Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

impulse bought the kindle edition of the only good indians by stephen graham jones to kill time at work today and i'm glad i did - it's real good so far.

One of the most useful things my teenage self did was memorize a whole bunch of Hopkins, so I'll have him with me on my desert island no matter what.

I know it's not an arms race but while I like Heaney a good deal, and accept his project didn't necessarily require it (if that's the right verb?), he doesn't come close to Hopkins' heights (cliffs of fall, frightful). Xp

He's also a deal easier to remember than Heaney!

Totally with you on the Holy Sonnets and Hopkins.

I like the way his rhythms and absolute command over assonance still produce these verses that murmur like brooks. Like many poets in old age, he relied on technique to get him past an empty larder, but I'll always love Field Work.

When I taught poetry 18 (!) years ago, "The Otter" often made my syllabus:

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 I've been reading Hardy's poetry since "The Voice" speared this lovelorn teen two decades ago. The rhythmic experimentation and occasional clumsiness adds to their charm.

More Hardy is in my 2021 list. Maybe I'll try some of his poems too.

reread The Mayor of Castorbridge a month ago this weekend

Alfred, don't want to pick on you for your spelling but...

...it's too much fun to resist!

In keeping with Hardy's approach to prose and poetry.

I suppose that Heaney covers a lot of ground (sometimes literally lol) that is more mundane and is very connected to the landscape, which is not much different from the landscapes of my childhood. When he speaks of the scent of the air, the colour of the earth, he is putting the feelings of very ordinary people about their habitat into something almost divine. It helped me see the ordinary world in an almost magical and transformed way.

I have great regard for the matter-of-fact language he uses, it is simple, but not stupid, personal, but not parochial and these things by themselves make his work accessible and easy to read for people who may be far removed from the kind of places he writes about - so much so that it is easy to slag him off as boring, I guess. I think there is work of his that is discordant and that goes against this simplistic analysis of mine too. Act of Union has always been deeply disturbing to me precisely because it is written by him in his calm way, the imagery is visceral even in the present tense and allegorical as it is, and it is probably one of his most political works. I have never found it very easy to read, it’s shocking to me even now.

I will never forget learning Mid-Term Break in school at ten or so, as most Irish children do, and finding the poem terribly upsetting for very similar reasons - the mundane setting, the horror of the event, the bare bones simplicity that leaves you with all the murmurs in the house and the ticking clock in the waiting room. The sounds between the unsaid. I would be very surprised if there was much that still stuck to people’s minds a quarter of a century later, as that poem did to me.

When I think of Heaney I think first of the physical - the land, the air, the sea - and then the deep undercurrent of emotion running through his work, and what a pure pleasure it is to read his work, even when it is disturbing. I cannot read The Harvest Bow, in particular this:

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

Booming post.

He gives life to topography.

An auction notice on an outhouse wall— startling slip-in, and makes me wonder how it relates to the next line, as they keep walking.

That is a lovely post, gyac. I think that perhaps my experiences simply render much of what you speak of as mere observation and narrative candor, which is more than fine, but not what I look for in poetry. I should also say that Heaney often does the 'dilatory epiphanic' move toward the end of his poems, which I find just intolerable, more and more so as I age.

All that said, I'm glad he brings you peace and enjoyment.

_An auction notice on an outhouse wall—_ startling slip-in, and makes me wonder how it relates to the next line, as they keep walking.

I respect very much what poster Gyac has said here.

Yet it doesn't quite square with my own sense of Heaney. I think because my own sense, as I said, is of greater obscurity. Either I am not always sure what Heaney is saying, or I am not sure why he is saying it. A line often feels inconsequential. And quite often a line just doesn't quite add up to me at all.

There are other issues with Heaney eg: that after a certain point, he is often not writing so much directly about these matter of fact, immediate things, but making overt reference to classical sources. A non-classicist, I never find this compelling. My hunch is that, as Larkin begrudgingly said, classical and mythic references don't make reality more impressive, and the poet should work to do that without them. (As Joyce did in Ulysses, which almost never advertises its classical aspect.)

