Association of Writers & Writing Programs

(Elise Paschen, Frank Bidart, Askold Melnyczuk, Tom Sleigh, Tracy K. Smith) This tribute celebrates the work of Seamus Heaney, one of the major poets of our time. Heaney, the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, essays, and translations, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His most recent books include Human Chain and District and Circle, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. This panel of colleagues, friends, and former students, who knew Heaney during his “Boston” years, will share anecdotes, offer critical analyses, and read from his poetry and prose.

Published Date: October 2, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2013 A W P conference in Boston. The recording features readings by Elise Passion, Frank Bedard Ascal, Mel Nache, Tom Slay, and Tracy k Smith. You'll now hear Elise Passion provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:25):

Welcome to our tribute to Shay Assini with Frank Bidart, Oscar Ek Tom Slay and Tracy k Smith. My name is Elise Passion. Thank you all for being here and many thanks to Seamus and Mari Heini for joining us today. Where's Mari Mari? Thank you Seamus. Thank

Speaker 3 (00:00:44):

You.

Speaker 2 (00:00:53):

We are here to celebrate the work and life of Seamus Heini. One of the major poets of our time. Shamini was born in Moba County, dairy Northern Ireland. He's the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry, essays, translations, plays, and anthologies. His most recent books include Human chain and district and Circle Winner of the TSS Elliot Prize. In 1995, he received the Nobel Prize in literature. In the early 1980s, Shamini left Ireland to begin teaching for part of the year at Harvard University for 14 years. Heini commuted between Dublin and Cambridge, offering spring semester poetry workshops at Harvard. We are a panel of friends, colleagues, and former students whose lives have been influenced and enriched by Shamini. Each of us will offer an homage to Seamus.

Speaker 2 (00:01:56):

Before I introduce our panel, I'll tell you a little bit about myself. I'm a great admirer of Shamus Heini and was fortunate to have studied the Shamus when I was in college. I'm the author of several poetry collections, including Bai and winner of the Nicholas Roric Poetry Prize. I have edited and co-edited many anthologies including poetry in motion and poetry speaks. Former executive director of the Poetry Society of America. I currently teach in the M F A writing program at the school, the Art Institute of Chicago. And now let me introduce our panelists. Starting from my left, Frank Bidart. Numerous books include in the Western Night collected poems desire winner of the Bait Prize, the Library of Congress, and most recently watching the Spring Festival The Darts many awards include the Bingham Prize in American poetry, the Shelling Memorial Award for the Poetry Society of America and the Wallace Stevens Award.

Speaker 2 (00:03:01):

He teaches at Wellesley College. US Melek to my right has published three novels and a novella. He's received a fellowship in fiction from the Lila Wallace Foundation as well as the McGinness Prize and Fiction founding editor of Agni. He's the publisher of Aerosmith books and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Tracy k Smith is the author of three books of Poetry Life on Mars, which was award the 2012 Pulitzer Prize Dwe Day recipient of the James Lachlan Award and the body's question selected for the Kave Khan Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University. Tom Slays. Many books include army cats and spacewalk winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. He's received numerous prizes including the PSA's, Shelly Prize, ALAH Wallace Individual Writers Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. And now please welcome Frank Bidart.

Speaker 4 (00:04:17):

Most of my comments are going to be critical about the work, not anecdotal, but let me say it just a bit at the beginning about what an incredibly generous, profound presence Seamus was when he lived in the Cambridge community. He entered a world that very much had a lively poetry scene and he participated in it and kept it together. As the years went on, he was interested in everybody and everybody's work and there was a kind of breadth and generosity of attention that was very extraordinary and very wonderful and those were extraordinary years, years that had begun with Robert Lowell, Cambridge and then Elizabeth Bishop and then Seamus continued the world that they had been part of and if anything widened it and deep it. I know everybody who was part of that was very grateful for those years. I want to talk about what a great poetry actually this is. That's not news, but still with every writer, one has to rediscover over and over again why he's to be taken seriously, why he is worthy of the kind of attention out of all the writers that are clamoring for one's attention and Shamus his word rewards that kind of look very profoundly.

Speaker 4 (00:06:05):

It's a work that is both intimate and personal and large scale in the issues which it deals and its take on them. What I want to do today really is look at why his political or social poems work so well. They are among his greatest poems and that's not true of many, many contemporary poets, poets from the past. He's really in a line of poets like Marvell Yates, Robert Lowell, in which the gaze on the political world or social world is as profound and ambitious as any subject matter he takes up. I'm going to mostly just talk, but I have a few sentences written down which I would like to read. Well, first of all, I think these political or social poems are among his greatest. They constitute a vision of human life beyond sectarian positioning and given the world in which Seamus was writing of conflict in Ireland that moving beyond sectarian positioning was very far from easy or automatic.

Speaker 4 (00:07:31):

I want to ask how their vision of human life is consistent with the vision of he needs other poems. The answer I have in mind is the way he sees political or social issues as proceeding from trajectories already present in the lies of the actors. The actors enact these trajectories and the pattern that the intersection of these trajectories make has kind of predetermined faded quality, which makes them often these poems often seem ultimately tragic and there's something stoic about the eye that looks on these conflicts and he's very much an actor in them and read some passages in which he is as an actor, has a character and he's on a trajectory just as they are on a trajectory and part of the ly, the poetry is the way in which he sees these very different actions that people are engaged in and how they are not trivial actions or actions that simply proceed from a response to immediate circumstance.

