Seamus Heaney on poetry - The New Yorker Festival

well good afternoon ladies and gentlemen it's a great pleasure to welcome you here I'm Paul mun The Poetry editor of the New Yorker and we're welcoming welcoming you here on behalf of the magazine and this uh event in the New Yorker Festival so uh our topic today with Sheamus heene uh is history and Homeland and I I'd like to begin if I may Sheamus just by taking you back uh to 1968 which in Ireland of course was a year in which um the notion of history and Homeland somehow combined in rather striking ways well that was 1968 in October a Civil Rights march you may remember or not was Batten charged by the Royal austri constabulary in da City or London Dairy City depending which position you take on the Homeland in Northern Ireland and that uh started off uh the the cycle I suppose you have to call it of violence that we experienced between 68 and 1998 and in 1998 we had the Good Friday agreement which um which changed the Constitutional Arrangements between the Republic of Ireland and the north of Ireland to the extent that there was uh an acknowledgement that there was a a north south South relationship and then what we now have uh we're now 2008 so we're 40 years after that I remember Connor Cruz O'Brien saying be just after the the Baton charging of the of the March which was the beginning of the action everybody had a sense that change was going to happen Civil Rights was in the air Civil Disobedience and so on Conor Cruzer Bren said writing it I think it was in The Listener this is not a matter of of altering some electoral anomaly this is a matter of changing the relationship between the Victorious and the defeated which the Victorious situation established long I mean first of all with the plantation of oler in the 1620s is stabilized I suppose with the Protestant settlement of William of Orange in 1690 then the the borders drawn in of the unionist majority in the North in 1921 and so that was that was one of the fundamental differences it wasn't just civil rights it wasn't just one man one vote it wasn't just uh you know jobs for no discrimination and so on it was changing the relationship between between that group who thought of themselves as Irish Nationalist and out of it and the group in charge the cast if you like the northern unionist cast and I think those relationships have changed actually what what the uh what the uh Good Friday agreement the Belfast agreement whatever you want to call it in 1998 did was to allow for a perviousness On the Border allow for north south relationships to be established institutions to be established I allow for an assembly an Invision assembly where where the minority CA Catholic Irish nationalist whatever you want to call it would be involved with the britisher unionist majority there so relationships were uh were made possible and I think that the 10 years of fumbling around in the assembly it even though it's just ordinary political disappointing fumbling Point scoring and so on is an advance so I think we have changed at a great price and of course it's not the kind of thing that we see in this country that kind of fumbling around in the you know I realize I realize uh as you speak there of civil rights one tends to forget the extent to which the American model and Civil Rights was really so instructive were you conscious of that at the time or is that something that perhaps you've you're more aware of since we were very very very aware of the civil rights movement of course in the north and indeed that that model was uh there for the people who established the actual Northern Iron Civil Rights Association but uh I came to California for a very happy year a very influential year very important year 19771 after that 1969 was really when we moved from protest to danger and people were killed on the streets and the British army was there and the provos had started and the sectarian killings that started the you know it was desolation uh but we went to Berkeley then and I remember uh one of our friends saying uh a black friend he said well he said I I don't know the words he said but I sure recognize the tune so uh but I mean what was we shall over the words were we shall overcome that's right that's both places actually I remember the first I wrote a a piece in the in the uh listener magazine again where Connor had written that uh The Listener magazine was edited that time by by Carl Miller very interested in in the north but I ended up my article saying the New London Dairy air you know the air Danny boy is called the London Dairy air or the dairy air is said the New London Dair air it sounds very like we shall overcome and and uh that was all there but I have to tell you a a story that illustrates the the gr that which we were working in 1968 in Belfast Irish versus British Catholic versus Protestant all all those kind of underground energies very decorous people were with each other even though it have very high voltage under the under the decorousness anyway I was on a television program talking about I think the North in the north and I went to for fish and chips in this fish and chip shop near us in in Belfast near icy Avenue and there was a young English woman serving behind the counter and she said to me oh she said I recognize you she said you're the Irish poet and uh the proprietress a ston orange woman said she said he is not an Irish poet he is a British subject living at oler and then then she turned to me and she said wouldn't it sicken you and timorously showing my arish Catholic I said yeah yeah yeah