Seamus Heaney-Classic or Dud (RIP)

I don't think he's 'selling nostalgia'. Or maybe I do. Maybe he writes nostalgia, and then it sells. Maybe I mean that any nostalgia in his work is real, and not merely done for commercial effect.

For all his success, I don't think of him as a calculating, mercenary figure. (Perhaps that's the point.)

>>> is he a continuation of the romantic movement of woodsworth and co. ?

Yes, I think so; or, he thinks so, and says so.

>>> how does he relate to Yeats, to Joyce, to Kavanaugh(sp), to the rest of irish literuture (sp)

It's complex, but simple. It's whatever it looks like. He relates, they relate back, he relates it to us. The relations are as many as you like. They're hidden, and displayed; closed, and open. The topic is nearly, or really, endless.

I could go on. So could you. So could he. He does.

>>> does anyone else compete with such intense pastorals ?
(are they really pastorals with the muck and the death)

I imagine that they are, eg. in the first volume. But the idea of counter-pastoral might be relevant.

>>> does the poverty become less real and more cute (wrong word, twee, kitsch, something else, thinking of frank mccourt)

Where does he write about poverty, exactly? He does idealize the rural, that's true - but I'm not sure he makes a big deal out of being poor. I'm not sure he *was* poor.

>>> did he deserve the nobel?

If any poet did, let's say he did.

why did he deserve the nobel ?

Thinking about it, I'm not sure that is a big problem though. May be a red cod.

If I apply your post to North, TH, it seems to make some sense. Maybe even good sense.

As far as I can see your ignorance has not shown yet.

Perhaps it will later.

I suppose it's stating the obvious to say how much less personal than Patrick Kavanagh he is, Kavanagh tended to see Ireland and the areas around him more in terms of their effects on him, and perhaps found the things Heaney cherishes stifling, but I am more familiar with Tarry Flynn than anything by either man and perhaps am just projecting that into my answer here.

I think Heaney is as much trying to show the beauty of simple domestic life as being nostalgic. As I say it's been a few years and this thread is a bit intimidating but that's my two cents nonetheless.

Revive because I was reading a little bit of Heaney and out of everything The Harvest Bow just kicked my ass, again. Especially this bit:

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall--
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

That line about already homesick for the big lift of these evenings is just something though. It's like a punch in the stomach and a kiss combined. I think the original poster has all this anxiety that the world Heaney writes about doesn't exist at all, that it's a touristic fiction, but it feels real to me, and similar enough to my childhood.

He peaked in 1979, alas, but, wow, until then he improved with each volume.

My favorite:

The Otter

When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer's back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.

Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,

Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck.

And suddenly you're out,
Back again, intent as ever,
Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,
Printing the stones

I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges

This picture is so perfectly described

(You've connected the dots, as far as the original poster goes, right?)

oh yeah

similar spelling

ie, why I missed this thread first

So it's interesting, from my alien perspective which I more or less hate to bring into this conversation, that what you're liking is how familiar everything rings.

where would a person start with heaney?

xpost Probably, the stuff I like least is the really Northern Irish stuff, which I can't relate to really, but the stuff about old women and bicycles and the countryside feels so primal.

I'd say Field Work has my favourite stuff, especially the harvest bow.

Agree on Field Work as his best ("The Otter," "Glanmore Sonnets," "A Dream of Badgers"). You can find a cheap used copy of the 1987 collection easily.

Thanks guys!

The Skunk is amazing, and a much sexier Heaney than I'm used to.

The Skunk

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
At a funeral mass, the skunk's tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.

After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word 'wife'
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air

Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Sorry the page it was on was horrible

loads of bouncing ads

His name is SO FUN to say

"sheerrrrmussss heeeeaaaarnnny"

I may be alone on this one, but his translation of 'Beowulf' was excellent. Gave it the playfulness that had been missing from it, and his verse just flows so beautifully, it's like I'd never read the poem before.

I named one of my cats after Seamus Heany

I agree with VegemiteGrrrl about his Beowulf. It was quite an artful rendition and makes the poem both accessible and alive.

Seamus Heaney

was just gonna link you this

ok then.

