since the loss of the mining industry. It seeks to outline and explore the potential of lyrical strategies as an aesthetic response to the challenges of representing the testimonies of the post-mining community in order to provide a poetic ethnography of their changing industrial identities. The dynamic between worker, location, and labour was radically altered after the defeat of the National Union of Miners in the miners’ strike of 1984-5. The thesis suggests ways in which these relationships may begin to be restored in the poetic imagination of the present, outside of fatalistic and nostalgic narratives.
My research covers firstly, the poetry and philosophy of Muriel Rukeyser which exemplify a Modernist poetic response to a mining disaster, and poetic strategies towards building class consciousness in mining identity. Secondly, it considers the approach of Barry Hines to the 1984-5 miners’ strike and its aftermath in his novel, The Heart of It., also utilising the many testimonies from mining families he collated for the novel. Thirdly, I compare Juliana Spahr’s poetic responses to identity in the neoliberal age, with a view to applying her strategies to restoring a sense of collective identity in the present day. My final chapter is a shorter discussion of how the findings of each chapter inform the poetry which follows, which together with the poetry itself, forms my conclusion. Each chapter, in broadly chronological order, addresses a conceptual or contextual theme. These are, consecutively: place and the materiality of poetic symbols, the intersection of body with place in the formation of identity, and poetry’s potential to restore individual and collective identities in the neoliberal age.