“You are neither here nor there, /A hurry through which known and strange things pass”

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/73559117″>Seamus Heaney – Postscript</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/littlevision”>&Eacute;amon Little – LittleVision</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Seamus Heaney’s family on life with the great poet: ‘He was always just Dad at home’ – Nicholas Wroe – The Guardian – June 30, 2018

Although he was 74 when he died, there is still a sense that his life was somehow cut short. ‘So it did comfort me,”’says Marie, ‘when I heard that Auden had once said that no true artist died before they have said what they had to say. And I think he did manage to say what he had to say.’” 

Seamus Heaney – Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild

–

Read rest of poem  (Link provided here because the article above notes that in Ireland there are “few funerals that don’t feature ‘Postscript’.”)

excerpt from 1 of Bill Clinton’s favorite books

Seamus Heaney– The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

–

Read rest of excerpt 

See more: Bill Clinton: By the Book – New York Times – May 31, 2018

According to Wikipedia,

the poem–in particular a stanza with a line about how sometimes “a tidal wave/of justice” rises up and “hope and history rhyme…”

was quoted by Bill Clinton in his remarks to the community in Londonderry in 1995 during the Northern Ireland Peace Process, and by Joe Biden at the memorial service for Sean Collier, a campus police officer who was killed in the line of duty during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. In the opening chorus of the play, Heaney’s translation emphasizes the role of poetry as “the voice of reality and justice” in expressing “terrible events”.

 

Dailies 1/12/18

 Bruce Beasley – On Marriage

I.

Wind’s the medium of air.
It says what in the air’s
stasis we’d never hear.
In the sibilation of its leaving
–

Read rest of poem 

Angel Nafis – King of Kreations

Onliest man who lay hands on me. Pointer finger pad between my eyes.
Pinky knuckle cool on cheekbone. God of precision, blade at my throat,

for a half hour, you love me this way. Together we discover what I got
from my folks—widows peak, dandruff, hair growing fast in concentric O’s.
-
Read rest of poem 

Corey Mesler  – Your Body

How it doesn’t carry you around.
How remarkably durable it is,
carrying you around.

–

Read rest of poem 

~TRIBRACH~

Poetry Diary: 

Johnny Cash – California Poem

1966

–

There’s trouble on the mountain

And the valley’s full of smoke

–

Read rest of poem 

Seamus Heaney loved to fax

 

Seamus Heaney’s biographer races to see poet’s faxes before they fade – Alison Flood – The Guardian – 11/14/17

“A race is on to track down faxes sent by Seamus Heaney before they fade. The outdated technology was the preferred form of communication for the late Nobel laureate and will be a vital source for Fintan O’Toole, who has just been signed up to write an authorised biography of the Irish poet.

“’My one terror is that his favourite communication mode was the fax, and faxes fade. So I’m going to have to find out who has faxes from him, and read them quickly. At the end, [Heaney’s publisher] Faber had a fax machine that was kept just for Seamus,’ said O’Toole.”

He also liked pens. 🙂

Seamus Heaney – Digging

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

–

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

–

Read rest of poem 

Dailies 9/1/17: a market, digging, lettuce, the family freezer, young boys

Amy Gerstler – To a Head of Lettuce

May I venture to address you, vegetal friend?
A lettuce is no less than me, so I respect you,
though it’s also true I may make a salad of you,
later. That’s how we humans roll. Our species

–

Read rest of poem 

 

Seamus Heaney – Digging

–

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

–

Read rest of poem 

 

Jodie Hollander  – The Family Freezer 

I am in the freezer, getting numb:

around me are hunks of frozen meat wrapped

in white butcher paper, popsicles in old iced boxes,

frost-bitten burger patties, bags of frozen peas.

–

Read rest of poem 

Carolyn Miller – The Market in Limogne

I went back to the market but it was not the same,
because my friend was dead and I was looking at
all the beautiful things she could not see.
I knew she would have loved the bundled radishes,

–

Read rest of poem 

---

Tribrach

Poetry Journal: school started in our town on Monday…and already the kids have a day off (Teacher In-Service Day.) I’m taking care of my son and his best friend/fellow first grader this morning as they tear up my house and wrestle and fart on each other.  So I’m searching for poems about boys. This one is nice:

Toi Derricotte – In Knowledge of Young Boys

–

i knew you before you had a mother,

when you were newtlike, swimming,

a horrible brain in water.

i knew you when your connections

–

Read rest of poem

–

Why don’t female poets collaborate as much as men? &! check out these Bro Books!

