To the Lighthouse: the Place of Politics in Poetry by Seamus Heaney

My Dear Readers and Fellow Poets:

Two days ago, CBC Radio re-aired its May 23, 2010 interview with Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney on the place of politics in poetry. 

This interview was timely, sociopolitically conscious, and most importantly, relevant to "our life in this broken world."

Below is an excerpt from this interview:

Pondering Poetry:

I was first interested in poetry as 'poetry.' Early on I was familiar with recitation.

We had little concerts at home as children, where we recited poems we'd learned at school of course. Then at Christmastime and at Easter, elder friends of my father's and mother's would be in, and there would be sing-songs. As I came into adolescence I would be asked to do a recitation. I knew several, such as The Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Spell of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee, all from Robert W. Service...

I wrote some poems as every literary undergraduate does, but it wasn't until 1962, that something started in me. But it came from reading poetry by Patrick Kavanagh, an Irish poet with the same kind of background as myself, a wonderful sudden burst of energy from him; and likewise from Ted Hughes, who again touched on subjects that I thought were known only to me, such as dead pigs lying in barrows, and bulls in outhouses, and barns and so on...

Poetics & Politics:

The question of what a poet's responsibility is to address the politics in their time is one that I kept answering ad nauseum between about 1969 or 1970 and 1989. Almost everything that I've written in prose and much that's in verse is about that question. Poets of the 1930s in England especially felt that. I mean, Spender, Auden and Louis MacNeice — who's an Irish poet of course, but part of that British generation — spoke to and about the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism and so on.

They were lyric poets, they had private subjects. They had love, eros, sex, time, childhood and yet there was the big war and the need for commitment. Communism was flowering as an ideology. The attraction of working for the wretched of the earth was deep, moral and compelling. So what was the private lyric poet to do? Was he or she to just keep to the lyric matter of the self and beauty or was there a bigger obligation?...

Just a few minutes before Seamus Heaney  died, he sent a message, in Latin, to his wife Marie. It said simply: "Noli Timere – Don't be afraid."

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, "poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty." 

-- Seamus Heaney, Ireland's most renowned poet since Yeats, playwright and translator who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature

History says don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme

Seamus Heaney, "The Cure at Troy"

 

I would like to conclude today's post with a "haiku called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty"

This Brave New World, CXXIX

a teen waves his bloodied keffiyeh becoming Flag

FYI: For many Palestinians, the keffiyeh symbolizes their yearning for freedom and serves a nod to their history. For some non-Palestinians, it's a show of solidarity. 

And The Guardian, Jan.9, 2023 (9 months before the Hamas attacks): Israel security minister bans Palestinian flag-flying in public: Itamar Ben-Gvir’s order follows series of punitive steps against Palestinians since Israel’s hardline government took office.

Note: For more about Seamus Heaney's view of haiku and writing of tanka, see my "Dark Wings of the Night" posts: Seamus Heaney and His View of Haiku and Tankas for Toraiwa

Added: This Brave New World, CXXX

Christmas Eve in Bethlehem

nativity scene

Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus

amid tangled rubble

the sound of church bells

fades in the gathering dark

empty Manger Square

FYI: Manger Square is a city square in the center of Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "In 1950, Bethlehem and the surrounding villages were 86 percent Christian. But by 2016, the Christian population dipped to just 12 percent, according Bethlehem mayor Vera Baboun."

The New Yorker, Nov.1 2023: The Gaza-ification of the West Bank: As the war in Gaza escalates, so, too, has the forcible displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. Is Israel’s approach to the two regions linked?

An interview with Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli activist and the former executive director of the nonprofit organization B’Tselem, which works on human-rights issues in the occupied territories.

 

Government of Canada, Dec. 15: 14 countries, in addition to the EU, call on Israel to take immediate and concrete steps to tackle record high settler violence in the West Bank.

