POETS Day! More Seamus Heaney and Thoughts on Touching Stuff
Last week’s POETS Day was about Seamus Heaney, and I seemed to have found myself in a moment, albeit a miniscule one. Douglas Murray featured Heaney in his regular Sunday column, “Things Worth Remembering,” over at The Free Press and then the latest issue of The New Criterion arrived with a review by Paul Dean of both The Letter’s of Seamus Heaney and The Translations of Seamus Heaney. I got swept up in it all and the books I borrowed aren’t due back until the day before Valentine’s, so l’m going to keep it going.
I’m pulled by the urge to say “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s…” and then substitute something about the Super Bowl for the usual “Saturday,” but I’d have to include “Bowl.” It’s not POETSB Day. I can’t write “Super bowl” to de-emphasize half of what is a well-known proper title, and even if I did, it looks stupid. I’ll keep it “Saturday” and assume you know the drill. I’ll stay away from Taylor Swift cracks too.
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My wife and I, weather permitting, try to walk every day along the creek that runs near our house. Today I was telling her about Heaney, what I’d read that afternoon. He left a sizable collection of literary papers and works to Emory University. They have his along with collections from other Irish poets: Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, and others. That’s about a two-hour drive from Birmingham and I was thinking maybe we’d take a day trip. And then I thought, “Why?”
I follow Aelfred the Great on Twitter (@aelfred_D). A few week’s ago he mentioned that he’d just picked up a copy of The Waste Land: A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including The Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited by Valerie Eliot, so I got a copy of my own. Walking with my wife, talking about the Heaney Emory repository, I started thinking about literary antiques – first editions, folios, original papers, etc. – and how we fetishize them.
from A Herbal
After Guilevic’s “Herbier de Bretagne”Between heather and marigold,
Between sphagnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated rook,I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
My new annotated Eliot is more useful than the original from which it was scanned. I don’t have to keep it under lock and key. I can mark it up with my own notes. And nobody’ll care when I spill coffee on it. Eliot and Pound touched the original, but as a vehicle preserving what they wrote, assuming it’s a comprehensive reproduction, mine’s got the same info in a more durable format. If the goal is preservation, I’ve got the better goods.
The Heaney papers are no doubt digitized by now. The originals don’t serve beyond sentimentality. I like to think that the documents held at Emory represent some sort of bridge connecting me to the poet. “Seamus Heaney held this,” I could say. And if I held it too… I have no idea. But for some reason I think it’s nice. Not that I’d ever be able to hold them.
I’ve seen The Book of Kells. It’s way further up the precious scale than anything written post Guttenberg. I waited with hundreds of others to kind of be in the same room with it and see, for a brief pause, whatever page it was opened to on that day. I don’t remember at all. It was encased in a plastic box and well lit, so there were reflections to contend with. I got a much better idea of the artwork looking through reproductions in the gift shop. But I was in the same room as the little tiny plastic room that the book was in.
The Forge
All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.
I saw a documentary about The Book of Kells a long time ago. Researchers wore white gloves when handling it. Nobody touches it. I doubt the Heaney collection is treated with that degree of reverence, but to the world outside of a select number of researchers, it’s off limits. Every bit of the book has been recorded and made available. The actual tome might as well exist only as an idea, but there it is and there I was and there were all manner of others waiting to be near it.
I read that with every breath, we are mathematically likely to inhale at least one atom that was a part of Julius Caesar’s last gasp. I don’t know what amount of time needs to pass for a single breath to be dispersed to that degree, but most people breath more than once. I may not have coughed out a great 20th Century poet’s hospice atom but if the Caesar thing is true, I’ve surely shared a bit of oxygen that Heaney, Eliot, or Pound got ahold of first at some point in their lives. We collect things our heroes touched or held. We’ve likely inhaled something they inhaled. Forget tactile, that’s comparatively sexual. But we still value these media even when we’ve secured the message.
My wife touched a Giotto once. It was allowed but she said it seemed wrong; a parade of museum patrons eroding the surface a finger at a time. Touch the fresco. Don’t touch the fresco. There were two wolves inside her. I kissed the Blarney Stone. I don’t feel like my lips or the endless succession of other lips wore that rock down even a fraction of the amount that the disinfecting liquid sprayed on and wiped off between smooches did. But we rub off too. Her finger and my lips have shed and grown and shed and grown cells so many times. I suppose we have cells that touched cells that touched the Renaissance or got Irish petrichor on them. It’s a Kevin Bacon game at this point.
I have three first edition Faulkners. They have no tactile connection to the man, whatsoever; printed in New York with all the artistry of a work order and shipping instructions. I like em.
That’s what happens on our walks; what we talk about. That’s why we walk. Sometimes it’s free association. Sometimes it’s playing with a why. The poem isn’t the writing on the paper, but we’re sentimental. The writing is the connection. The poem is.
When we got home, I showed my wife a few of the poems I was considering for this post from the couple of Heaney’s books I checked out. “He really is good,” she said. She’s right, and I’ve done him no service yet, so expect another Heaney POETS Day in the next few months. I hope you enjoy the three of his that I included today. He really is good.
I’m still not driving to Emory.
from Clearances
in memoriam M.K.H., 1911-19847
In the last minute he said more to her
Almost than in all their life together.
‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night
And I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad
When I walk in the door… Isn’t that right?’
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could not hear but we were overjoyed.
He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,
The search for a pulsebeat was abandoned
And we all knew one thing by being there.
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.
[With the “in memoriam” and after “After Guilevic’s” under the titles I thought it would be a bit fussy and probably unnecessary to write in Heaney’s name as well, but in case it isn’t obvious, all three of the above poems were authored by Seamus Heaney. While I’m in brackets, thanks to John Puccio for quoting “Clearances” last week. I hadn’t read that before.]