And though I was reluctant
I turned to meet his face and the shock

is still in me at what I saw. His brow
was blown open above the eye and blood
had dried on his neck and cheek. 'Easy now,'

he said, 'it's only me. You've seen men as raw
after a football match...'

hmmm thread's short but on-point, note to self, read heaney. Any further perspectives?

With ikr, obv (always, p much)- if you're from rural ireland you'll recognise heaney's scapes, they're maybe idealised but they're far from invented.

sorry for xp breaches stet hasn't seen fit to code for nokia 5230's yet etc

RIP.

one of the greatest i think

Aw man RIP

Oh shit. RIP.

Met him once, totally embarrassed myself by blurting something 'amusing' about how he'd even managed to bring the depressing South Armagh shithole my mother was from into one of his poems; he fairly gently reminded me that the poem was about his cousin being murdered. Bought me a drink all the same. He seemed a good man from that evening.

North is one of my favorite volumes of poetry of the 20th century. His technique was considerable.

Being honest I never really learned to love his work even though I bought most of what he published and tried to get into it. But I had massive respect for his skill and integrity and he always seemed such a kindly, decent man.

In the years after uni I stayed in touch with a fellow student who was starting to attract some attention as a promising young poet, and he used to send me drafts of his work for comment. (I also sent him some stuff but I was playing at poetry by comparison). Then out of the blue he sent me a letter saying he'd forwarded some of his stuff to Heaney, and had had a very friendly reply with some very thoughtful, constructive criticism of his work. So I was in the slightly bizarre situation where my friend was getting his work critiqued by two people, me and Heaney. Bit like getting tips on composition from Bernstein and the kids' piano teacher down the street.

clearly a v gentle, nice person.

darraghmac's point about this

if you're from rural ireland you'll recognise heaney's scapes, they're maybe idealised but they're far from invented.

feels right (tho i'm not from rural ireland). the land is potent with things that aren't visible in it in Heaney, but *feels* right (the colours, the sensations), as if you're standing in it.

been a while since i've read any, seems like an opportune if sad time to do so this evening.

RIP Seamus

again, it's great that every single thread about an individual on the board is eventually gonna end with RIP. wtf

You had perhaps envisaged......?

the Elvis thread doesn't tbf

The Otter:

When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer's back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.

Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,

Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck.

And suddenly you're out,
Back again, intent as ever,
Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,
Printing the stones.

Alphabets
Terminus
From the Frontier of Writing
The Haw Lantern
The Stone Grinder
A Daylight Art
Parable Island
From the Republic of Conscience
Hailstones
Two Quick Notes
The Stone Verdict
From the Land of the Unspoken
A Ship of Death
The Spoonbait
In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald
The Old Team
Clearances: In Memoriam M.K.H.
Clearances 1
Clearances 2
Clearances 3
Clearances 4
Clearances 5
Clearances 6
Clearances 7
Clearances 8
The Milk Factory
The Summer of Lost Rachel
The Wishing Tree
A Postcard from Iceland
A Peacock's Feather
Grotus and Coventina
Holding Course
The Song of the Bullets
Wolfe Tone
A Shooting Script
From the Canton of Expectation
The Mud Vision
The Disappearing Island
The Riddle

I think that is quite a list.

The four 'From' poems are indeed what I was getting at - the first two at least tremendous.

I think he wrote the second for Amnesty.

I come back - when I actually read him - to the fact that Heaney, much more especially late Heaney, has certain obsessions that he unabashedly indulges, primarily:

1: his rural childhood (I don't especially see the father as central to this; more place, objects, etc) -- and various named local characters, who are by definition unknown to almost all readers

2: the classics, ie: poetry, mythology or whatever from ancient Greece, maybe with Rome and old Norse also thrown in. There must be a fair number of people who see this stuff and think: YES - HEANEY'S REWRITING VIRGIL'S LAST WORK! But then a majority must be like me and have no idea of any of these works, and no identification, unfortunately, with the passion that presumably draws Heaney to them. He must LOVE this stuff, love engaging in depth with it, to go on about it SO MUCH.