And Haaretz, Dec. 24: "Christmas During Gaza War: Bethlehem Marks a Somber Holiday"

Bethlehem and the entire Holy Land are in a state of grief and deep sadness. There's no problem with attending Midnight Mass: There are no tickets, no stress and no worshippers.

Cool Announcement: Seamus Heaney's One Christmas Day in the Morning and New York Times's Op-Docs

Below are Christmas gifts from Seamus Heaney and his avid readers, Kerrin Sheldon and Elaine McMillion Sheldon.

I "One Christmas Day in the Morning"

Tommy Evans must be sixty now as well. The last time I saw him was at
the height of the Troubles, in Phil McKeever's pub in Castledawson, the
first time we'd met since Anahorish School. I felt as free as a bird, a
Catholic at large in Tommy's airspace.

Yet something small prevailed. My father balked at a word like 'Catholic'
being used in company. Phil asked if we were OK. Tommy's crowd
fenced him with 'What are you having, Tommy?'

I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren't a Catholic thing, how the
sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at
Christmas proved my point -- when his eye upon me narrowed.

I remembered his air-gun broken over his forearm, my envy of the
polished hardwood stock, him thumbing the pellets into their aperture.
The snick of the thing then as he clipped it shut and danced with his eye
on the sights through a quick-quick angle of ninety degrees and back,
then drilled the pair of us left-right to the back of the house.

The Evans' chicken coop was the shape of a sentry-box, walls and gable
of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to
the eaves. And there above the neat-hinged door, balanced on the very
tip of the apex, was Tommy's target: the chrome lid of the bell of his
father's bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses.

-- Seamus Heaney, District and Circle, (which won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK)

Commentary by Conor Carville ( excerpted from "Heaney and the neighbour": poetry between politics and ethics," Textual Practice, 2012)

The ways in which the neighbour poems stage a relationship between ontology and ethics, and the role of poetry itself in this relationship, are central to the final poem I'll consider, "One Christmas Day in the Morning," which can be found framed in District and Circle by "Chow" and "The Nod." What distinguishes it from both, however, is its status as Heaney's only rural neighbour poem explicitly set during the Troubles. More than this, it is unusual in depicting a moment when the subtle and civil negotiations between Catholic and Protestant seem to go radically, and dangerously awry. "My father balked at a word like Catholic being used in company" we are told. Yet the poem uses this word three times in short succession. In this way its lexis exhibits the blundering indiscretion that is its subject:

I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren't a Catholic thing, how the
sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at
Christmas proved my point -- when his eye upon me narrowed. 36

At this point the poem makes its move into the past, veering onto childhood terrain. When "Tommy's eye upon me narrowed," the voice of the poem is reminded of his neighbour as a boy, presumably on the Christmas day of the title (a detail which links the poem back to "An Ulster Twilight"), with a new air-gun, "dancing with his eye on the sights." The poem ends as follows:

The Evans' chicken-coop was the shape of a sentry box, walls and gable
of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to
the eaves. And there above the neat-hinged door, balanced on the very
tip of the apex, was Tommy's target: the chrome lid of the bell of his
father's bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses. 37

There is a double-edged quality to this moment in the poem which involves in both cases the suspension or supercession of one scene by another. It is a moment which itself turns on our reading of the phrase "fairly brought me to my senses." On one level the description of Tommy with his air-gun is part of a series of references to militarism, arming and aiming that look forward to "The Nod" and back to Station Island. The narrator is thus "fairly brought to his senses" in that he moves from the inner world of the mind back to the physical and material. The "zings" of the pellets on the target snap him out of his reverie of a simpler, more innocent past and release him into the reality of the present, newly aware of the tense situation which he has created. "Being brought to one's senses" in this context is an apt description of the way in which in Heaney the encounter with the other involves the recognition of an ontological reality that is attested to through bodily affect. It is this aspect which I have been terming political. However, as mentioned above, there is also a second reading. The noise of pellets hitting their target "brings the narrator to his senses" in that it reminds him of a shared childhood memory and, in the implicit equation between the bell above the coop and the nativity star above the stable, a common religious inheritance at odds with the kind of cultural differences he has been suggesting. He is thus "brought to his senses" in that he attains a more objective and reasonable view of his relationship with the neighbour. Here then is the ethical lesson of the poem. Thus once again the end of the poem exhibits an ambiguity: it is equally possible that the narrator returns to the moment newly reconciled to alliance and affinity with the neighbour, and that he comes back with a heightened sense of difference from the martial other. One achievement of the poem is to imply that a situation such as the one described will inevitably involve both emotions. Another more complex implication is that its abstract ethical dimension is inseparable from its material, political one.