but there it was well there it was one of the things it was was just that celebrity you were writing in The Listener you were very visible you were recognized on the street was that a something that you accepted happily or how did that work for you well I grew into it I suppose I was there was a magical arrival in my life of publishing poems in the 1962 I published a poem in two poems in the Belfast Telegraph I I didn't know anybody I didn't know the literary editor sent them in and they were accepted then I moved to higher regions and higher standards now were they were they under the or over the name in cerus or was that your name no under my own name Sheamus J he my second name is Justin so I when my hair read white I decided I should be called Justin ready rather than Sheamus I keep thinking of Sheamus as a young young poet's name but uh in the first in the beginning it was Sheamus J he in the Belfast Telegraph then in the arest times I published two poems various times published one of them under the name James heene because Sheamus is the Irish for James I never submitted under under under James but that was another cultural difference and then anyway 1963 poems first poems published 62 63 1965 a book accepted by Faber and Faber fabers wrote to me I was really blessed incredible and uh 19 19 66 first book comes out gets blessings well received and I suppose I I had a Charmed Life and and an and the anxiety that comes with that also but by 1968 yeah I was teaching in the University I I suppose I felt that uh I had some kind of Representative status for the minority people there and I was glad enough to write and The Listener and do pieces but but anxious also because I I'm not I wasn't an activist uh I tried I tried to think I think I tried from the beginning to do what y said he tried to do but this was at the very end y's formulation was Majestic and authoritative but he said he had tried to hold in a single thought reality and Justice so so I I tried to write fairly in other words as fairly as I could without with giving it a certain let me ask you uh about the relationship between yourself and the word bone uh you spoke earlier of the plantation the house that you were brought up in or the farm that you were brought up in county dery or London Derry again these words charged in that part of the world um would have been associated with one of these fortified uh farmsteads did that give you you any pause at all or were you conscious of the charge of that when you were growing up I was not at all conscious of that when I was growing up uh in fact the place was called MOS ban and then it became when you were writing down the address on your letters it was MOS ba WN and it was only when I think 1972 when I came back from uh Berkeley I was asked to do we were always being asked to write something about the conditions in Northern Ireland explain yourself to the world and uh the that came to me as an idea of for the divided nature of the world we lived in most ban B ba long stroke ba acute ba father in in arish would mean Bond would mean white and it would if you took it that way your emology LED you back to native olster to the province known you know the Primeval Ireland as Ola the the Irish language olster Province now so that that is one version of where we live one Homeland is in the what John montue called the Primal Gil the names of many of all over the Northern Ireland lead you straight back to pre-norman pre-foundation pre preor Ireland to an option of Homeland in the first k Celtic place or gelic place so that was most B most born B WN uh LED you to Plantation olster where history begins in the 1620s and everything before that is is is not there the land was theirs before the land was ours so to speak and so so uh Bone mostos born and Mos B it seems to be that in the very in the very name of the first house the division the the problem was implicit ethologically I don't know which emology is correct born or ban but um they're both they're now commingled you know but not problematically I don't think so what tell us about moss Bon what was it like there well it's I mean it's almost like another world isn't it I mean I feel like an anthropologist when I rather than aut rather autobiograph when I began to say a whitewashed single story long range of housing the first three rooms up Upper Room middle room lower room were our dwelling house thatched roof but then at the very end there was a stable and a horse I mean other there were four four apartments under this one long roof it was a traditional whitewashed Irish thatch Cottage and uh very uh intimate it was on our own small farm uh so I only when you get older do you realize that Homeland Security was there from the beginning you you your own Fields were around you neighbors that you knew were beside you uh it's still a place that in my in my inner first memory I know best we moved from that place in well when I was away at College at the age of 14 but I mean I hesitate to mention these things they're also so picturesque but they're all true there were Wells people came to our house because we had a pump at the back door to get the water there was no running water in there was no rural electrification where lamp lit the lamp you lit the fire in the morning you lit the lamp in the evening candles were used now and again uh so it was the first world it was a Mythic world if you like and but it was also part of your own ordinary experience so when I began to write that place was there and it still is there of course it's completely changed now completely the th