I'm not certain what 'dilatory epiphanic' means, but my hunch is that what it means is precisely what you find, to a quite formulaic (but well-executed!) degree, in Larkin - and *not* in Heaney. If Heaney actually often did that then his endings would be less obscure to me than they are.

Poster Gyac mentions that his or her own childhood was in a landscape like Heaney's. Mine wasn't - perhaps that makes a difference.

As for 'Lightenings viii': having read Foster praise it in his own uncritical way, I'm inclined to say, with impolite contrariness, that that's now about as rusted a cliché as 'when hope and history rhyme'. What's actually good about it?

I see more myth than Classical allusions in Heaney -- Irish myth, but rooted in peat, loam, mud, and the smell of farm animals. It's what I like about him.

I recall now that there is a massive Heaney thread here:

Seamus Heaney-Classic or Dud (RIP)

In which several of us turned over the same ground only last year. ILX poster Gyac posted exactly the same quotation! And I, for instance, after a period of reading him quite intensively, wrote:

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.

But there simply isn't much Irish myth in Heaney.

There is tons of classical myth - especially in the last 20 years or so of his career, when he spent half his time producing translations of it.

If he had wanted to write about Cuchulain, Deirdre, Finn MacCool or the Sidhe, he could have. But he didn't, as far as I recall -- for one thing, he will have known how much it had been done, almost a century before.

The exception is Mad King Sweeney, which / who he did write about a lot -- seemingly in part because he liked the rhyme with his own name.

Station Island?

I'm actually relieved he didn't write about Cuchulain, etc.

I much prefer a long poem about Bros, though.

When Yeats wrote a key position-taking play for the Abbey and the Revival, it was (among others) Cathleen ni Houlihan.

When Heaney wrote one for Field Day, about 90 years later, it was The Cure at Troy.

I suspect (as my post from the other thread indicates) that you will never fully get the measure and pleasure of Heaney unless you are somewhat steeped in classical learning, tales and poems of ancient Greek, at least in translation, so that what he does with them and alters means something to you, as it generally doesn't to me.

The long poem 'Station Island' is based on an Irish Catholic pilgrimage. I'm happy to call Catholicism myth, if anyone else is, but it's not 'Irish mythology' in the way that phrase is usually understood.

The literary inspiration for the whole thing is, above all, Dante - whom I don't pretend to know well at all. Again, if you did, you might get much more out of Heaney. Catholic, mythic maybe, but not Irish.

The poem is full of Irish elements but they're not mythic: actual victims of recent violence; Carleton, Kavanagh and Joyce; other people Heaney knew, like a late priest.

Part III of the book STATION ISLAND, though, is the Sweeney section - I grant that that is properly an engagement with medieval Irish mythology.

I think the Bros poem idea is not even fanciful now -- there seem to be a ton of younger type poets who would do such a thing (or maybe more likely NKOTB, or even Spears / Timberlake, or something), and be reposted all over Instagram for it. I can definitely picture this being celebrated in some circles, and getting a Short Cuts feature in the LRB.

In a certain way, though, it wouldn't be viewed as equally serious as what Heaney did. Its defiant unseriousness would be part of the point [etc etc]. Which they wouldn't say about Heaney writing about the 1950s.

I'm also wary and weary of classical myths. A generation of formalist American poets (Hecht, Moss, Howard, etc) wrote in the '60s and '70s as if I still cared about Eurydice or whatever. Louise Gluck also has a weakness for it.

and, yeah, I meant the Sweeney section of SI. Also the title poem itself. Depends on how you regard the speaker bumping into the ghost of Joyce.

Larkin's statement was here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin

He says something like 'I'm not going to fall on my face just because you use the word "Faust" or "Judas"'.

I broadly agree with him.