You can say that 2) shows the limits of the audience, it's our fault, and Heaney is prompting us to learn. That's reasonable and optimistic. Most of us won't learn that much.

1) meanwhile can't be blamed on the reader, ie: you could only know who those people were if you read an in-depth biography of him.

What would be an equivalent? Maybe ... a contemporary person writing about their childhood friends from 20 or 30 years ago, and going on and on about things like ice lollies, Space Hoppers, Bros, Pokemon, etc -- and then, the rest of the time, going in for endless rewrites of a certain body of culture -- like, say ... STAR TREK. So every poem that wasn't about lollies or seeing Bros on TotP in 1988 would be eg: 'The Search For Spock, Scene III', in verse form.

This is a way for me to perceive and to say that despite my great affection for Heaney, I find his actual poetic choices, of subject etc, often dead ends, private obsessions. Suppose someone did write lots of poems about Bros (I can imagine it) - they would have some fans but might they not be seen as narrow unless they worked to show its importance and invite a broader readership to understand it?

It's funny, then, that he is also seen as such a public poet - for good reason, to be sure.

PS / I do think that is mainly a statement about LATE Heaney -- I don't really recall WINTERING OUT and NORTH being like that at all. It's ELECTRIC LIGHT, DISTRICT AND CIRCLE et al, that are.

A recent death had me remembering:

I.I.87

Dangerous pavements.

But I face the ice this year

With my father’s stick.

A late turn toward the classics is a hallmark of that generation's aging poets. I think of McClatchy, Wilbur, Hecht, etc. Only Merrill avoided it because he's too weird and camp.

Christopher Logue, though War Music was ongoing, I think. Edwin Morgan followed a similar path, mostly, with his later focus on translation. Perhaps age returns you to make use of the stuff you pushed against in your youth.

Also Tony Harrison (for a long time), + Don Paterson (a bit younger), Paulin I expect, + others.

Unsure though this was something they had pushed against. In Heaney's case at least I think he was always at home with it, and indulged himself in it more and more.

I suppose if you were a classicist to any degree you could see it differently. A bit like I do Ciaran Carson's ALEXANDRINE PLAN, the translations from French Symbolism - a project that did mean something to me, in a way that classics don't.

'Pushed against' is too hard, you're right. But they weren't neo-classicists, I guess.

is there anything to be said for the important thing being the expression of love for or engagement with classics or local characters rather than a case for their unlensed-through-heaney importance one way or the other, that heaney (or any writer) either has confidence in his ability to encapsulate the experience of himself-as-vehicle for (or the universality of) the emotions or knowledges or experiences themselves separate to lobbying for the actual focii

we dont need to have dug heaneys spuds to appreciate his telling of digging for spuds. to push it out again we can never have dug a spud at all and still have our own resonant facsimile of spud digging.

side: am i the only ilxor to have dug spuds

I don't really think I go along with that argument, because when he rewrites the classics, or talks about local characters, they don't do much for me, where on your reading, they should do, because of his love for them.

re digging, if you mean the actual poem 'Digging', then one of the reasons it works is that it's about multiple things: writing; generations, father and son; the difference between the manual and intellectual / lettered worker; and even the faint hint of violence in the gun (though risk of pre-Troubles anachronism here). We can think about them and not think much about actual digging - as I don't.

xp otm & no.

New thought I had is that insofar as late Heaney, on my reading, happily goes on about private obsessions that don't really interest a reader, and makes the reader do all the work of trying to find a point in this private stuff --

in that, he is curiously like an avant-garde type, of the Prynne School, Keston Sutherland, or whoever - people who 'don't compromise with easy readability', 'pursue an uncompromising intellectual agenda and rewrite the contract between author and reader', etc.

Which is droll in that, as a great Faber poet, he is not much someone they would identify with.

I have dug for spuds every year

well its a good discussion anyway

My families Dundonian, so I've picked a fair few tatties (though as a Fifer berries were more common).

I met Heaney a couple of times. Patient, but not warm (I might just have that effect on people).

An uneducated guess might be that this was nothing to do with you (though I have no idea of you or your relation to him), but just that Heaney, as someone very often required to meet strangers at public events, had become guarded about it and treated it as a professional duty. Rather as a Queen or President could.