 

II New York Times's Op-Docs, For Seamus by Kerrin Sheldon and Elaine McMillion Sheldon

This short film, titled For Seamus (06:26),  celebrates the life and work of Seamus Heaney, the most famous contemporary poet in Ireland.


Updated:

Commentary excerpted from Senior Infants: Connecting with Seamus Heaney's Poetry

. The nature of the incident and the tension it caused emanated from sectarian sensitivities within Irish communities during the period when those with extremists views formed or joined militias and took up arms. During the so-called Troubles there were countless incidents of violence and murder between Catholic republicans and Protestant loyalists. The wisest thing, as Heaney's own father had intimated, was to keep your Catholic mouth shut in public for fear of causing offence with its subsequent potential for reprisal; the so-called Troubles began in the late 1960s and, beyond constant sectarian tension, erupted particularly viciously from time to time;

......

. irony: the situation described is totally at odds with a title that echoes a Christmas carol of goodwill;

. despite of his choice of prose, Heaney loses nothing of the poet in himself: deliberate group of assonant sounds, for example, the [ai] of the first and fourth paragraphs, the [i] sounds of paragraph 4 and clusters of alliterative consonants, for example, alveolar plosive [t] in the final paragraph.


Below is my response haiku situated in an inner city

teenage boys stare
at the nativity star ...
pop, pop, pop of gunshots

Hot News: WMT's Seamus Heaney Tribute for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

I was invited by Aislinn Clarke, Artistic Director of Wireless Mystery Theatre (Northern Ireland’s only audio theatre company), to take part in WMT's Seamus Heaney Tribute for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, for Nov. 8th.

Below are my submitted poems, which were published on NeverEnding Story:

inner émigré

rolling off my tongue...

the professor's

right eye flickers

in a long shadow

(for more information about Seamus Heaney's concept of inner émigré, see my "Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing, V")

 

Father recited

Li Po's Quiet Night Thought...

I listen

to Heaney's river

in the trees

 

Toronto snowstorm...

writing haiku to escape

the fear of silence

(for Seamus Heaney, Poet Of "the Silent Things")


For more information about Seamus Heaney's view of haiku, see my  "Dark Wings of Night: Seamus Heaney and His View of Haiku"

Butterfly Dream: Ulster Hedgerow Haiku by Marion Clarke

English Original

Ulster hedgerow

the steady click
of golf balls

for Seamus Heaney

Marion Clarke

Chinese Translation (Traditional)

阿爾斯特綠籬

穩定地擊打
高爾夫球 

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

阿尔斯特绿篱

稳定地击打
高尔夫球

Bio Sketch

A member of the Irish Haiku Society, Marion Clarke is a writer and artist from Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland. Her work was highly commended in the IHS 2011 International Haiku Competition and, in summer 2012, she received a Sakura award in the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival contest. A selection of her haiku featured in the first national collection of haiku from Ireland, Bamboo Dreams, edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky. Marion’s poetry and artwork can be found at http://seaviewwarrenpoint.wordpress.com/

Hot News: Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in 60 E-Papers and BackStories Behind Seamus Heaney’s Haiku

My Dear Readers/Poets:

Launched on the first day of 2013, NeverEnding Story reached another milestone today:  its haiku/tanka have been regularly reprinted in 60 e-papers, four of which are Japanese. The newest members are The Mindful News Daily edited by Jeanette Patindol, TVVH_Urban Review: The Lit Daily edited by Jeff Casselman, PoemWatch Poetry News edited by FJustin Germino, Lighthouse edited by Noemie Goessne, The PoetryTree SUNDAY EDITION edited by Renee Sigel, Haunted Poetry edited by Morgan Dragonwillow, and The Nature__Lover Daily edited by Nature_lover. For more information, see Hot News: Haiku/Tanka Reprinted in More Than Half A Hundred E-Papers and its comment section.