house has gone is been renovated the the fields little Fields all the all the hedges have been taken out they are the railway that run behind our house has been lifted it's the it's it's it's a late 20th century landscape uh with and the roads have changed and the flag stamp I wrote about has been obliterated and so on but it doesn't stop me remembering it as it was well well there have been changes all over in this country even over the last 20 years where I live in New Jersey fantastic changes in the landscape but somehow the change that took place from say 1939 when you were born uh over the last 50 60 years has been quite extraordinary it's as if one has gone surely from a a peasant Society uh to whatever it is we inhabit right now in Ireland um it what what is it we're inhabiting this is the first country by the way announced the other day of the European Union which has been uh declared to be in recession it has been declared to be it has been declared to be in recession that's because we left a week ago no um yeah well the poet Edwin mure who was born in the orany and who ended up in Prague uh at the Communist takeover who was the first translator of Kafka he he was born into Arney into the a kind of water in the well Turf cutting beet cutting and so on so he said culturally he was born in the Middle Ages he was born in about the 16th century or 15th century and then he lived into the he he lived into the Soviet era so he said chronologically he was maybe 50 or 60 but but culturally he was about 400 years of age and I think that applies to us I mean we we we were there and well my wife Mari always said that when we heard this phrase the Celtic tiger the I I don't think that I know live in the Republic of Ireland of course for the last 30 33 years where we went no we went there at 72 36 years left the north lived in the Republic I I felt uh at home there for many reasons but I when I be I began to feel less at home when is it say something about me of course when the country became very prosperous I became uneasy I didn't think it was what we were cut out for somehow everybody else seemed to be quite quite trusting of it and some part of me and I think some part of many many people in the country relished it but disbelieved it slightly so Mari said this Celtic tiger is quite soon going to turn into a rug she said and these are the Visionary powers of the Bride you see she she came came to be right but we are living in a dismaying moment in Irish history I mean we've we voted no recently to uh basically saying we are skeptical in some way of our relationship to Europe we don't believe totally we didn't ratify by U by the referendum the Lisbon treaty um and so that that meant that the people spoke no to their previous 30 years of very prosperous history depending upon Europe depending upon American Investment also because uh we had special concessionary good tax good good tax concessions for Investments for corporate investment and so all of a sudden uh the the people said no to what they had uh benefited from then suddenly because of the economic collapse and the housing crisis here and the credit crisis we're again in World recession everything is falling back the property Market is gone banks are anxious everybody's anxious so we we're uh in a very strange and dismaying moment I think in in our history and the northern crisis now has fallen back into it's it's not it's not the worry anymore it was preoccupying the whole country for 40 years and now it's economics you know so let's stay with the home place though for the moment what what uh uh so many wonderful poems come out of that experience is there any possibility we could uh have you read one perhaps yes in the midst of it all I think the most Homeland secure poem maybe I've ever written is a poem called Moss Bon sunlight what what makes us at I mean it isn't just the address at home your own I mean when I think of my childhood what do you how do you think of your childhood I mean it's it's an inwardness uh and how do you imagine it I I my whole childhood in one way could be summed up little fellow in the middle of the field listening to a lark I mean it's very poetic but it actually is in a way the whole of that and the littleness of that the Solitude and the at homeness at the same time in the whole picture a lark very beautiful very lyric but it's uh shows Solitude and completeness at once in that image but the other place the domestic spot is the kitchen in the house at mosb and I do remember stepping out of my cut I had I had a cut made by the local Carpenter Joe Ward and uh the it was made I suppose so it if you peed in it the boards could be taken out in was or if you did worse in it the boards could be taken out and cleaned up so you could you could take the bottom out of the cut board by board and I I do remember the sensation of putting my Barefoot on the floor and uh the joy and safety of that you felt the earth going up into you I remember it right in my foot still so so this this poem is about being in that kitchen uh later on and when I imagined what what my security was like I imagined myself in the credle and this poem was written imagining myself in in in a cradle in that kitchen when my aunt who lived with us was baking bread it's called Moss born sunlight so there's a griddle which is baking bread and there's meal and there's the heat of the stove and so on and so forth so let's see I've said it before I say it again the poem really wants to be a verir if it could be must bone sunlight there was a sunlet absence the helmeted pump in the