Speaker 4 (00:08:55):

They proceed from character. I want to begin with a section of his long home station island and in this section, section eight, the whole station island is the theories of the encounters with what he calls familiar ghosts and these encounters are and substance dream encounters. They are in many ways challenges to his ordinary social self. I'm going to not read the whole of the beginning of this poem In this section, section eight, he meets two familiar ghosts. The first is an archeologist who is dead and he says, I came to there at the bed stone hub with my archeologist very like himself and then he speaks to the archeologist, those dreamy stars that post across the screen beside you in the ward. Your heartbeats, Tom, I mean scared me the way they stripped things naked. My banter failed too early in that visit I could not take my eyes off the machine.

Speaker 4 (00:10:15):

I had to head back straight away to Dublin, guilty and empty feeling. I had said nothing and that as usual I had somehow broken governance and failed an obligation. I have knew that we would never meet again, did our long gaze and last handshake contain nothing to appease that recognition. And then Tom speaks nothing at all but familiar stone had me half numbed to face the thing alone. I left my still faced archeology, the small crab apple physionomy on high crosses, carved heads and abbeys. What else? Dig in for years in that hard place in a muck of bigotry under the walls, picking through shards and William I cannonballs. But all that we just turned to banter to I felt that I should have seen four more of you and maybe would have but dead at 32 poets, lucky poets tell me why it would seem deserved and promised passed me by and I could not speak. I saw a hoard of black basalt, ex-head smooth as a Beatles' back a Karen of stone force that might the eggs of danger. And then I saw a face. He had once given me a plaster cast of an abu done by the go and master mild mouse and cowled a character of grace.

Speaker 4 (00:12:11):

Your gift will be a candle in our house and then this figure disappears and another ghost appears. But he had gone when I looked to meet his eyes and hunkering instead there in his place was a bleeding paleface boy plastered in mud. The red hot pokers blazed a lovely red in SharePoint. The Sunday I was murdered, he said quietly. Now do you remember? And then the speaker Shamus goes on. You were there with poets. No, I'm sorry. He continues to speak. You were there with poets when you got the word and stayed there with them while your own flesh and blood was carted to bey from the fuse. They showed more agitation in the news at the news than you did and then Shana speaks again, but they were getting crisis firsthand. Column they had happened in on live sectarian assassination. I was dumb encountering what was destined and so I pleaded with my second cousin. I kept seeing a gray stretch of luff big and the strand empty at daybreak. I felt like the bottom of a dried up lake. You saw that and you wrote that not the fact you confused evasion and artistic T, the Protestant who shot me through the head. I accused directly but indirectly you who now atone perhaps upon this bed for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew the lovely blinds of the purgatorio and serin my death

Speaker 4 (00:14:15):

With mourning de that I seem to waken out of sleep among the work pilgrims whom I did not know drifting to the hostel for the night. Well, I think this is so wonderful. It's very hard to talk afterwards.

Speaker 4 (00:14:35):

The more you know she Mrs. Word. You realize that when he discusses what he brings up with this ghost who accuses him, he brings up a character that he has described in many other poems and it's a position in relation to violence and political sectarianism that is much thought out. There's the sense in this poem and in all these poems that the person whose life was taken is as I said, on a trajectory that he can't change, that Seamus cannot change. Seamus cannot change the trajectory he's on. There's a kind of destined constellation. The two together make, let me briefly read the end of north in which he discusses the way in which his character, his the decisions he has made about how he responds to violence has to do with the way he's an artist and the kind of artist he is. He says at the end of exposure, how did I end up like this?

Speaker 4 (00:16:01):

I often think of my friend's beautiful prismatic counseling and the anvil brains of some who hate me as I sit weighing and weighing my responsible at christia. For what? For the ear, for the people, for what is said behind backs. Brain comes down through the altars, it's low conducive voices mutter about let downs and erosions and yet each drop recalls the diamond absolutes. I am neither in internee nor informer and inner emigre grown, long-haired and thoughtful. A wood kern escaped from the massacre taking protective coloring from bowl and bark feeling everyone that blows who blowing up these sparks for their meager heat have missed the once in a lifetime or 10 the commons pulsing rose. Well his sense that there's a price to the way in which he is a, not someone who becomes a partisan of sides. He's not following or addicted to the diamond absolutes and therefore there's something qualified about the apology he makes to Colin. It's an apology that is real, but at the same time there's stoic acceptance of the necessity of the position he has been in.

Speaker 4 (00:17:54):

I want to read end by reading a short poem from Shamus most recent book, human Chain, which is very wonderful. The point I've been trying to make is that the vision in Shamus poems has to do with forces, positions that collide and he sees a kind of necessity in both, and this doesn't only have to do with people and personalities, it has to do with the nature of the world and the possibilities of the world. In this poem it's called the Baylor. It has to do with a vision of the world of which he sees these bales of hay. This field has been gleaned and he sees it as abundance and richness and an el dodo and then he recalls someone who when he sees the sun goes down, thinks about the price of that and how each day has to do with things dying not only with abundance but that the descent of the son is the kind of harbinger of the death of individual life.