Stats:

Pageviews yesterday: 203

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Most-read post last month: Dark Wings of Night: Seamus Heaney and His View of Haiku (posted on Aug. 31), 227

 

And I just added the backstories behind Heaney’s haiku to the 'Dark Wings of Night' post:

In The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry, Irene De Angelis gives the backstory behind Heaney's haiku below (p. 30): Heaney wrote it after a small accident when he fell on a icy pavement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and hurt his knee.

1.1. 87

Dangerous pavements…

but this year I face the ice

with my father’s stick

Below is excerpted from Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll, pp. 212-3.

Helicopters and roadblocks have appeared regularly in your poems, Were you especially aggrieved by British army patrols of that sort?

One half of me would be saying, "They're only a bunch of squaddies doing their job; as individuals, they'd sooner be at home in Leeds or wherever -- they're here because of the IRA's threat to life and limb." But another half rebelled when I'd turn a corner and there were the armoured cars blocking the road, marksmen in the hedge, soldiers in warpaint manning the checkpoint. A lot depended on the manners of the individuals you were dealing with. But the truth of the matter was that they were deployed to keep you in your place, their comrades had shot down people in Derry and they could basically do what they liked. The disgrace of the army comes from the way the higher-ups protected the low-downs. leaving aside the scandal of Bloody Sunday, there were those cases where soldiers who'd shot innocent people and were found guilty of it got a token sentence and then were readmitted, smirking, to the ranks. In cases like that, the contempt for the nationalist people, the contempt for justice, told you what you were dealing with.

At that point you just wanted to say, "To hell with them." And it wasn't the squaddies from Leeds you'd be thinking about, but the Loyalist element in the Scottish regiments and the blond-voiced top brass in the officers' mess. For twenty years and more, every time I drove up from Dublin into Tyrone and Derry, I always felt a kind of generalized menace on the lonelier bits of the roads: you knew the countryside was full of clandestine activity, not just by the paramilitaries on both sides, but by the undercover operations of groups like the SAS. I remember doing a haiku about it:

Springtime in Ulster:

aerials in hedges, squawk

of walkie-talkies

Many thanks to all of you who have helped NeverEnding Story grow in any way.

Chen-ou


Updated: Seamus Heaney's last words to his wife -- Noli timere. Don't be afraid. 

Below is excerpted from Michael's Essay: Seamus Heaney's last words to his wife

In the course of the funeral tributes, his son Michael told the mourners that a few minutes before he died, the poet sent a message, in Latin, to his wife Marie. It said simply: "Noli Timere --- Don't be afraid."
 
Poets know about human pain and human fear.

It is part of their mandate to write about our fears, not necessarily to assuage them, but only to describe them accurately so that we know what we are dealing with.
    
We seem to be steeped in fear these days, marinating in the uncertainty that something dreadful is about to happen.
    
Not just the existential fear of death and what may or may not come after. Not just extinction.
    
The old worry about their physical deterioration and loss of dignity and sense and yes, pensions.
    
The young worry about their future. People with jobs fear losing them. People without a job fear that they will never again enjoy the pleasures of honorable work.


Updated, September 17

The newest member is Moon Dust Daily edited by Leslie Moon

Dark Wings of the Night: Tankas for Toraiwa by Seamus Heaney

The tanka below were first published in Poetry International 7/8 (2003-4)

I loved to carry

Her violin case, its nose

In air, its back end

Nice and heavy, the balance

Factored in and factored out.