“For more than 200 years, male British authors (usually poets, usually in pairs) have co-written or co-edited collections, anthologies or scholarly travel journals. It’s a tradition that is in surprisingly rude health, with recent examples and forthcoming festivities marking the 50th anniversary of a collaboration that sold shedloads. The subgenre’s fundamental challenge (how – and how much – to write as ‘we’?) remains unsolved, however, as is the mystery of why female or mixed doubles pairings in all kinds of writing are comparatively rare. Do try, though, to avoid potentially hurtful comparisons to Bro (buddy) movies, Bro-country acts or rappers duetting: the writers involved are sensitive chaps.”

Why British poets are bringing the ‘Bro book’ back: From William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, male authors have long collaborated in pairs – and the tradition is now stronger than ever – John Dugdale – The Guardian – 3/31/17

2 literally annoying articles

(poetry diary 22) I’ve recently been feeling annoyed over this news article:

According to the dictionary, “literally” now also means “figuratively” – Dana Coleman –Salon – August 22, 2016

So for bemusement I went looking for poems about the word “literally.” I didn’t find any that hit me, but I was amused to find an article about a man who took one of Seamus Heaney’s poems too literally….

In 2010 a man obsessed with telling the world about the horrors of bullfighting travelled through two days of rain to protest one of Heaney’s readings.

Heaney once wrote a poem, “Tate’s Avenue,”  which mentioned the sport. He also once compared W.H. Auden to a bullfighter. The protester found these things upsetting.

A statement from Heaney said: “I do not support bullfighting and anyone who draws such an inference from my writing is totally mistaken.”

Read more:

The danger of taking poetry too literally – Richard Alleyne – The Telegraph – August 30, 2010

TATE’S AVENUE

–

Not the brown and fawn car rug, that first one
Spread on sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths,
Its vestal folds unfolded, its comfort zone
Edged with a fringe of sepia-coloured wool tails.

–

Read rest of poem at Poetry International

September 3

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

–

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

–

SEAMUS HEANEY ON WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S ONE BIG TRUTH-AN INDISPENSABLE FIGURE IN THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN WRITING

Literary Hub –August 30, 2016

As a child, William Wordsworth imagined he heard the moorlands breathing down his neck; he rowed in panic when he thought a cliff was pursuing him across moonlit water; and once, when he found himself on the hills east of Penrith Beacon, beside a gibbet where a murderer had been executed, the place and its associations were enough to send him fleeing in terror to the beacon summit.

Every childhood has its share of such uncanny moments. Nowadays, however, it is easy to underestimate the originality and confidence of a writer who came to consciousness in the far from child-centred eighteenth century and then managed to force a way through its literary conventions and its established modes of understanding: by intuition and introspection he recognized that such moments were not only the foundation of his sensibility, but the clue to his fulfilled identity.

If you have the words….

“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.”
― Seamus Heaney 

from Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Quote found at Goodreads.

bits of poetry news and “In Our Time”

The Poetry Foundation’s “Harriet” blog has a good round-up of articles written on the Hudson/Chou pen-name scandal, including ones about the real woman Hudson took the name from, who is demanding that he stop using it. 

*

At the Irish Times, Mike Heaney, Seamus Heaney’s son, has an essay on his father’s famous last words, and how they in saying them Heaney did “what writers do best: boiled down our anxieties and fears in a way that makes sense.” 

*

The Guardian has a piece on how literary magazines are using crowdfunding campaigns like Kickstarter to help fund their magazines. 

*

PBS has a bit on Vetch, the first poetry journal by trans writers 

*

And for those who have 22 seconds to spare, here is an old recording of Muriel Rukeyser reading the poem “In Our Time:” 

Have a happy Wednesday! -TAA