Artsbeat; "Seamus Heaney"

My mother ground is sour with the blood of a faithful, they like gargling in her sacred heart as the legion stir from the ramparts. Come back to this island of the ocean where nothing will suffice, read the inhumed faces of casualty, the victim, report us fairly how we slaughter for the common good and shave the heads in a notorious, how the goddess swallows our love and terror. Night Irish poet, Sheamus Heaney, talks about his life and work in Ireland, considered Ireland's leading contemporary poet, Heaney has written poetry about the Irish countryside and love of country, as well as about the continuing political unrest in Northern Ireland.

In addition, we'll hear readings from several of Heaney's poems as well as highlights from a conversation recorded during a visit to the University of Kansas last year. One part of me felt that just to take pleasure in the sweetness of Mary, to be too free and something, to make too free with the beauty side of Ireland, the truth side of it. Join us tonight for a special edition of the program featuring a conversation with Sheamus Heaney. I'm Darryl Brockton. And I'm Diane Amstead, that's tonight, here on Art Speed. Sheamus Heaney was born in 1939 on a farm in a townland called Mossbond near Loch Nay between Belfast and Darryl. He was the eldest of nine children and attended St. Columbus in London, Darryl and later

the Queen's University in Belfast, where he studied English language and literature. He published his first book of poetry in 1966 and seven more followed in the years since. He's won a number of major writing awards and he's considered Ireland's leading contemporary poet. During a visit to the University of Kansas last year, Heaney discussed, among other things, the artistic climate in his native Ireland. Taking it from a point of view of just writing and being a writer, a small country has certain disadvantages. But one of the advantages, I think, in Ireland is a sense of having some responsibility for the destiny of the nation. I mean, this may seem grandiose, it's really, but it's a common undertow of thinking about writing in Ireland. There's something, I think, in every writer's vision of what it is to be a writer. If you publish a poem in the Erie's Times, say, cabinet ministers, bureaucrats, industrialists,

will read it, I mean, with more or less attention and it is possible, you know, that's just right, they don't make a deal of it, but, you know, if you have established a presence as a writer, the relationship with not just a literary, culturally, but with the more or less cultivated Earth's side world is fairly strong, you know. My hands come, touched by sweet briar and tangled fetch, foraging past the burst gizzards

of coin hordes to wear the dark-boward queen whom I unpin is waiting. Out of the black mower that peeped, sharpened Willow withdraws gently, I unwrap skins and see the pot of the skull, the damp tuck of each curl, reddish as a fox's brush, a mark of gorge and the flesh of a throat, and spring water starts to rise around her. I reach past the riverbed's wash dream of gold to the bullion of her venous bone. Any poem will have an element of surprise, chance and auto-jemesis approach, you know. And in other words, there is, there is, at the initiating point of a poem, some sense

of tremor discovery, excitement and possibility, and sometimes that excitement keeps itself alive in a single sweep until you finish the poem. I mean, Philip Larkin, the English poet used a very good image, he talked about a poem being written with a knife and a fork, you know, that the fork, there's a certain part of the imagination and intelligence that is the fork that fastens onto the thing, but then there's another, you know, artistic negotiating quality, which is the knife. We have no prayer is to slice a big son at evening, everywhere the eye concedes to encroaching her eyes and is wooed into the cyclops eye of a town.

Our unfenced 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 pit, set it up in a stound in great full of air, better sunk under more than a hundred years, was recovered salty in white, the ground itself is kind, black butter, melting and opening underfoot, missing its last definition by millions of years. They'll never decole here, only the waterlogged trunks of great furs, soft as pulp. Our pioneers kept striking inwards and downwards, every layer they strip seems camped on before, the bug holes might be Atlantic sea pitch, the wet center is bottomless. You mentioned the poem Anna Horish, which is a little poem by the place name.

I wrote three or four or five of those poems once and they came very quickly. I guess to take an analogy from the visual arts, there are some kinds of poems that are like drawings and they're caught and they go, they flee across the pitch and the art of that is to be true to the impulse and let it go, like a drawing. But there are some poems which are paintings in a way where you work at it and you shade it in and you perhaps redo the canvas a little bit and you stand back and then you move it a bit. And my experience is that those poems are usually a stanzaic poems with some kind of argument in them. My place of clear water, the first hill in the world for springs washed into the shiny

grass and darkened cobbles in the bed of the lane, Anna Horish, soft gradient of consonant of vowel meadow after image of lamps swung through the yards and winter evenings with pales and bales, those mound dwellers go waste deep and mist to break the light ice at the wells and down hills. Some part of me felt that just to take pleasure in the sweetness of lyric, to be too free in some way, to make too free with the beauty side of the truth side of it, was almost an affront to the conditions in the country.