*

Every time she placed

Her two thumbs to the two snibs

And opened the lid

She couldn’t help a quick frown

(Disguised pleasure?) as she checked.

*

Then her brow would clear

And the sun disc of her face

Tilt up and brighten

At the tap of a baton,

At the tip of a baton...

*

In the baize-lined case

Emptied of the ingrown jut

Of the fiddlehead,

A lump of ancient resin

And a dirty chamois cloth.

*

The conductor’s hands —

Big and out of proportion

To his skinny wee

Professor’s body — always,

She said, "interested" her.

*

Fiddlehead ferns: why

When I think of them do I

Think: Toraiwa!

Because — surprise — he quizzed me

About the erotic life.

 

Updated:

Seamus Heaney seemed to merely write 5-line poems closely following the traditional 'syllabic pattern' of a Japanese tanka, with no knowledge of its bipartite structure. Below is a relevant excerpt from Eric Thomas Sherlock's MA Thesis, titled "Kokoro as ecological insight : the concept of heart in Japanese literature" (Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, 1984, p. 107), clearly indicating the origin, historical and aesthetical, of a tanka's bipartite structure:

Since ancient times there had been a custom of having one poet write the first three lines of a waka (kami no ku), while another poet finished the poem by adding the final two lines (shimo no ku). This practice eventually became extended, through multiple authorship, to a hundred stanzas of alternately three and two lines. The new verse form, which became known as renga, first originated among court poets as a form of amusement and relaxation after an evening of serious waka [ancient name for tanka] composition. By the Ashikaga period, however, renga itself had achieved maturity as a serious poetic form.

Note: You can read Heaney's haiku and his view of haiku in relation to English poetry in general and to the Irish lyrical tradition in particular.

Dark Wings of the Night: Seamus Heaney and His View of Haiku

                                                               Toronto snowstorm ...

                                                               writing haiku to escape

                                                               the fear of silence

                                                               for Seamus Heaney, Poet of "the Silent Things"  

The haiku form and the generally Japanese effect have been a constant feature of poetry in English. The names of Basho and Issa and Buson have found their way into our discourse to the extent that we in Ireland have learnt to recognise something Japanese in the earliest lyrics of the native tradition.

Seamus Heaney, The Guardian (24 November, 2007)

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013), who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, died yesterday at the age of 74. Outside the haiku poetry community, he was one of few Western poets who recognized and appreciated Japanese haiku's influence on English poetry. On 24 November, 2007, he published an article, titled "The Pathos of Things," in The Guardian. Below are two excerpts:

 

It seems to me that the scenes which inspired [Wordsworth's] most characteristic poetry could well have inspired many of the great masters of Japan. The English and Japanese sensibilities respond in similar ways to the natural world, and landscapes which brought out the best in Wordsworth could equally well have provided the setting for a haiku by Basho. Significantly also, the English poet's work abounds in phrases which could be used to describe the general emotional impact of a certain kind of Japanese lyric - as when he speaks of being "an inmate of this active universe", of being taught to feel "the self-sufficing power of solitude" or a something in nature which is "far more deeply interfused", and so on...

[Ezra Pound] had begun by composing a 30-line poem but had destroyed it because it didn't achieve a satisfactory intensity of expression; six months then passed and he wrote one half that length; and a year later he produced what he called a "hokku-like sentence":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

"I dare say it is meaningless," Pound concluded, "unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."

The poem is far from meaningless, and it is largely thanks to its existence that readers (and writers) in English have drifted "into a certain vein of thought". Thanks to these 14 words, we are now well attuned to the Japanese effect, the evocation of that precise instant of perception, and are ready to grant such evocation of the instant a self-sufficiency of its own. We don't require any labouring of the point. We are happy if the image sets off its own echoes and associations, if it speaks indirectly, as Issa speaks in his haiku:

A good world --
dew drops fall
by ones by twos.
 