Speaker 4 (00:19:09):

Let me read the poem and this is the last thing I'll do. The Baylor. Let me also say that that often the counter movement and a hins poem has to do with this cut marvelous healing for the vernacular. So often the poems, they proceed out of this very impacted dense language, but there will be suddenly a phrase that is marvelously spoken. Anyway, here it is the baler. This is the last thing I'll do all day. The clunk of a baler ongoing card dull some taken for granted. It was evening before it came to what I was hearing and missing summer's, richest hours as they had been to begin with. Fork lifted sweated through in nearly rewarded enough by the giddy duck brace of a tractor at the end of the day last lapping a hayfield. What I also remembered as wood pigeons sued at the edge of 30 leaned acres and I stood inhaling the cool in a dusk eldorado of mighty cylindrical bales was Derrick Hills saying the last time he sat at our table, he could bear no longer to watch the sun going down and asking please to be put with his back to the window. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:20:47):

During the fall of 1978, there was much talk about who would be offering poetry workshops at Harvard That spring I was on the poetry board of the Harvard Advocate and one of my friends told us that the college had hired a poet from Ireland named Shema Heini. Although he had published death of a naturalist door into the dark wintering out and north, only north had appeared in American editions, so we were not yet though we soon would become familiar with Seamus work we all clamor to get into his class, I was fortunate to be accepted Tahiti's English JB Poetry Workshop, one of the first classes he taught at Harvard as a guest lecturer in 1979. We would meet once a week in Seaver Hall where Seamus offered a safe haven in his classroom and seemed to coax the poems out of us. While preparing my remarks for today, I managed to unearth a notebook from English jv reading through my hands sprawled notes.

Speaker 2 (00:21:57):

I was reminded how Shamus poetic grasp the centuries and the continents. The poems he discussed range from Sir Thomas Wyatt to Robert Lowell. We didn't feel overwhelmed by Seamus knowledge but fueled by it. He stretched our minds and our imaginations. In the first class, Shana suggested we keep a commonplace book. He said It is an important habit to have let the grainery fill up, extend your instinctive sense of things into articulating them. Let it be your survival kit. It is directly and indirectly related to the life and art of the writer. Each week we would workshop student poems. Seamus also would guide us through close readings of poems by the great masters he brought in Philip Larkins High Windows t s Elliot's journey of the Magi. Elizabeth Bishops The Art of Losing and drafts of William Butler Gates's Cool Park. 1929. He offered us suggestions for writing prompts or notions suggesting we attempt and ours poet an oad, an echo poem, a villain, a litany.

Speaker 2 (00:23:23):

Many of the things Seamus discussed in class still reverberate with me. He talked about the process of memory and how it may be recalled without saying. I remember sinus also said a constant in poetry and prose is the actuality of feeling the subject must be your own technique comes afterward. He talked about traumatizing the self into myth or into another character. He questioned how do you escape out of your experience into something greater beyond it because of Seamus, his voice and his delivery, every poem he read entranced Seamus was kind, soft-spoken and he created an atmosphere of trust and community around the table. It was always a joy to be in his presence. What I remember most vividly is meeting with Seamus one-on-one to discuss the work. In 1979, Seamus had a subterranean office below Lamont Library in Qz. He was using Robert Fitzgerald's study during Fitzgerald's sabbatical.

Speaker 2 (00:24:37):

We would present portfolios to him and he then would comment on our poems. At that time as a sophomore I would write a poem and then think I was finished with it. Seamus gently nudged me to realize that I had to work on the poem and craft it. During one of our initial conferences in Qy, Seamus said, why don't you go to Haton library and look up Gates's manuscripts? I followed Shamus advice and went to Haton where I discovered how extensively Gates revised that moment influenced the rest of my life. As a writer, I extended, I revise copiously and it also awakened in me a passion for gates. I went on to graduate school where I wrote my default dissertation. In fact, on Gates' manuscripts, I again had the privilege of studying with Shamus in his English SS b r poetry workshop when he returned to Harvard in 1982 as a visiting professor and just a little memory from that class is I remember I was working on a poem called Oklahoma Home and Seamus said that the poem begins after the first stanza, which now brings to mind the aesthetic behind Seamus poem scaffolding and how I had to take down the scaffolding in order to discover that poem.

Speaker 2 (00:26:04):

Studying with Seamus was a highlight of my time in college. I'm ever grateful to him for his wisdom and guidance, his generosity of spirit and as he once put it, referring to his own teachers. For quickening my love of poetry, the critic Richard Eater wrote Heini exercises, poetry's power to proclaim truth and the artist's power to make us know that it is a truth we can't be without. Throughout my life I have turned to haes poems for their deep truths and profound sense of humanity. The poems are touchstones in my daily life. As a mother, I envision the same closeness with my son as he describes in clearances five, his sonic about the mother and son. Folding sheets coming close again by holding back art presupposes life. When I listen to the radio, I think of the litany of shipping news in Glenmore at seven.

