POETS Day! Listening to Seamus Heaney

As always, it’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but this week you may not have piss off quite as early. I’m not suggesting you stay at work. Don’t do that. Get the weekend started early as per usual, but today we have an audio component. If you have a cushy desk job and a pair of earbuds, you can take time for a little verse right there in the discomfort of your cubicle.

Some may say, “Listening to non-work-related material on company time is like stealing!”

Yes, it is. Delicious stealing.

***

Harold Bloom wrote about everybody. As editor of the Modern Critical Views series, he got his name on a mess of book spines. They’re essay collections, and a hell of a resource – each focused on a particular author or movement and each with an erudite introduction by Bloom himself. A quick count on Goodreads shows one hundred and seventy-nine volumes dedicated to individual authors. There’s not a decent cover amongst them.

I say that but, except for Robert Hayden, who got caught suppressing a sneeze, the quarter or so that use a photo are okay. James Joyce looks just like he does on the cover of every other James Joyce book because they all use the same shot and the Russians look like appropriately pissed off Longfellows, but the artists’ renderings are cruel.

John Updike is drawn as Tank MacNamera played by Gerard Depardieu and Pablo Neruda is depicted as Comintern Jeeves. I don’t think Seamus Heaney has been libeled by his portrait, but I don’t look at it and see an Irish Catholic from Derry – not with that parka like fringe of hair. The measured fields of green in the background are discordantly not white. It’s a fine rendering of an amicable senior engineer who thinks the fresh-out-of-Anchorage grad they just sent up needs to put down that laptop and spend some time at the drill site.

In my head, I’ve done something similar to his poems. I grew up in Alabama. My parents came from Maryland and though my mother was an accent chameleon, I picked up a bit of Mid-Atlantic from dad to stir in with the proper English we speak in the South. When reading, I get caught imposing my dialectic idiosyncrasies where his sparkling lilt should reign. Catholic, but not from Derry.

I’ve heard Shakespeare read by an actor pronouncing the text as it would (likely) have been pronounced in Elizabethan times. It’s richer. There’s nothing wrong with Hamlet in Birmingham but you find beats and rhymes you didn’t know were there when you hear the Avon cant. If I think I’m missing something in a poem and know where the poet came from, I’ll try to read it or at least imagine reading it in their accent. That only sounds goofy because it is.

Not everybody can do a convincing Irish accent, but almost everyone can do that awful stereotype Oirish of fourth drink St. Patrick’s Day fame, the one roused in defense of your lucky charms. Do that, but temper it, and then temper that result.

I stumbled reading the following from one of today’s featured poems.

Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

In my voice, the “a” in gargled is too short and right after the doubled “b”s in “bubbles” I fall forward into “bluebottles.” I don’t do justice to the repeated “s” in the second line.

Seamus Heaney is a giant. Bloom sets him up as Yeats’s heir, writing in 1986 that selections from the collection Field Work were, “worthy of comparison to the Yeats of In the Seven Woods (1904), and it begins to seem not farfetched to wonder how remarkable a poet Heaney may yet become.” We don’t have to wonder any more. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. To me he stands with Landor, Swinburne, Yeats, Graves, and Bishop; poets who participated in the development of poetry in their time but seem aloof. Concomitant. More inspired by others than influenced by them.

There’s a lot to say about Heaney, but I’ll get to that some other time. I’m stuck on sound right now. I found recordings of him – bazillions of recordings of him – on YouTube and they’re much better than listening to mentally tempered leprechauns. I’ve copied the first two poems from his first collection, The Death of a Naturalist, and embedded a video of the poet reading each after each. It’s as pleasant as you’d imagine.

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

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

I read a few essays on Heaney and I’m having trouble finding the quote for proper attribution, but I’m pretty sure it was Bloom who pointed out that this next poem could have been titled “Birth of a Poet.”

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst, into nimble
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Finally, this is the last poem he’s known to have written. It’s dated twelve days before he died. There’s no recording that I know of, but if you listened to the two above you should still have his voice in your head.

In Time
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

for Siofra

Energy, balance, outbreak:
Listen to Bach
I saw you years from now
(More years than I’ll be allowed)
Your toddler wobbles gone,
A sure and grown woman.

Your bare foot on the floor
Keeps me in step; the power
I first felt come up through
Our cement floor long ago
Palps your sole and heel
And earths you here for real.

An oratorio
Would be just the thing for you:
Energy, balance, outbreak
At play for their own sake
But for now we foot it lightly
In time, and silently.

18 August 2013