And some get a puritanical distress in me about the whole thing. Also, I mean, not mentioning names or certain writers, I was kind of enraged by their excellence. You know, there's a certain kind of poetry that is beautiful, resourceful, admirable, excellent, but there's no obstacles, you know, there's no grit, there's no encounter. And at that time, I was kind of impatient with certain kinds of fluency. I mean, temperamentally, I'm not given to political or public stances. And yet, the way the moment developed in the north and the way a number of us were, you know, there at that moment, as writers and the way the expectations grew and the way your own sense of responsibility grew, left that question of the poet's role, that abstract question we discussed, left it at the center of your almost unconscious, you know, it was

always worrying you. And in the end, I've come almost to feel that I've worried too much about it, you know, that it may have been better just to forget about it, but it was impossible to forget about it, you know, it was possible. This morning from a dui motorway, I saw the new camp for the internees. A bomb had left a crater, a fresh clay in the old side, and over in the trees, machine-gun posts defined a real stockade. There was that fight mist you get on a low ground, and it was deja vu. Some film made of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life after death? That's chalked up in a wall downtown, competence with pain, coherent miseries, a bite and a sump, we hug our little destiny again. One of Shemusini's most famous poems is The Tall on the Band, inspired by photographs of a prehistoric man found preserved like Tan Leather in a Danish bog. I knew I would write about the Tall on the Band, you know, but I didn't know when or how. I mean, that's to go back to where we're talking about the originating excitement. What do you do with it, you know? It was a completely, a literary response, I said, my god, that's wonderful.

When everybody who sees this preserved archaic head, I think, has moved, sees the photograph and moved by it. And when my response was a common one, but since I had written a poem about Bogland, which I liked myself, and I thought to myself this man's nancesture of mine, there was something also in that the very face looked like the old characters, writing bikes through the countryside, 30 years ago, the moustache, and I felt very close to him. But how do you do it? And then in some vague field of thought would be too strong or word for it, of association. I thought, as I read about this, he was sacrificed to the fertility goddess and so on.

And I thought Irish republicanism is an origin of sacrifice, martyrdom, territorial to do with redeeming by blood, the nation and so on. So I knew that in some way the head of this man, who died by violence, would be a kind of bit to call other things towards itself out of the contemporary world. Some day I will go to Ahus to see his Pete Brown head, the mile pods of his eyelids, his pointed skin cap.

And the flat country nearby where they dug him out, his last gruel of winter seeds caked in his stomach, naked except for the cap, noose and girdle. I will stand in the long time. Bride groomed the goddess, she tightened her torque on him and opened her fin, those dark juices working him to a saint's kept body, trove the turf cutters honeycombed workings. Now a stained face reposes at Ahus. I could risk blasphemy, consecrate the cauldron bog, our holy ground and pray him to make germinate the scattered, ambushed flesh of labors, stalking corpses laid out in the farm yards, tell tale skin and teeth, flacking the sleepers of four young brothers, trail for miles along the lines. Something of a sad freedom as he rode the tumble should come to me, driving, saying the

names, tolin, gravel, nibble-card, watching the pointing hands of country people not knowing their tongue. But there in Jotland, the old man killing parishes, I will feel lost, unhappy, at home. There's a poem called Bug Queen, that was the first of the, I know there was another one before that, one called Come to the Bar, and that was the first one of the, of the new rake. And then Bug Queen, I remember Bug Queen was an important poem to write in a way, because it was the first time in my life I'd ever worked for a whole day at a poem. It was the first time, and I didn't have a job with that time, I was freelancing and I said, this is what it means to be a writer, you know.

And the excitement, the host was empty, and the excitement stayed all day, and it had a tremendous sense of joy at that, and the poem is just, it's a relishing of a lot of words, too. I lay waiting between the turf face and a main wall, between heathery levels and last tooth at stone, my body was brailed for the creeping influences, dawns, suns, gropped over my head and cooled at my feet through my fabrics and skins, the seeps of winter digested me.

The illiterate roots pondered and died in the cavings of stomach and socket, I lay waiting on the gravel button, my brain darkening, a jar of spawn fermenting underground, dreams of Baltic amber, bruised berries under my nails, the vital horde, reducing in the crock of the pelvis, my diadem, brookaris, gemstones dropped in the peat-flow like the bearings of history, my sash was a black laser wrinkling, dyed weaves and Phoenician's stitchwork retted on my breast-soft marines, I knew winter cold like the nozzle of fures at my thighs, the soaked fledge, the heavy swaddle of hides, my skull, the hibernated in the wet nest of my hair, which they loved, I was barbered and stripped by a turf-cutter spade

who veiled me again and packed comb softly between the stone jams at my head and my feet, till a peer's wife bribed him. The plate of my hair, a slimy birth-cord of bog, had been cut and I rose from the dark, packed bones, skullwear, flayed stitches, tops, small teens on the bank. When you are writing in a form, you are actually in some way in negotiation with the whole keyboard of literature, that form implies, especially the solid, the melodies that