Speaker 2 (00:27:10):

I look at the bookshelves in a new light when I read the bookcase and of course all the incomparable loved poems such as the Otter and the Underground to name a few as in those days when I listened to his voice in the workshop. I'm entranced on the page by the sound of he's poems, the jubilation of speech, articulation of emotion, how he will draw the strings so tightly with such drumming, those Anglo-Saxon hard pressed syllables, the pressure of language, the tautness of the line, how each syllable matters has such intensity. I'm constantly compelled by hemi's word hoard. I would like to conclude by reading a favorite poem, one of many by Seamus Heini. I'm particularly struck by this poem, the Skylight, because the turn it takes, how it lists off the ground delivers us with a miracle converting the ordinary into the marvelous.

Speaker 2 (00:28:12):

This poem is from seeing things and it's part of the sonnet sequence. Glenmore revisited. Number seven, the skylight. You were the one for skylights. I opposed cutting into the seasoned tongue and groove of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed. It's claustrophobic nest up in the roof effect. I like the snuff dry feeling, the perfect trunk lid fit of the old ceiling. Under there it was all hutch and hatch. The blue slates kept the heat like midnight batch, but when the slates came off extravagant, sky entered and held surprise wide open for days I felt like an inhabitant of that house where the man sick of the palsy was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven, was healed, took on his bed and walked away. Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (00:29:30):

Back in the eighties, back in the long 20th century, early soundings of globalization were beginning to be heard around Cambridge every spring, which happened to be when Heney returned to join his fellow Itinerant bar, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky In raising the spirit level of American Bowry, I'm grateful for this chance to celebrate what was once in annual writing. Long before there were hedge funds, there were schools, those singular Irish institutions of instruction outside the academy. One such was located far from the self-regarding gaze of mother Harvard near Inman on Magnolia Street near Inman Square and the second floor apartment of Lynn Vo and s t. There our syllabus was life, our required text of the world. In place of Irish grammar, we had literature with a special focus on Irish poetry and single malt, preferably Yates, preferably Jameson's. Two frequent lecturers at these intimate sessions were Seamus in Mahaney. Occasionally Derek Walcott stopped by to clarify a fine point about syncopation at Caribbean or Elizabethan literature, homework was done on the spot and might involve scattering a Shakespeare sonnet. Others have tried to identify through the gossamer of random syllables. Rhythm will allow. More often than not. The masters Mentos shown through.

Speaker 5 (00:31:05):

These were fined evenings of literary mayhem where the games also included a pantomime called the deaths poets in hand gestures, for instance. Here's John Berryman. We're discussing the work in contemporaries. The cruelest thing I ever heard shaman say about a peer was one thinks of Homer. No more muted saying

Speaker 5 (00:31:44):

Heini. The man embodies the bridges of the verse In much the same way as his poetry echoes the potencies of the world in him, genius wasn't severed from those essential human qualities of warmth, generosity, and loyalty without which we're hardly worthy of the name. His presence in person and on the page was and remains a summons to attention. An evening with a heinies whose circles were vast than any I've ever encountered since yet who always seemed to have room for one more inevitably ended in singing in their company no one was allowed to hide or play. The wallflower all had to participate and when your turn came, the preference was for a tune That echoed something of your origins, though you could always dodge the requirement by reciting a poem. Then there was the afternoon, the circle square Ted Hughes and one had the untranslated experience of how Stonehenge might sound if rocks could speak.

Speaker 5 (00:32:45):

I once said to someone maybe heini himself that Seamus has the uncanny ability to make you feel comfortable in your own home. This isn't to suggest Weber that his art is in any way safe. Indeed, a large part of my attraction to it was that it was anything but and he's own antennae, vibrated with particular responsiveness to signals from troubled and temperate zones in the spread and gnarl of he's work. There can be a subtle snarl and a glint of blade keeping us rightly on edge. As the child of immigrants who fled Eastern Europe after World War ii, I tuned in with particular attention to the reverberations of a past that was troublingly familiar, maybe because it was steeped in troubles of its own in his influential essay, the impact of translation Heney observed. We who live and have our being in English know that our own recent history of consumerist freedom and eerie nuclear security seems less authentic to us than the tragically tested lives.

Speaker 5 (00:33:53):

To those who have lived beyond all this fiddle and poets living in England, poets in English have felt compelled to turn their gaze east and have been encouraged to concede that the locust of greatness is shifting away from their language. At the same time, he concludes by noting that this poetry of witness was oddly resuscitative, thus finding hope where I had reckoned only despair. It remains to be seen how our poetry responds to the fact that we now have our own gulags to account for housing among others. Bradley Manning, I once asked him what united him with two poets through whom he was bound in friendship, Tom Gunn and Ted Hughes, and he replied Le Valencia, different kinds of violence in all three poets called for different responses. Of course, in he's case, the oblique approach managed to hit the mark square with verse that satisfied the demands of conscience while fulfilling the expectations of art.

Speaker 5 (00:34:57):

My charge today is to say a few words about the prose writer. Though of course I first came to him through the poetry. What's striking though is the continuity between the two. He is as subversive in his prose as he is in his verse. His essays about the great poets of the world never feel like writing about literature in quotations, but rather like vital human communication, the proverbial message in a bottle, the news from somewhere. The hunted news that stays news ranging around the globe and across time to negotiate the tension between suffering and song, they simultaneously offer a crash course in the high moments in the history of poetry. I'd like to offer just two more examples writing about Christopher Marlowe. In He notes I remain convinced by what my own reading experience tells me, namely that some works transmit an immediately persuasive signal and retain a unique staying power over time.