yard heated its iron water honeyed in the slung bucket and the sun stood stood like a griddle cooling against the wall of each long afternoon so her hands scuffled over the bake board the rening stove sent its he sent its plaque of Heat against her where she stood in a flowy apron by the window now she dusts the board with A Goose's Wing now sits broad lapped with whitened nails and me easling shins here is a space again the scone rising to the tick of two clocks and here is love like a tinsmith scoop sunk past its gleam in the meal bin love situ all right you know that's the other thing I've always uh sorry go ahead I must say the image that I've always found fascinating among others in that most fascinating in that poem is the one of the the scone rising to the tick of two clocks and there's some kind of tension between these two clocks that which I think actually contributes to the the charge of the poem in a way that I don't quite understand but I think maybe maybe um May even appeal to extra to information beyond the poem who knows with the sense of the your aunt and your mother in the house um I mean is there any that's very good mean this is a revelation though well no I mean does that make any sense to you I'm really sure to know that Jared Manley Hopkins had two women in his house too you know yes yeah yeah I think yeah but uh no I would say also maybe it's too I grew there's a poem called Terminus which I like also but growing up in between we all grew up in between the northern it's like the two societies that you described earlier on the two eras of time I mean that's part of the tension well when the two clocks are just physically I mean they register that don't I mean and that's you used to hear that in Old Country Cottages it was a much more silent time that was part of it so that t talk and I mean they're different different Melodies but it's it's absolutely true that the the tension is there too I thought of it as just a safety but it's it's safe from something also I guess yeah what what what is the reader who is not heard a clock I suppose there are some readers in the world who will not have heard a clock in this modern era what are they going to make of this well this is this is a big test isn't it I mean I remember with Robert LEL uh one of the great poems loved I knew it by heart man and wife tamed by miltown we lie on mother's bed there miltown what's it it and it it was some kind of sedative I believe in the 1950s so but you you if the poem is doing its work it carries you over I think funny enough that's a word I always passed over I I somehow deliberately misread it as Milton as if they've been reading they were reading Milton your your point being that there one may actually in Elliot's phrase one may yeah you know get a poem without entirely understanding it uh Richard eberhart's great poem about the groundhog which I loved as a child which was in every Anthology I realized that uh as far as I was concerned a groundhog was like some kind of wild bore I had absolutely no idea what a groundhog was and yet yet somehow one could could could get part of the charge of the poem so when did poetry begin to have a charge for you well I suppose very early on me again I didn't know that these things were poems but there was a two liner that we knew as youngsters which I think is a terrific poem now two sticks standing and one across spells Patty Brennan in the hill head Moss two sticks standing were in the bug and there was a one across and on that there was a A can hung and a fire was lit underneath it and when the guy was in the middle of the day working he L his fire and heated up his water and made his tea he went home in the evening they were still standing there there was a sign that the guy had been there it's a kind of they not say Martian poem poem about absence about Steven deas saying signals of all things I am here to read and so on but that was unconscious taking in Rhymes so who wrote that did you write that's anonymous anonymous that was just part of the districts my granny was Doty she was the stuff she hunted the orange men through gadu you know the pretties are boiling for that's a fine joke the herings are coming and Do's boat I mean that was all there but the school in school I remember poetry wasn't actually taught as such you were G you were given things to learn by heart and then there were things called comprehension tests where where the poem was read and there were questions to to see if if you understood the content of the poem and one of the first poems that meant anything to me was a comprehension test and in the text was poem by wordworth called Fidelity a barking sound the shepherd Hears A Cry of dog or Fox it was about a a famous accident in the Lake District in wordsworth's time where some man fell over Shepherd fell over a precipice and the dogs dead barking and barking and barking wouldn't leave the master so so that that poem I remember I remember like everybody else the first time again it was a comprehension test not taught to us Blake's Tiger Tiger Tiger Burning Bright uh up the AY Mountain down the rushy Glenn well-known Irish poem but but then it was that that was first school then Secondary School a level English English classes you know uh early on the G of the the Ancient Mariner it was English teaching where I first got my first fro nothing quite independent about it it was just doing the on the conveyor belt of the education system and gradually the older you got the more conscious you were of your pleasure the more you were aware of what was involved I