Maggie O'Sullivan

Maggie O'Sullivan Poems

Maggie O'Sullivan Biography

Maggie O'Sullivan (born 1951) is a British poet, performer and visual artist associated with the British Poetry Revival. O'Sullivan was born in Lincoln, England of Irish immigrant parents[citation needed]. She moved to London in 1971 and worked for the BBC until 1988. Her early work appeared in magazines such as Angel Exhaust. She now lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. O'Sullivan's work is influenced by Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Beuys, Jerome Rothenberg, Bob Cobbing and Basil Bunting. Her books include An Incomplete Natural History (1984), In the House of the Shaman (1993), Red Shifts (2000) and Palace of Reptiles (2003). She edited out of everywhere: An anthology of contemporary linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America & the UK (1996).)

The Best Poem Of Maggie O'Sullivan

Poem

to defend this
poem from its own attack , I'll
say that both the flush left
and irregular right margins constantly loom
as significant events, often interrupting what
I thought I was about to
write and making me write something
else entirely. Even though I'm going
back and rewriting, the problem still
reappears every six words. So this,
and every poem, is a marginal
work in a quite literal sense.
Prose poems are another matter: but
since they identify themselves as poems
through style and publication context, they
become a marginal subset of poetry,
in other words, doubly marginal.. . .

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