I have the impression that he was warm with people he knew and liked a lot. As of course most of us try to be.

I expect many of us have particular stories of meeting writers and what they said. Perhaps it is or should be a thread.

I don't like Andrew O'Hagan but his memoir about touring Ireland and Scotland with Heaney and Karl Miller has some interest for the personal Heaney element.

Darraghmac, I think you would still need to enter the thought experiment of reading someone who wrote many poems about Bros and Commodore 64s, and many other poems about STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, and finding that they generated a warmth, love and fascination that was not connected to these particular contents but was a matter of the way the poet loved these things, which was something that anyone could identify with.

I think I can imagine that, and I could get on board with the Commodore 64 poems for at least a couple of poems -- but I maintain that it would be viewed as oddly narrow if it went on for book after book, and the 5th book exciting readers with SPOCK REDIVIVUS and 'BONES' IN SPACE.

A couple of specifics:

In ELECTRIC LIGHT: the poem 'Known World' seems to me very slack -- literally reproducing material from an old notebook, and not doing anything decisive or poetic with it.

'The Clothes Shrine' on the other hand I find worthwhile:

The clothes shrine

It was a whole new sweetness
in the early days to find
light white muslin blouses
on a see-through nylon line
drip-dying in the bathroom
or a nylon slip in the shine
of it's own electricity-
as if St. Brigid once more
had rigged up a ray of sun
like the one she'd strung on air
to dry her own cloak on
(hard-pressed Brigid, so
unstoppably on the go)-
the damp and slump and unfair
drag of the workday
made light of and got through
as usual, brilliantly.

-- as it is talking about something recognisable, in fact even something quite subtly important (to do with sharing a life with a member of the opposite sex) and taking it somewhere, making the everyday into something more interesting; and as the language is dense or pleasing enough ('rigged up a ray of sun' with 'brilliantly' a mildly punning final echo of the light).

Though I also fear in this poem a risk of tweeness, especially '(hard-pressed Brigid, so / unstoppably on the go)' - a sense of chuckling gaily at the feminine presence rather than honouring it as the main tone suggests. I don't greatly blame Heaney for this, the poem is well-intentioned, but I think this unfortunate resonance may come across.

heh, a most curious experiment proposal alright and i will attempt it at some stage today amidst my usual thought experiment of trying to get into the mindset of somebody enthusuastic about sharepoint

'Turpin Song' is yet another poem about an object in the house when he was growing up, but does have the peculiar interest of bizarrely bringing in Kubrick's 2001.

Read Field Work over the last couple of days. I mean, first thought is how dazzling it is as a collection - how free it is, ranging. Oracular, even? I made some brief notes as I read and wondered at the frequent recourse to the mouth the tongue and, not that it particularly needs a rosetta stone, if a phrase from the second Glanmore Sonnet might be the heart of it: 'words entering almost'. It's a loose theory but the book opens with a fierce act of eating ('Oysters' - 'I ate that day/Deliberately, that its tang/ might quicken me all into verb, pure verb') and closes with an image of eternal devouring in 'Ugolino' and there is frequent reference to mouths and speaking: 'my tongue was a filling estuary', 'my tongue moved, a swung, relaxing hinge' 'your voice was a harrassed pulpit'. Even a forehead is modified with the adjective 'candid'.

I suppose it's something of a cliche to consider Heaney's move to Wicklow as a kind of retreat or exile, a place where he was given the space for voices to come, bidden or otherwise but the title of the book does give that sense of him making recordings or soundings of his personal mythology.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Also, jesus christ the Harvest Bow.

That’s interesting, I’d never put the tongue imagery together like that, but it’s entirely true. It’s a very personal collection. I need to reread properly as you have done, but I recall it’s pretty political (even his scattered but repeated mentions of the hedge school tap into the past of Irish children not being permitted to be educated) but it’s also tinged with sex; The Skunk and The Otter most obviously, but even The Guttural Muse when he is watching young people after a night out. There’s lots of animal/naturalistic imagery too, the bag of flies as “policeman run amok” being particularly sharp. I am also amused by his quiet embarrassment when he is reminded that he is more removed from the world than he would like to think (talking to the man in the pub in Casualty, the third-last and penultimate stanzas in An Afterwards).