mean manly Hopkins Wordsworth meant a lot to me Keats and so on then at University elizabe Elizabeth and jaab and drama John Webster etc etc and then y Sly enough in my 20s really I mean I read C4 poems by y the university but I he didn't take them in so it was only when I began to write that I began to read other po like gates with Avid interest not just in their work but in their conduct and how they behaved themselves and how they got through their life in in in in a society particularly Mr Yates yeah and the the Americans the Americans are very important to me in the University I always remember John crw Ransom I Knew by Art uh uh LEL Elizabeth Bishop uh Robert Frost was completely important you know when I I met him at University and uh then uh when I had as I said it Charmed Life my py was published early and as a result I was given a job in the I was upwardly mobile from primary school into teacher training College into it all I mean it may became too easy I felt I had to earn it later on to tell you the truth I I came right up into and I was teaching in Queens University when Paul mun himself arrived in the University but uh I was I mean I was teaching Frost I think in the University before I really knew him well enough I was a young fellow so all that came quickly magically eagerly and as you know we're we're still learning to read The Poets we love uh I'm still learning to read Yates and Frost and Bishop and L and you know I was very lucky to meet uh L then in Ireland also and Ted Hughes was very important to me as a as a as a stay as a kind of something foundational in I read his poetry in 1962 I came across Ted Hugh's port in the in the Belfast Library I came across at first I think in in the Alvarez's Anthology the new poetry and it sent a charge into me his subject matter was like what I had grown up with I thought that my stuff wasn't really there for modern poetry it was kind of bulls and thatched cottages and Wells and so on so but Hughes had this Mythic sense of the animals and that all that was a charge of energy and a confirmation that you could use your own use your own material and a sense too which I think you you developed of a relationship in Ted Hughes between his poetry and indeed his personage and and the country itself uh one of the reasons I think why he was such a spectacularly successful poet laurate having to do with his relationship with some sense of England and that's an idea that I think may have come partly from Yates in the case of Hugh but also in your own case perhaps from Yates the sense that as he put it uh somewhere along these lines somehow along these lines that Ireland was a country in which one man or woman presumably he would have said had he been circumspect uh can can take a project and see it through in the course of his or her lifetime um me do you still do you have a sense that uh that the project of being a poet who uh as we've discussed earlier who in some way represents Ireland um is is still one that's that's viable well I should say I didn't start out thinking I represented Ireland at all but but in a small way during those crisis years that you're asked to be spokesperson and so on so there was that element um the the the moment when I thought something happened good the first book is full of first person singular and uh there is a poem in the second book called bogland with a Wei there's a Wei and it it is the people of the island you know uh and the I thought of the island of Ireland the way we were taught about it at school was that it was Ireland was like a saucer it had high it had mountains around the edges and then there was a soft there was a wet bit in the middle people used to leave wet their saucers in Ireland in the middle would spill their tea into the saucer but um so so I wrote this book called bugland because the bug Valen was in our teaching we were all taught that I'm sure your school too uh the the center was wet so I did this poem quickly thank goodness like many of the best ones uh and it it it uh I in my University I had to I had to teach a class for Michael Allen who who taught American literature and he was off for a day or two and I had to say something about about American literature and uh I I learned this most primitive of truths that in America the Prairie is very important and the frontier is very important and uh and that is their myth so after after I I I taught that class I thought well what's ours I mean Americas have this terrific out outward Direction finding pushing out we have a bug going down so that and there's a kind of there's a kind of p p on the word Pioneers where the first meaning of that is a the the people in the Army who dig who dig the holes in the trenches so they're the diggers the pioneers and they're the people in the in in the covered wagons here I guess oh here I think I know it by heart but I better get it all the same do do you from time to time recite a poem from memory or I do quite often this one usually yeah mhm no it's interesting because we were talking earlier on about how how we learned poetry at school how was beaten into us and yet somehow uh one perhaps doesn't always have well I've read this one fairly often in my time yeah band we have no prairies to slice a big sunlet evening everywhere the eye concedes to encroaching Horizon is woed into the Cyclops eye of a Tarn our unfenced country country is bug that keeps crusting between the sights of the sun they've taken the skeleton of the great Irish elk out of the Pete set it up an astounding crate full of air butter sunk under more than a