are possible within those fourteen lines are various indeed, but there have been various melodies played, and in a way the thing about the solid is to play the melody, but to put your own improvisation on it somewhere. I discovered a translation by Flano Brian from Early Irish, which seemed to be a struck a note that was the right chewing fork I thought for what I wanted to do, and the note was very sparse and terraced, and kind of like an etching, really. It's a little too-stress line, it's a seasoned song which goes, here's a song, stags, give tongue, winter snows, summer goes, high cold blow, sun is low, brief his day, seas

give spray, those little line-man line things, that, if you know what I mean, that isn't an English melody, and I wouldn't want to get too dark scenarios, because the inheritance of English literature is in my ear, but I would like to mutate it in some way into my own voice, physical voice almost. Fisherman at Ballet Shannon, netted an infant last night along with the salmon, an illegitimate spawning, a small one thrown back to the waters, but I'm sure as she stood in the shallows docking him tenderly till the frozen knobs of her wrists were dead as the gravel, he was

a minnow with hooks tearing her open, she waded in under the sign of her cross, he was holding with the fish, now limbo will be a cold little of souls, through some far-blindy zone, even Christ's pan's unhealed, smart and cannot fish there. The reassuring man in all this is James Joyce of course, who never invented anything if you like, Joyce, Joyce at one point said, I don't think I've got an imagination at all. I don't know what he meant, because he kept writing home, saying what height are the railings outside, Echo Street, could a man claim up that at night, and so on, look at

the back of the star of the sea church for me and tell me, if you're standing there, can you see his far-stand, he went strand-down, he was kept writing back to his aunt Joseph but the fact of the matter is that I think nearly all my poems have some basis and an autobiography or observation to put the abstractions there, or to have a source in dreams, but there's always, but unless those sources, in some way, kick the language motor for you, unless words are a word, or unless there's some kind of, I keep coming back to the noise of excitement or generating possibility, but unless it relates into words and the words themselves begin

together a little life of their own, I mean observation, all the observation in the world, all the memory in the world, not much good to you. As I work at the pump, the wind heavy with spits of rain is fraying the rope of water I'm pumping, it pays itself out like air's afterbirth at each gulp of the plunger, I am tired of the feeding of stock. Each evening I labor this handle half an hour at a time, the cows guzzling at bowls in the buyer, before I have topped up the level, they lord it down, they've trailed in a gain by the ready-made gate he's stuck into the fence, a jingling bedhead wired up between posts, it's on its last legs, it does not jingle for joy anymore.

I am tired of walking about with this plunger inside me, God he plays like a young calf gone wild on a rope, lying or standing one settle these capers, this gulp in my well. Oh, when I am a gate for myself let such wind fray my waters, a scarves my skirt through my thighs, stops air down my throat. I'm living in Dublin, when I lived in Wakelow, something happened to me that I really liked and that was, I was able to write about where I was living, usually when I was in Belfast I always wrote about where I came from, I don't know, when I have one or two ponds, maybe about the contemporary thing in Belfast, you might as well say some kind of erotic relationship

with his material, there was nothing erotic with Belfast for me, whereas when I went to Wakelow, I mid-bull to write about the house I was living in which was something I never thought of doing before, and I'm glad more soundless for that reason there are a lot of literal record in them, and that was an exciting thing for me to do. I can feel the tug of the halter at the nape of her neck, the wind on her naked front, blows her nipples to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs, I can see her drown body in the bog, the weighing stone, the floating rods and bows, under which at

the first she was a bark sapling this dug up, oak bone, brain-forken, her shaved head like a stubble of black corn, her blindfold, the soil bandage, her noose, her ring to store the memories of love, little adulteress before they punished you, you were flocks in the mud, undernourished, and your tar black face was beautiful, my poor scapegoat, I almost love you, but would have cast on her the stones of silence, I am the artful warrior of your brains exposed and darkened cones, your muscles webbing at all your numbered bones, I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters cold and tar wept by the railings, who would connive and civilized outrage, it understand the exact and tribal intimate revenge.

You've just heard a special edition of Art Speed, tonight featuring a conversation with Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the program was directed by Diane Megz and produced by Daryl Brogdon. Our thanks also to Mary Davidson, Thomas O'Donnell and Donna Campbell of the KU English Department for their help in preparing tonight's program. Heaney's poems were read by Mara Brennan-Pieca-Cavitch and Thomas O'Donnell. Join us next week for a special Christmas program as we visit a local production of the Nutcracker, we'll visit the auditions, rehearsals, and backstage with our Kerry Scott. I'm Daryl Brogdon and I'm Diane O'Donnell's dead. We'll see you next week on the Art Speed.