Speaker 5 (00:36:06):

The works continue to combine the sensation of liberation. With that of consolidation, having once cleared a new space on the literary and psychic ground they go on to offer and each rereading the satisfaction of a foundation being touched and the excitement of an energy being released. He comments on how a generation recognizes that they're in the presence of one of the great unfettered events which constitute a definite stage in the history of poetry. He may have been speaking about himself. He further observes there's always a kind of homeopathic benefit for the reader and experiencing the shifts and extensions which constitute the life of the poem. An exuberant rhythm, a display of metrical, virtuosity, some rising intellectual ground, successfully surmounted, experiencing things like these gratifies and furthers the range of the minds and bodies pleasures and helps the reader to obey the command. No know thyself without trespassing on ourian turf. Heini was yet no stranger to the bohemian grove where he seemed as at ease as he was high flying with Dukes and Earls. I remember running into him late one night at a party in a slightly disreputable smoke-filled fourth floor, one bedroom walk-up in a dubious art of town.

Speaker 5 (00:37:42):

He and Mari had just arrived. They were in high spirits and ready to engage the thick crowd. They might have been slightly better decked out than some of the others, but they B blended in swiftly. Seamus apologized for arriving late. How has evening been going? Oh, very nicely. Very nicely. Where had they been? Oh, dinner. Yes. With whom? Oh, the emperor and Empress of Japan. Oh, and so they sailed into the rattle and happy to be there. My final example of his rectifying prose comes not from one of the published essays, but rather for one of the best exchanges I've ever heard during a q and a. It occurred at the end of a lecture when someone from the audience asked Shameless how he understood Joyce's evolution as a writer. I thought he was going to go there last night. I believe he did not.

Speaker 5 (00:38:40):

He answered off the cuff with Doubleness and portrait of the artist As a young man, Joyce was learning his instrument, which just happened to be the language of the colonizers in Ulysses. He wanted to show the British just what could be done with their language and in Finnegan's wake he wanted to remind them that theirs was just one stream in an ocean of the world's tongues because I might add the proper government of the tongue is the tongue set free. The freest speech always contains a kind of poetry and as Heini remarked, poetry is its own vindicating force in his person and in his poetry. He brought the laws of conscience back to a language that seems anxious to reduce it to a mirror epiphenomenon, a coincidence of brainwaves rather than the kind of implanted magnetic north by which to steer in Heini vision fuses with craft forging a vessel to bury us.

Speaker 5 (00:39:45):

Stately passed ces, enchanted Isles all the way home because his imaginings have been fully engaged with the gross universe. He hasn't had to repent. Alo Wallace Stevens whose chilling question to himself in his late poems is Have I lived a skeleton's life as a disbeliever? In reality, he continues to uphold a grudgingly affirming flame against the ever-present plum, a torch of tongues to sing back the night rendered fraternal by the words latency. His poems and essays remain capable of infusing us with a sense, with a sense of tenal impossibilities lurking in every moment and in every one with a whip to notice. I don't think I ever understood as intensely what pound meant when he wrote about gathering from the air a live tradition as they did that afternoon at Kool Park in Ireland when Seamus led a few of us first to Yates' Tower, then to that open nipple lake on which drifted half a dozen swans, no more disturbed by the light drizzle of the salt day than we.

Speaker 6 (00:41:13):

Good afternoon. It's such an honor to be here. I didn't realize that Seamus was going to be here, so now I'm also sort of terrified, but very grateful that I can just testify to how important you and your work and your presence in my memory and in the world have been. And I think that we are speaking for a great many other people. I know that as Elise was talking about having been shame as a student, I had the feeling of vague jealousy, not because our experiences were different, but because they were so similar. And you always have the feeling that this is only for me, but I think it's just an indication of the largeness and the generosity that we've all been talking about. And also I feel that the moral vision that comes up in collections like north is also an extension of that warmth and empathy that we felt in the classroom and that we feel in any context in which machines he and his voice are present.

Speaker 6 (00:42:14):

I remember being a 20 year old in a poetry workshop at Harvard and feeling noble by the degree of seriousness with which Professor Heney approached our work and our interest in the craft of poetry. Poetry was still something that I wanted and I wanted to understand and I knew that somehow I wanted to be able to make, but it was also still largely a mystery. And so part of my wish to be in the class was simply to feel like I was closer to someone who knew what it was that I was seeking out. I took the class because I remember very distinctly being in the second semester of a sophomore survey English course that I had decided to take because I had decided to be an English major because I knew that somehow some way I wanted to try and become a writer, whatever that meant.

Speaker 6 (00:43:09):

And finally in the spring we read the poem digging in the anthology that we had, and suddenly all of the work that I'd been bringing to wanting to understand the language of literature and wanting to have something that I immediately knew how to invest in and describe to others was just kind of clarified and it was done for me. And the poem, it begins very simply between my finger and my thumb. The squat pen rests, snuck as a gun, opened my eyes and ears to something that had seemed a little bit hazy and distant. And I learned from that poem that by looking at something seemingly inconsequential, perhaps closely enough, it can literally transform and reveal something that you didn't realize you knew or understood or held. And I decided that's what poetry was. Poetry was looking at the world and it didn't have to be in grand ways looking at what is literally at hand and listening to it in such a way that it could begin to speak back to you in a language you didn't even know that possessed.