hundred years was recovered salty and white the ground itself is kind black butter melting and opening underfoot missing its last definition by millions of years they'll never dig cold here only the water log trunks of great Furs soft as pulp our Pioneers keep striking inwards and downwards every layer they strip seems camped on before the BG holes might be Atlantic seepage the wet Center is bottomless I was very glad when that upen the central idea of history in that poem and a number of others has to do with what we keep what we hold on to what's preserved what might serve us from generation to generation it occurs to me that perhaps in the right now in Ireland and perhaps in this part of the world also that there may be some aspects of our history that we have to shrug off leave behind mind uh re yeah re uh reinvent yes um and I want to ask you about um the phrase hope as it combines with the word history a phrase you use at the end of of one of your translations and a phrase that's been taken up uh by one of the main players I suppose in those 40 Years of of uh of Engagement in Northern Ireland as I said Jerry Adams as the title of his U autobiography uh a phrase that one might well imagine that other great Irishman Barack Obama taking up as as as as as as a rallying cry um tell us about Hope and history and if part of what hope might be about isn't in fact leaving leaving off some stuff well the phrase came up in uh A Chorus I wrote for a translation of U philes or I'm never sure whether say philes or Phil I think both will be both will be okay in this present company I think does it R with sties or sweeties I I once heard both phes phes and I it was I changed the title of it to uh the Cure of Troy and uh it's it's a play where it has a in a sense a happy ending the man who refuses to go back he has FES was uh marooned on lmos on on their way to on the Greeks were going to Troy to take the city and uh uh phes ended up with a they stopped there and he got bit and he got his feet became stinking he became a rotten smelling guy and said you stay here we finish with you so they they maroon him and they go on to Troy and they he becomes he's there for 10 years deeply embittered then a prophet says you need philotes to take Troy so the story was he has to come back he has to in a sense forgive them which he won't so but at least in in the Greek drama you had a way of bringing a God in to say to Phil forget it buddy you go to Troy no matter what de XM so we had no way of swinging a God in out of the out of the Guild Hall roof so I had to write a chus that that that said you know get on the but I I I added an extra chorus to This play I had been reading uh vaslav hav one of his books of interviews and he in this interview he made a distinction between optimism and hope and that was precisely what was called for in our country anybody born and bred in Northern Ireland could not be too optimistic uh we're not going to say oh it'll be terrific it was good it'll turn out well you know that optimism is yeah it'll be grand you know it'll be all right hope hope said hope said the havl is not optimism it isn't grounded on the notion that everything will turn out well uh hope hope is uh it's its Horizon is beyond the actual it's a kind of it's a Transcendent thing hope means that you believe something is worth working for and is worth sticking at worth persisting with so so in that sense hope became an allowable concept we we are all very wary in the north of irland of being too optimistic or being too putting too good to face on things not because knowing the difficulty to go back to the beginning of reestablishing relationships between conquered and defeated it's not a simple thing anyway I wrote this chorus and uh it says history says don't hope on this side of the grave but then once oh I I should say this this I would never have allowed myself to do this Paul had it not been 1990 this was the year after 1989 when everything had happened the wall had come down in in uh uh in in Berlin uh all things had happened in Poland Czechoslovakia Nelson Mandela had got come out of Robin Island so so the vaslav H thing was allowable to oneself although it was a very Fierce time very UNH hopeful in north of Ireland in the early '90s very cruel a lot of a lot of killing and dairy and graay steel and all those things anyway 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 that was the The crucial stanza and as I say it was underwritten by what had happened in Europe and by what was happening in South Africa and what could possibly happen on our own ground so uh though I doubt even then you had a an image of Ian perley and uh absolutely n Martin mcginness holding hands the chuckle Brothers as they were called in in the north no no no dream of that but that was an astonishing moment I mean that was quite remarkable it was and that that would never be forgotten it marked things but it was a mark of possibility I think we've gone back to I mean I think there was definitely progress after 1998 we had moved from the atrocious to the messy which is an advance and with with Martin and Ian there was a kind of again it's a symbol of hope you know this thing was worth working for slip back a bit now to groomer realities and positioning and you know let me ask you about that I mean there have been moments when I've wondered for example if there wasn't i' I've always taken it pretty much at face value the notion that hope and history might rhyme and it's been quoted so often including I think by Bill Clinton when he when he came to uh visit um Ireland