My only contribution to this thread is that today I discovered two of the hunger strikers AND Dominic "Mad Dog" McGlinchey grew up in the same village as Heaney. Seems a pretty hardcore place!

Biden likes to quote that bit Hof Heaney's Sophocles translation

It’s funny, early in the Inauguration gala, I mentioned to someone that Heaney/Sophocles “when hope and history rhyme” poem has become as much of a ceremonial standard as “Hallelujah.” And then Lin Manuel-Miranda delivered it...

I was blown away by it, first time I read it in DoubleTake magazine, and then in as part of NY Times poetry op-ed page.

I'm quite conscious of speaking from a position of ignorance with regards to Irish politics gyac, so tend towards keeping my gob shut (apt, given what I was babbling on about earlier)! But yes, the book is full of elegies for the dead and missing. There's one particularly vivid image of tanks rolling down the Toome Road, camouflaged in alder branches, which is striking for so many reasons: the idea of camouflaging a tank (itself a kind of silencing, however pointless), the appropriating of the landscape, the echoes of the English forces marching on Dunsinane in Macbeth.

Totally agree on how erotic it is. 'The sootfall of your things at bedtime' is about as erotic a line as I can think of in poetry ( I vaguely wonder if Bill Callahan nicked it for 'All Your Woman Things'?

Yeah The Toome Road is actually great in giving that sense of suppressed but still strongly felt anger (“How long were they approaching down my roads as if they owned them?”) iirc Colm Toibin said when Heaney died that he liked that “In a time of burnings and bombings he used poetry to offer an alternative world...” and I’m like, bitch, have you ever read Heaney? The anger is still there, he wishes for peace but he is still from Derry and it colours his poetry every now and then. How could it not?

Is the Music of What Happens worth a look? It's back up on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bxwv/seamus-heaney-and-the-music-of-what-happens

I watched this ^^. It's goodly. Heavy focus on the poems but mostly via interviews with his immediate family and photography of Ireland - so no real critical component at all (despite the presence of Helen Vendler) if that's a deal breaker.

It’s not, but also I’d forgotten about this so I appreciate the reminder!

I enjoyed it; there is indeed not a great critical component, but I doubt it would've fell in its place in this doc. There's a serene quality to the imagery of days past paired with hearing his poems. And I appreciated hearing the family members just talk about Heaney.

From a young age, Seamus Heaney was friends, and then sometimes collaborator, with the poet and critic Seamus Deane.

Seamus Deane has just died aged 81.

It is incredible - in a good way, for once - to observe the official recognition from the Irish head of state, let alone other literary people:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/president-leads-tributes-to-seamus-deane-1.4564086

Literally unthinkable that the UK head of state or head of government should offer such a response in an equivalent case.

“The death of Seamus Deane is an incalculable loss to Irish critical writing, indeed Irish writing in general,” the President said, “as his passing represents not only the loss of a foremost critic but of a distinguished poet, novelist and internationally acclaimed university teacher.

“Seamus Deane’s contribution to critical and creative writing was delivered, not only at home in Ireland but in some of the most prestigious universities of the United States of America, be it Berkeley, Notre Dame, Indiana, Oregon. In such universities, news of Seamus Deane’s participation in a seminar immediately drew huge interest from scholars young and old, partly due, no doubt, to the sheer breath of the materials he would cover, but also due to the unique connection he would make between the life and the work.

“To Derry he leaves the incomparable legacy of the life, the writing, the concerns, the despair and the hope, that he shared with its people and to which so much of the work would respond.

“Few cities have a writer more embedded in its people, its history, its challenges, its hopes and its humour.

“There are, to me, parallels between Seamus Deane’s relationship to Derry and, in his time, Sean O’Casey’s relationship to Dublin in the way the full experience of its peoples are placed at the centre of the writing. All of the living is allowed its place.