Speaker 6 (00:44:16):

And it was so magical in such a conundrum that the self could teach the self something that I felt hooked. So I put myself in that classroom and with probably 10 or 15 other students and every week we would bring in our poems, which I think for about half of us were really bad shatty imitations. And he and that desire reason shamelessness by guiding us gently toward a sense of the voices that might help us to find our own voices. And I'm so grateful for that. I'm so grateful for those conferences where he might take out a pen and say, what do you think about this word? And to think that genus would be circling one word in a page of words that I had written meant that that word was important and that I could make it more important. And that was a wonderful gift.

Speaker 6 (00:45:13):

I was a junior during the first workshop that I was enrolled in and between my junior and senior years, my mother had cancer that came out of remission. So I was dealing with a lot of, I guess the anticipatory grief of trying to figure out what it would feel like to lose someone. And I didn't know how to say that and I wasn't writing about that and I don't even think I was talking about it, but somehow that was becoming something that sat beneath the surface of the poems that I was trying to write and something that sometimes I would feel activated by a poem that seemed to speak clearly and openly to grief and loss. And I want to talk a little bit about one of the poems in the sauna sequence clearances in a minute. But I remember that spring and I had a heavy heart and our last class Seamus took us to a Portuguese restaurant in Somerville for dinner.

Speaker 6 (00:46:11):

And we were all sitting at this big table feeling like important adults and maybe there was even wine involved. And it was a joyful night. It was jovial. And he, not only does he have the gift of making you feel welcome in your own home, but he also makes you feel like you are the interesting person at the table. I remember he was asking us about our lives and our plans, and I think all of us knew who we were in the presence of, but it was hard to find a way of asking the right questions. And somehow that discomfort went away just by the warmth that he brought to the evening. I remember the end of that night, I just didn't know how to say it, but I just wanted to know if everything was going to be all right. I was going to graduate. I had no plan. I knew I had to go back home to be with my family, and I think I just looked bereft and I was standing there and he said, it's okay. Everything's going to be okay. And I took that home with me as a kind of promise from beyond.

Speaker 6 (00:47:13):

I also met him and him copies of some of the books that I had of his. And later I read the inscription in, I believe it was in my copy of seeing Things, which was I think my favorite of his books at the time was a quote from Yates. It said, and wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey. And I remember looking at that again and again when I really needed it. Over the next year, I want to close by reading. I've been working on some prose that has to do with my mom in my family, but there's a moment in which Seamus poetry becomes helpful. So I'll close by reading this alone in my room by my window overlooking the rooftops and the low hills that were wet and green in the distance. Reading poems to myself became a kind of ritual.

Speaker 6 (00:48:07):

The slim volumes I brought home with me from college offered me a sense of continuity between the life I'd begun to lead on my own and the life I'd been drawn back into upon returning home. Every time I set foot in my room, it was though I were chasing the handful of poets I'd come to know while I was away chasing because I didn't want to let them get away. I didn't want them to swerve out of my grasp. I was certain they'd want to escape, given how little I knew how to say and how little there was here to command their attention. Those winter afternoons upstairs with the pack of my most necessary poets, and he was first on that list, we're teaching you something about what it felt like to try and regard the totality of something I'd only ever known. In part a life they told me is made of what happens and what is lost.

Speaker 6 (00:49:01):

Looking back, we learned to name those things to see and understand them. We hold 'em for a minute looking first with innocent untrained eyes, but if we hang there for a while longer, we can step into a different kind of gaze. One capable of seeing what is absent, longed for what has been wheeled away or simply forgotten. There's a sonnet sequence called clearances in he spoke the hall lantern that I found myself returning to again and again. It's an allergy for his mother. I had a visceral love of one particular sonnet about the two of them peeling potatoes while the other family members were away at Sunday mass. I suppose it reminded me of all the days when I was my mother's tiny satellite accompanying her everywhere safe and happy at her side. But the poem that resonated most mysterious for me, mysteriously for me was the sonnet that closes the sequence I thought of walking round and round a space utterly empty, utterly a source where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place in our front hedge.

Speaker 6 (00:50:09):

Above the wallflowers, the white chips jumped and jumped and skied high. I heard the hatchets differentiated, accurate cut the crack, the sigh and collapse of what luxuriated through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all, deep planted and long gone. My coval chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, its heft and hush, become a bright nowhere, a soul ramifying and forever silent beyond silence listened for. What did it mean to be both empty and a source? Was there something I housed or might one day house something the loss of my mother would enable me to give? Or was it her loss that was the source of something? Would something worth having eventually spring from it? I thought sometimes of how I'd chosen to look up in the first moments after her death, I made a pact with myself that I would wanting to show her my face to tell her I believed she was on her way as she'd assured us she would be.