Jesus Christ, I really regret replying here. Thanks so much, guys.

gyac, I really meant what I said about your post-- it was really lovely, and I'm glad to have read it. It did make me go back and re-read some Heaney, and while I don't gather the same enjoyment from it that you do, that's okay!

Talking of Dante: I only just learned that ALASDAIR GRAY has produced a version!

This might finally be the time for me to attempt to read a version of it properly.

t’s memory, isn’t it? Love in the most ordinary of places, the profound in the everyday. It makes sense in the context of the rest. Yeah, but seems deliberately to exclude some of what it might have more specifically meant to the narrator and/or his father on that day, which is a good reminder of the slipperiness of significance, especially as recalled, recast, across the years, in the midst of what could otherwise seem like a lovely set piece: overall, with this line, it reminds me of the way Turner could balance things in his paintings, with just the one daub.
Great post, yes, and thanx to Alfred as well for those lines and all yall for the rest of this conversation--will have to go back to that Heaney thread, and was already thinking of checking out my Mom's copy of the SH Beowulf, A New Verse Translation.

xps to table: didn’t mean you at all, your reply was very kind and it didn’t matter that we don’t agree on this

I kind of feel like poets are like bands, so I would never think of being confounded that a poet I like is not generally admired or that one who is generally admired is not liked by me. Also, like bands, I think most poets have a hot streak of a few great albums/books, when they're hitting on all cylinders, the drummer and bass player both are in the pocket and the singer had temporarily given up or taken up smoking; or in the case of the poet, has found the perfect subject matter or diction or is in the right emotional headspace for his current style, or has a hot hand which always seems to fall on the apropos word or phrase. I can enjoy a band without understanding or even listening to the words, and though I wouldn't take it that far with poetry, there is an element of it just sounding good that can transcend the occasional inscrutable or hermetic allusion.

I agree with that. I think I'd probably love a Heaney or Merrill book or two, if I revisited.

Along those lines, though, and perhaps to prove that I am able to be convinced, I will note that this year, I read a number of Barbara Guest books, and simply couldn't understand why she was so popular. Then someone recommended 'The Türler Losses,' and it is a masterpiece, just an incredible book.

For Merrill, I've not read 'Changing Light at Sandover' since an undergrad, but I found it masterful then. It's the rest of his work that I find lacking.

For Heaney, the bog poems will always reverberate in my memory. Everything else seems quite dull to me.

G K Chesterton - Robert Browning

I finished this short biography/critical appraisal by Chesterton and I very much enjoyed following his logic as he not only deal with Browning's life and work, but also his critics. At times it was a counterpart (of sorts) to what Janet Malcolm was doing to Sylvia Plath's many biographers.

I broke down and started a new WAYR thread:

Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

only post to it if it's 2021 in ur time zone please folks

I finished Lethem's THE ARREST.

It ends with quite a large climax, which rearranges key items and characters of the novel in a quite a vividly schematic and spatial way.

It may leave some loose ends and unexplained story elements.

I finished Dissipatio H.G.. It belongs to that special pantheon of books that were finished shortly before the author committed suicide (cf. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday). It's hard to read a book like that without looking for clues to the author's pathology. This books offers plenty of suggestive clues if that's what you're looking for. I don't want to completely conflate the author with the narrator, there are some obvious differences, such as their age, but also plenty of overlap. Both seem to be very well read, moderately-antisocial autodidacts, who live by choice in a remote mountain village, dislike cities, and distrust the bien pensant intellectual currents of their day. The book is short but chock full of obscure allusions. I was halfway through before I realized there were end notes, which helped quite a bit. The title is illustrative, in that it is putatively drawn from a Latin letter written by an obscure Neoplatonist philosopher. The philosopher is real, although the letter itself may have been a little joke of the author's. It seems that many of these little jokes were intended for a very select audience, possibly including only the author himself. I guess that fits with the book's imagined scenario, but can make for frustrating reading, if that's not your sort of thing. Now, I'm reading The A26 by Pascal Garnier.