Friday, August 30, 2013
RIP: Seamus Heaney - Apr. 13, 1939 - Aug. 30, 2013
The first time I heard of Seamus Heaney was while listening to NPR in the spring of 1979; he was being interviewed, and he read a few poems from his recently published collection Field Work. Then, in the early eighties, when he'd crossed the ocean to teach at Harvard, he actually came to Provincetown, where I was living, to give a reading at the Fine Arts Work Center. I invited a friend to go with me. He wasn't interested. I said, "You could be seeing someone who might someday win the Nobel Prize for Literature." My friend remained un-impressed, but, there being not much else to do in February, did go with me. We were part of a small crowd of twenty or so. My friend didn't care for it at all. Frankly, I didn't like it that much either; Heaney read mostly poems he'd translated from the Gaelic, published later as Sweeney Astray, and I was lost trying to make any sense of them; nothing charmed me -- plus Heaney had a really stupid hairstyle.
Eventually he wised up about the hair. And, in 1995, he did win the Nobel Prize.
And while I didn't care for Sweeney, I do love many of Heaney's poems, including one he read that spring afternoon in 1979.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Indonesian Cemetery
A person in Indonesia left a nice comment on my blog and sent me photos of what is called Taman Kenangan Lestari Memorial Park there.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
The Parkington Sisters
I saw this poster at a cafe where I sometimes have breakfast; the date July 18th had already passed so I asked the cafe's owner if I could have the poster. "I have a crush on all four of the Parkington sisters," I said. (I think there are more sisters and brothers that aren't in the group.)
I've seen them in concert twice. And when my friend was in the hospital he introduced me to his nurse and said, because I used to live in Wellfleet, "She's from Wellfleet and her daughters are musicians, maybe you know them."
"Oh, you must be the mother of the Parkington Sisters!" "Yes!" "I just love them!" It was like being introduced to ... oh, say, John Lennon's Aunt. The Parkington mother looked way too young to have children over 10 or 12.
I can't imagine growing up in a house with so much musical talent laying around. They all write songs. They all play multiple instruments. It would be bliss.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Friday, August 9, 2013
Happy Birthday Philip Larkin - Born August 9, 1922
I don't have a favorite poet ... I have several favorite poets. Still, if someone asks me who my favorite poet is, I usually say, just for the sake of convenience, "An English guy named Philip Larkin." His poems amaze me; the images he draws, the situations and emotions he depicts, the anythings he chooses to wrap in words, are precise, accurate, and always original.
He had a thirty-years-plus career as a librarian, most notably at Hull University in Yorkshire; his friends wondered why he would wish to go to such a non-hip location. He made the library there one of the best in all of England, a destination.
He wasn't especially nice; he seems to have turned into a grumpy old man at somewhere around the age of sixteen. He was snide. He was arrogant. He was dour. He was a racist. He loved pornography, especially if it involved spanking. He was a misogynist. He had lengthy affairs with three different women -- simultaneously for a good bit of the time, with preciously small regard for their feelings, and, despite each of their wishes, would not promise faithfulness to any one of them. Add, therefore, along with racist and misogynist, that he was a solipsist.
But, yes, a marvelous poet. Indeed, he was offered the Poet Laureateship in 1984, but, because he had long ceased writing poems, turned it down; he felt it would be a sort of cheating; further, it is believed that he was not feeling well and expected to be dead sooner than later. (It could be said that this was pretty much a life-long stance since he was a hypochondriac.) If, when the Laureateship was offered, he did really believe that he was not to last much longer, he was, as it turned out, at last correct. He died on December 2, 1985.
Some twenty years after his death, the Poetry Book Society in England conducted a survey in which members were asked to name the person whom they considered to be the nation's "best-loved" poet. The winner: Philip Larkin.
(When did I run across Larkin? In the mid-sixties a friend in Michigan, despite a sort of dyslexia that made it almost impossible for him to read easily, got -- through friendship -- a job as a publisher's representative. He didn't last long at the job, but long enough to slip me a few brand-spanking-new hardback books, one of which was Larkin's third volume of poetry, The Whitsun Weddings.)
Of Larkin's lengthy poems, the last, a contemplation on death, was written seven years before his own death:
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Statue of Larkin at Hull University |
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