Speaker 6 (00:51:14):

I turned up my face to that bright nowhere, wanting to feel what it housed, wanting to show that I knew it housed not just something but my mother, my source. What hurt so much in those months after her death was exactly what Haiti's poem knew how to name that my gaze in those moments had been pointed out toward a place beyond my discerning, a place I'd never hear or reach as or know as long as I was myself. But the poem didn't just lament that aspect of loss. It created a conundrum of presence and largeness, a realness more real than the absolutes we live by a soul ramifying and forever silent beyond silence listened for such language consoled me and it beckoned me to the page, pushed me to see whether I might be capable of writing truths like that into being truths that would prove better than the ones that he looted or exhausted me from one moment to the next in this new life. Even if the only one to read or to believe or to need them in the first place would be me. So I want to say publicly thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (00:52:38):

I am Tom Slay. Since I'm speaking last, I was asked to sort of summarize what we've heard and since I've just heard it, it'll be partial. But in any case, when I was listening to Frank and Dark Talk, the thing I was immediately struck by was how Frank was in a way talking about the difference between political commitments and political emotions and how Shamus is very much a man who writes about political emotions. And then in Elise's and Tracy's really ISTs talks, I was struck by not only the sense of generous teacher, extremely knowledgeable, but also a man who took everybody seriously and knew how to impart that without any kind of creepy condescension.

Speaker 5 (00:53:29):

And then in terms of what OCO was said, having been many of these, by the way, that fourth full apartment was Mel Chuck's apartment. But I was struck by why Oco was talking about in terms of translation, how we live our lives in these little isolated language bubbles and the things that are going on in other languages need to be translated so that we can actually inhabit bigger worlds. So how do I do? I was asked to speak personally. So what I'm going to do is tell a string of little anecdotes that tied to lot Elise Frank oal and Tracy said, we'll make up what kind of complex knot. And so I'm going to start with a few qualities about Seamus that for me feel like bedrock. First, the gentle self mockery and roguish good humor, but also the colloquial eloquence and sense of kindred feeling that pervades shame's conversation. It's such that you feel smarter, funnier, and more genuinely alive whenever you're in the same room with them. At that same Portuguese restaurant you were at Tracy, and speaking of some Portuguese sausages set a fling. Seamus said, now these sausages are sausages of the mind.

Speaker 5 (00:55:09):

And once in a car stopped at a stoplight. When we saw the curve of a heart silhouette against the window shape, Seamus said, it looks just like a seahorse. And speaking of the complexities of friendship, Seamus recently quoted the famous Yates, famous lines from Yates, think where Man's glory most begins and ends and say that my glory was I had such friends. And then Shamus said, of course the corollary is also true. Think we're man's glory most begins and ends and say that my trouble was I had some threats and in a totally different register, I remember speaking to him about the death of my father, in which my dad's body, long after my father wanted to keep on living, simply refused to give out. Seamus nodded and said, with great accuracy of feeling, oh, I know, I know the hateful strength of the dying.

Speaker 5 (00:56:24):

And on a foggy morning when we are out walking in Dublin, he said, it's a soft day. Another Seamus qualities is his gift as Tracy and Elise have pointed out, is his gift for putting younger people at ease and even offering them immediate terms of equality. He's never played the Emmens, GREs, the laureate, the literary lion as a man and as a poet. He took the heart what like the McClarty once told him to help with overstating it. Don't have your veins bulging, your bureau bureaus about the next quality. Sounds simple, but in a way it complicate all the others. Seamus always shows up. He shows up as a friend, as an artist, and if he's been invited around at seven o'clock, he's there at seven o'clock, if not before. Now I'm not saying that punctuality is an absolute virtue. It can be disconcerting if you consider yourself a fashionably laid host, but in shameless case is clock is set to five of not five past. That clock keeps a strict accounting with himself, but it's un hassled and un hassling if you yourself happen to be late. And this tolerance is emblematic of this love of the quirks and other people's characters. Seamus once told me of David Hammond, the Irish singer and documentary filmmaker called him early one morning and said, hello, Seamus, are you awake?

Speaker 5 (00:58:11):

And when Seamus said, no, David, I'm still asleep. David said, undeterred, well, are you awake now?

Speaker 5 (00:58:25):

So Sylvia years back, Seamus and I are walking through a Jewish poetry festival at Boston University when I notice his gates slowing and a kind of hyper vigilance taking over the tightening and a hunkering down into himself. And he said, in a level voice, is it commenting on the weather there's been a bomb scare? And indeed, there had been police cars fumed under the trees. The bomb squad was standing by and a moment later, an ambulance with his lights flashing, drove up after the event, which went ahead as planned. Once it became clear that there was no bomb, I asked Seamus how we know. Ah well. He said, you get a sense of these things. And then I saw that the police weren't moving in but standing back, I also recall the first time I visited Shamus in Dublin. It was after his mother died and he'd written fairly recently the beautiful sequence of saunas about his mother's death.

Speaker 5 (00:59:28):

As both Tracy and Lisa mentioned Clarence's, I was up early reading in the living room when Seamus came down a little later, his undershirt, Mari Seamus wife, who ought to be the subject of her own tribute for the ease and eloquence of translations of Irish legends entitled Over nine Ways as well as her genius for being at the center for most of her lipo, the music of what Happens. Anyway, Mari gave you the poem, still marked up with little changes in thick blacking from Shamus pen, such heart and skill and reliable sensibility. They impressed you with their greatness, not by their obscurity or fierceness or seniority or by being million dollar worded, but possessing the distinction of good conversation as Robert Lowell Seamus is good friend, as we heard last night, once wrote in another context, I do not mean mattered conversation, the humor, the English are said to inherit or get in their schools.