By ones, by twos, ripples pulsed out from the image poem, so it was inevitable, especially given Pound's capacities as an operator on the literary scene, that the new Japanese effect should be integrated into the history of poetry in English as "The imagist Movement"...

For curiosity, I went through the recently published New Penguin Book of English Verse in search of this effect in pre-imagist periods, but didn't discover anything. This is not to say, of course, that poetry in English is unaware or unexpressive of the underlife of feelings or the melancholy of things: since Anglo-Saxon times the elegiac mood has been a constant of the poetic literature. It's just that the means of expression are different. In 1869, for example, Matthew Arnold wrote this brief, untitled poem:

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel - below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel - there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

What the haiku/imagist form can do is to reach down into that noiseless, strong, obscure, deep central stream and give both poet and reader a sense of epiphany. It's worth noticing indeed that the word "epiphany" becomes available as a literary term around about the time when Pound is coining the term "imagism", James Joyce being the one who was responsible for this new extension and application of its meaning. In their different ways, Pound and Joyce felt a need to extend the alphabet of expressiveness, and found a way to articulate what TS Eliot would call "the notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing" - a thing which was also for Eliot inherent in certain "images": "I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images and cling."

In the years since these early developments, the haiku form and the generally Japanese effect have been a constant feature of poetry in English. The names of Basho and Issa and Buson have found their way into our discourse to the extent that we in Ireland have learnt to recognise something Japanese in the earliest lyrics of the native tradition... Read the full text here

Below are two haiku by Seamus Heaney:

1.1.87

Dangerous pavements.
But this year I face the ice
with my father’s stick.

Seeing Things, 1991

Springtime in Ulster:
aerials in hedges, squawk
of walkie-talkies

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, 2008

You can read his Tankas for Toraiwa  here


Updated, September 15, 2013: Two Haiku-like Poems

In the section, titled Heaney's Haiku Poetry, of Chapter One, titled Petals on Sandymount Strand: Seamus Heaney, of The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry, Irene De Angelis further discusses two other haiku (in my view, haiku-like poems that demonstrate haiku sensibility): their concision results from his effort to write by subtraction (p. 24)

For Bernard and Jane McCabe

The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.

Us, listening to a river in the trees.

The Haw Lantern (1987)


The Strand

The dotted line my father's ashplant made
On Sandymount Strand
Is something else the tide won't wash away.

The Spirit Level (1996)


Note:  The phrase "inner émigré" in the fifth tanka of my sequence, Politics and Poetics of Re-Homing, below comes from Seamus Heaney's work:

inner émigré

rolling off my tongue...

the professor's

right eye flickers

in a long shadow

Below is an excerpt from George Morgan's interview with Seamus Heaney :

— You once wrote of yourself as an “inner émigré,” a term that has been bandied about a lot since then. Do you still think of yourself in this way?

8As far as possible, you try to remain a mystery to yourself. Living in Ireland, not being an exile, living in Ireland as a social creature, as a familiar citizen, I think there is a great danger that one’s social persona might overwhelm one’s daimon — if you’ll permit me such a grand term… And so what one is always trying to do is displace oneself to another place or space. In my case, I’ve been very lucky to have had a cottage in Wicklow where I am literally displaced from my usual Dublin suroundings and indeed Wicklow is where I first thought of myself as being an inner émigré. Since 1988, thanks to the great kindness of Ann Saddlemyer, I’ve been able to own the cottage and to think of it as my “place of writing.” When I said “inner émigré,” I meant to suggest a state of poetic stand-off, as it were, a state where you have slipped out of your usual social persona and have entered more creatively and fluently into your inner being. I think it is necessary to shed, at least to some extent, the social profile that you maintain elsewhere. “Inner émigré” once had a specific meaning, of course, in the 1920s and 30s in Soviet Russia. It referred to someone who had not actually gone into exile but who lived at home disaffected from the system. Well, to some extent that was true of myself. Certainly, in relation to Northern Ireland.