and and on other occasions I think by many people I sometimes wonder if um there there might not be a slightly ironized component to it in the sense that um hope and history can never strictly speaking rhyme at all and I wonder if talk about the word rhyme would you in that context what does it mean for you well I I go back to the end of the philes was interesting uh this was quoted but when after Hillary and Bill were in Dublin in 1995 they were taken their farewells and uh the the last chorus of the Cur Troy says no it's time to part anyway and it ends up the the true have the word the word leave URS they're leaving and then the last L is in in the the Hal true rhyme is love you see and I wasn't sure for a long time whether i' call it say the true half rhyme is love or the half or the half true rhyme is love I that's the infants of Philip Lin I know half they're half half true yeah no but but I think half rhyme is a half Ryme is a technically complete thing yes so if I said the half the true half Ryme is love is completely optimistic in a way that's wonderful so in other words love rhymes with hope is that no no love rhymes with leave earlier on I'm sorry please forgive me please forgive this wasn't an ear in an earlier I have a very loose sense of what a half rhyme is no but I'm saying that the question of rhyme and the question of Truth and true rhyme and half rhyme the first problem I had was in the first play first Greek version I wasn't sure whether I to end up with the true half rhyme is love or the Hal true rhyme is love I ended up oping for the Hal true rhyme as being more cautious and open history well it that was a chorus and I would never allowed myself that kind of writing in in my appropri Persona see I think that makes a a lot of sense but that's not necessarily how it's read I think that component is not really part of How It's read um and the half true there's the the true half true R is love now it's now it's high water mark and time but anyway the the end of that that this play has them leaving the island and leave is the up the right the first word in the rhyme couplet and then love is the second rhyme so it's a half rhyme anyway we we've labored this one maybe well you know I think we are going to have to draw to a close at that point and one can't imagine a better moment if a may suggest the poet who to go back to yet of all poets I think writing in English at the moment who really has managed to himself remake Sheamus hini is going to end this uh wonderful uh occasion with a poem so Shamus Robin was ask a poem it's in memory of a mutual friend who was an exemplary figure a free a free spirit who knew everything about the Captivate captured Society he was in uh Sean Armstrong was his name he was sprung from you would say a Protestant or unionist tradition any of these words have to be used but he and he ended up in in working as a social worker moving across the two communities from shankill road to the other side and he was a social worker in after leaving Queens he ended he was in a commune in California spent a while in selito and came back and hoped to establish a commune in County uh fermana I think down down and lo eron anyway he was shot and uh he actually was the person whose party Mari and I attended on the first night we uh took ourselves seriously so it's a kind of happy happy moment there too but it's it's about it's about uh rattling un optimistic but trusting hopeful Ulster a postcard from North antrum is it begins with a one of those 19th century Post Guard in memory of Sean Armstrong a lone figure is waving from The Thin Line of a bridge of ropes and slats slung danger out dangerously out between the clifftop and the Pillar Rock a 19th century wind DOL Pickers sea campions a postcard for you Shan and that's you swinging alone antic half afraid in your Gallow glasses beard and swallow tail of surge the carared Rope Bridge ghost written in sepia or should it be your house boat ethnically furnished rolent of grass remember the grass smoking should it be your house Redland of grass should we discover you beside those warm planked Democratic Wares among the Twilights and guars of selito drop out on a comeback Prince of no no man's land with your heads in clouds or sand you were the clown social worker of the town until your candid forehead stopped a point blank tea time bullet get up from your blood on the floor here's another boat in grass by the lock Shore Turf smoke a wired hen run your local hope for unfound commune now recite me William bloat sing of the Calabar or of Henry Joy McCracken who kissed his maranne on The Gallows at corn Market or Bal Castle Fair give us the Roar sing it by Brute Force if you forget the air yet something in your voice stayed nearly shut your voice was a harassed Pulpit leading the melody it kept at Bay it was independent rattling non-trending uler old decency and old Bush Mills soda FS strong tea new rope rock salt kale plants potato bread and Woodbine Wind Through the concrete vents of a border checkpoint cold zinc nailed for a peace line 15 years ago come this October crowded on your floor I got my arm around mari's shoulder for the first time oh Sir Jasper do not touch me you roared across at me chorus leading splashing out the wine thank you very much you very thanks very much

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 67,804

Keywords: festival 2008, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, poetry, festival, nyer festival

Id: 8HWurkQ1ao4

Length: 51min 50sec (3110 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014