Speaker 5 (01:00:40):

But a distinction that a man must have in for, he can never fake it or buy it. Later that same day, Seamus and I drove out to his cottage in landmark. We established a kind of routine. Him upstairs in his study working away, translating Anita's journey to the underworld, which he talked about yesterday, the translation that would begin one of his most beautiful books, seeing things in part about the death of his father. And he downstairs trying to scribble what I could but aware of shameless upstairs muttering to himself as he composed the cottage was very basic, very cold slate, roof clinking latch. And it projected its own Newman. It was the shameless said of the sausages, a cottage of the mind. Through it all, I felt the kind of wonder that such a house could exist, that I was sleeping in it and that Seamus was immensely gracious throughout and allowing my presence.

Speaker 5 (01:01:44):

And even though you had to wear your coat all day, people from shivering, I loved how the stoney up against this of the place seemed to say, well, look, you may not be exactly comfortable, but go ahead anyway. Think yourself at home every afternoon. I'd have it off for a three or four hour walk. And when he came back in the evening, we'd sit outside, there was a bit of sun or go over the lines. He rung out that day, he knocked them off 10 to 15 lines at a time. And I loved how he treated it as just the job of work, nothing fussy or sty in his process. It's just a severe and undiluted sense of what was up to the mark and what happened yet arrived. And then in the evening we boil potatoes, grab some fish, talk, listen while the radio played, drink a whiskey or a Guinness or most nights both, and then take ourselves off the bed. I recall the afternoon we first arrived, shameless was putting together a new edition of a selected poems, I think. And he invited me to go open the table with contents with him. It was a perfect day, warmish clear, getting on in the afternoon so you could start to feel the chill gathering. We sat in wooden chairs with a wheelbarrow between us as a kind of improvised table, each of us holding in our hands as she of falls. Jamis asked me to put the ones I thought should be included into the wheelbarrow.

Speaker 5 (01:03:21):

When I asked him if there were any principles guiding him in his selections, he shrugged, laughed and said with perfect one doman chip as opposed to one upmanship. Oh, just the ones I like. After dinner on another evening, Seamus asked me if I had any plans to put together a book of essays. Since he knew I'd written a good deal of critical pros. I shrugged and said something like, well, that would be nice, but I suppose I needed a theme. But this Seamus smiled and of the kind of robish salt mockery, oh, for God's sake, slay, stop putting on airs. You don't need a theme, you just need a tile.

Speaker 5 (01:04:12):

I remember on our last night together we took a drive to the Manor house of Garrick Brown, founder of CLA records and a champion of traditional Irish music. The house was set in a moody spot next to a black lake and at the very bottom of a deep valley in the Wicklow Mountains. To my eye, it was as grand and otherworldly as it was iic and Ular. But for Seamus, it was just the home of a friend, a man who might meet A few years later when I was visiting Seamus, just after being elected to give the Oxford lectures and poet. But that night, brown wasn't at home. And Seamus and I walked to the lake and skipped stones were bit and then fooled around throwing sticks into the lake. Even them like javelins horsing around really. And if there's an image that I retained from those days, it's a Seamus in an old green sweater with holes in it, clutching in his hand a stick that he's poised to throw as stand next to him with a stick that I'm also poised to throw.

Speaker 5 (01:05:21):

And Shamus giving me a look that says, I know that we know how ridiculous we look, but let's do this anyway. And so we did. Since that moment, the ripples have been laughing outward for close on to 30 years. And since we're lucky enough to have Seamus and Mari in the room, I'd like to ask them if they would like to take a bow. And given that an event like this is a little bit like coming to a room, seeing somebody who looks like you from the back when they turn around seeing I sort of recognize that base if they'd like to add anything in the end, thank you very much. Well, what would you do?

Speaker 5 (01:07:03):

Overwhelming and moving trustworthy from these particular people. And a lesson in how to do it. In fact, I called upon to do it for somebody else, always coming to Cambridge. In those years, over the 14 years, I came and went. Of course I had a job at the university, but I had a relationship with friends who brought me alive and kept me alive. And now years later, 1996, I stopped that job. So it was almost 20 years later and it's very, very moving to be at the center of such affection and grace. I say they talk about such friends as I think of power, Manian must be and ends. Same a Dorian Williams. I had such friends for once. It's a problem for me to have had so many friends. Yes, because well, you can see such grace and such readiness and generosity. There is a Latin phrase, which I'm sure that says that nobody gives or they haven't got themselves. So what was being given out today in terms of cadence, praise, gifts, heart knowledge. Heart knowledge as that knowledge that they have. Every one of them, what was given by them, sorry, deeply moved. But don't forget,

Speaker 2 (01:09:27):

Moved to it brought back a lifetime. And I suppose listening to it, I should have to sit there. I said, was I married to this? What they said is true even after 48 years of marriage. It is true. But what you give and get back and that's what happened. And it was wonderful on this.

Speaker 7 (01:10:13):

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