What a poet can establish in the act of writing a poem is something a reader can get from the completed work, that is a realisation that as persons and as peoples we can get further into our selves and farther out of ourselves than we might have expected; and this is one of the ways that poetry helps things forward.
Seamus Heaney “Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times: The Irish Poet and Britain”, Finders Keepers p. 377
Heaney’s work resonates with many people. My particular connection is not only through the poems learned, parsed and analysed in primary school and secondary school (the “poppy bruise” on his dead brother’s temple imprinted itself on my memory). But through Heaney’s time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford while I was a student there. I didn’t study Heaney as part of my course – nothing quite so contemporary in our survey of English Language and Literature. But Heaney was a good friend of my Old English tutor, poet, Corkman and gentle saviour, Bernard O’Donoghue. I think that’s why as Professor of Poetry, Heaney became an honorary fellow of my college, Magdalen. And I remember being invited to an honorary lunch on his appointment. I have no epiphany or personal revelation to report in being so close to literary greatness. It didn’t help me gain access to his oversubscribed lectures and indeed by the time Heaney’s professorship finished in Oxford in 1994, I was already completing my first year as a dance student at LCDS.
So it’s in retrospect and at a distance that I appreciate this proximity and the many aspects of Heaney’s reflections – on Irishness, in Britain, on art’s navigation of personal and cultural identity, on the responsibility of art to impulses that aren’t about contemporary politics – that help me make sense of what I experienced in Oxford, and that I continue to work on as an artist today.
In the quote from “Through-Other Places, Through-Other Times”, I can easily substitute dance for poetry (another poet, Thomas McCarthy, told an event at the Firkin Crane in Cork that dance and poetry emerged together in the rhythmic songs and movements performed or expressed around campfires by our ancestors). I may quibble with Heaney’s valorisation of forward movement: it’s perhaps inevitable in the progression of the poetic line (though rhyme so often takes us back in poems as much as forward, with its echoes of the past), while dance can go forward and back, progress sideways, upwards and downwards. But mostly I’m heartened by the combined aspiration of deeper inwardness and farther beyond ourselves, through others that his prescription for artistry proposes.
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