“Seamus Deane was, too, a leading part of the great burst of intellectual revival that led to the Crane Bag, the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature and many other innovations, which will be recalled as examples of the collaboration he had with his scholarly neighbours, and others, in giving a valuable affirmative to the importance and energy of Irish writing. When reasonably criticised for omission in a work he replied with the candour of a critic who had become himself the subject of a legitimate criticism. This was typical of the scholar in him.

“The price paid for a great talent, such as Seamus Deane had, was high and is revealed, I believe, in his work, including his fine novel, Reading in the Dark.

“That work too was delivered with a truth that combined the word, the place, the history, the lives, and the power of communal humour in the act of survival.

“All of this is put so well, for example, in his poem Derry, which opens with the lines:

The unemployment in our bones
Erupting on our hands in stones

The thought of violence a relief,
The act of violence a grief
Our bitterness and love
Hand in glove.

“Eternal peace be with our great writer and critic Seamus Deane. Sabina and I send our sympathies to his family, the people of Derry and his friends and former students at home and abroad. Siochán síoraí dá anam lách.”

Today I cannot stop thinking about how the line “The end of art is peace” in The Harvest Bow feels like a pause, a sigh, an exhalation to me even though the sentence continues. Sometimes you read something written short sharp sentences, like the writer is spitting the words at you, but it’s rarer to find something that feels like a pause as this does IMO.

It’s like

“The end of art is peace…”
breath
“…could be the motto of this frail device”

And that breath is the poet slipping from the mundane to the divine as he has been going all throughout the poem for barely a fraction of a second, before reality calls him back.

I'm reading *Seeing Things*. I've not quite made my mind up about it as a collection, but so many moments catch my breath. The back half of the book is a series of 12-line poems called 'Squarings' and this is buried in there.

Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.

In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting

For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original

Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.

original/ripple internal rhyme so cool

That phrase 'dainty shins' has been pinging around my head all day.

rattle bag is my all-time favorite poetry anthology, even if it has a few too many limericks

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

ooh

For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened

jesus

I'm conscious of clogging the reading thread with my Heaney blatherings so will just leave some of his ruminations on the creative process here, all taken from the Dennis O'Driscoll interviews. Although I suspect they don't bear close examination, they make me feel like my skin is covered in little lights.

Put it this way: some poets and poetry you admire in the way you admire produce in a market. Natural, beautiful stuff, delightfully there in front of you, thickening your sense of being alive. But you're still looking at it. You're savouring it but you can move on to the next display. Then there are other poets and poetry that turn out to be more like plants and growths inside you. It's not so much a case of inspecting the produce as of feeling a life coming into you and through you. You're Jack and at the same time you're the beanstalk. You're the ground and the growth all at once. There's no critical distance, as yet.

The early-in-life experience has been central to me all right. But I'd say you aren't so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it. The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. But once you do, it's like putting your hand into a nest and finding something beginning to hatch out in your head.

[talking about the poem 'The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon', from his second book Door into the Dark'] 'it started where I always like to start, in the ground of memory and sensation...but there wasn't enough self-forgetfulness'

The ultimate Frostian sensation of the poem coming to itself like a piece of ice on a hot stove.

...material that has been in my memory for so long it has almost become aware of me.

Lorca... implying that poetry requires an inner flamenco, that it must be excited into life by something peremptory, some initial strum or throb that gets you started and drives you farther than you realised you could go.

I'm reading that book now, thanks to the thread.

I was going to put a 'sorry for spoilers Alfred!' message but figured the extracts were more like breadcrumbs than spoilers.

It's meant to be dipped around. I'm reading about Bill Clinton's dinner with him.

I like the book. It has many moments to enjoy.

One is where O'Driscoll rather demandingly gets him to give examples of categories that are something like Public, Social, and Political poets, and in the first or second category he says something like: 'Dare one say Philip Larkin?' - and explains the answer well.

(That's an inexact memory.)

I've often said that he is (was) fabulously elegant, on a level unknown to almost anyone I can think of. In a way, Chinaski's quotations support that.

Coincidentally I've just been reading Bono writing about Bob Geldof being fabulously eloquent. Not quite so sure about that.

Geldof and Heaney both have heinous tastes in haircuts. Seamus Heinous more like. Is it an Irish phenomenon through the early '90s?