Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910474
Alex Alonso
Seamus Heaney’s Audio Archive Alex Alonso (bio) In 2009 as part of a weeklong program of events in honor of Seamus Heaney’s seventieth birthday, RTÉ released a fifteen-CD box set entitled Seamus Heaney: Collected Poems. It contained the poet’s readings of all eleven of his major volumes to that point, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to District and Circle (2006). On April 13th the twelve-hour recording was broadcast in its entirety on RTÉ Radio 1, followed by a program televised live from the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and the debut of Charlie McCarthy’s feature-length documentary Seamus Heaney: Out of the Marvellous.1 These tributes represented not only a measure of Heaney’s standing and his work’s extraordinary connection with the public but also the culmination of a long and mutually rewarding relationship with Irish broadcasting. Before the arrival of this CD box set, the complete works of Heaney’s poetry had never been collected in one place. The whole project took more than a year to record; Heaney worked closely with the RTÉ producer and sound engineers as he went poem by poem, collection by collection, reading and recording for hours at a time.2 It says much that, still recovering from a severe stroke in 2006, he committed himself to such an arduous undertaking. The performance indicates how strongly he felt about his poetry’s [End Page 227] coexistence with sound media and the spoken word, reflecting his desire to leave behind what stands as, in effect, an audio archive of his work. Heaney’s evident regard for the spoken as well as the written trace is characteristic of a poet whose verse was tuned so carefully to his own vocal pitch and whose life and career were closely intertwined with radio from the beginning as both listener and broadcaster. Orality was always foundational to his writing, and toward the end of his life the poet seems to have been intent on ensuring that his printed words would not lose touch with their original vocal imprint. In his lectures and interviews, Heaney regularly appraised his poetic influences in auditory terms. Patrick Kavanagh, he writes, “walked into my ear like an old-style farmer walking a field” (SS 192); his admiration for T. S. Eliot stems from “the physicality of his ear” and the way his “intelligence exercise[s] itself in the activity of listening” (FK 37); Heaney celebrates Robert Frost’s verse for “its posture in the mouth and in the ear, its constant drama of tone and tune”; Ted Hughes’s poetry is favored over Philip Larkin’s for possessing “a bigger transmitter” (SS 339); the beginning of the Last Gospel at Mass sounds to him “like the first note of God’s tuning fork.”3 Discussing the composition of his formative early poem “Digging,” Heaney claimed that he was “responding to an entirely phonetic prompt, a kind of sonic chain dictated by the inner ear” (SS 82–83). Clearly he, like Frost, believed that “the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”4 As he explained to Dennis O’
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910459
Heather Clark
“Diving for Crucibles”: Seamus Heaney, Barrie Cooke, and Bog Poems Heather Clark (bio) by the time Seamus Heaney read The Bog People in 1969, with its arresting images of Iron Age corpses recovered from Danish bogs, he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “I was in a new field of force. . . . Opening P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People was like opening a gate.” But he spoke, too, of another crystallizing force: that of the expression-ist artist Barrie Cooke. It was Cooke who inspired Heaney to write “Bone Dreams” in the summer of 1972, “the first of those loose-link, zig-zaggy sequences that would eventually appear in North” (SS 157). In the mid-1970s Heaney collaborated with Cooke on Bog Poems, a limited edition published two weeks before Faber and Faber released North in 1975. The Barrie Cooke archive at Pembroke College, Cambridge, which opened in February 2022, reveals new details about the evolution of Bog Poems and North that suggest the prominent role Cooke played in Heaney’s controversial turn toward the mythic in 1971–74 as he was writing some of his most iconic poems. This new archive shows how Cooke’s and Ted Hughes’s friendship inspired Heaney to reorient his life toward personal and creative freedom in the Republic of Ireland in the early 1970s when he was increasingly troubled by political violence and beginning to feel the weight of his responsibilities as a northern Irish poet. The Cooke archive and the Heaney papers at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) shed particular light on Heaney’s use of female bog bodies in Bog Poems and North, and they point to a connection between Cooke’s interest in sheela-na-gigs and Heaney’s use of the aisling figure in poems like “Come to the Bower,” “Bog Queen,” “Ocean’s Love to Ireland,” and “Act of Union.” Understanding Cooke’s role in Heaney’s life and art allows us to examine more critically what led Heaney to use passive, betrayed, murdered, and raped female bodies [End Page 14] as political metaphors. Drafts of “Bone Dreams,” “Punishment,” “Kinship,” “Tête Coupée” (later titled “Strange Fruit”), and the unpublished “Dark Rosaleen” in the Cooke and NLI archives point to Cooke’s influence—one that has only recently come into focus and that, I argue, contributed to Heaney’s attempt to transform the bog women of Jutland into aisling figures. But some of these drafts also suggest a revisionary process as Heaney retreats from Cooke’s mythic, ahistorical vision and moves closer to a historical, empathic view as he searched for ways to address the violence in Northern Ireland. He realized by 1973 that “abandoning history was a luxury that the times had disallowed” (SS 169). If Cooke’s influence led to what Edna Longley called “imaginative dead ends” in North,1 it also led Heaney to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, or what he called “Song and Suffering” (GT xii). This would become the defining theme of Heaney’s oeuvre, and it took root while he was collaborating with Barrie Cooke on Bog Po
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910469
Nithy Kasa, Kelly Sullivan
Nithy Kasa Nithy Kasa and Kelly Sullivan nithy kasa, a Congolese-Irish writer, is among the ten poets commissioned to write a poem for the Poetry as Commemoration project, an initiative of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at University College Dublin, with support from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport, and Media. She has also received an I bhFad i gCéin international residency for Cave Canem by Poetry Ireland, The Arts Council, and the Department of Foreign Affairs. Her debut collection Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho (Doire Press 2022) was included on the Irish Times’s list of the best poetry books of 2022. It is also shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023. Her work is featured on the University of Galway’s archive and the Special Collections of University College Dublin. ________ Nithy Kasa and Kelly Sullivan corresponded by email between January and August 2023. Their communication has been edited for clarity and length. kelly sullivan: When did you first begin writing poems? nithy kasa: Writing came naturally to me. I was always scribbling something, usually what I thought of as a song. But after I submitted a “poem” to the school magazine, suggestions to write followed. I never dreamed of my poems as a giving me a career—probably because we were warned that poets struggle to earn a living with little chance of making it. And most people who write poetry must also have a job, if at all possible as teachers/lecturers. So I was advised to find a career that would bring me a comfortable life, but to hold on to poetry for the love of it. [End Page 183] sullivan: When did you first encounter Seamus Heaney’s poetry? Your biography on several websites says you moved to Galway from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2005. I wonder if, like many young people in Ireland, you first read his work in the classroom in Galway? kasa: Yes, they taught Heaney, Yeats, Mahon, and Kavanagh among other poets. We read many of Heaney’s early Death of a Naturalist poems, each one explained line by line. “Mid-Term Break” was my favorite. I vividly remember my English teacher, a poet in his own right, breaking down that poem: “The baby cooed is onomatopoeia: when words sound like what they mean.” And he pointed how careful Heaney’s choices of words were in suiting the speaker or characters in his poems. To this day, “Mid-Term Break” is my reference poem for writing. sullivan: Your poetry is often about what we might call day-to-day rituals, sometimes in the form of memories or stories about your own family. You also focus on the natural world in your poems, often on nature as it links to ritual and custom—as in Heaney’s poetry. Do you think his work has touched the subject matter or tone of your poetry? kasa: I never thought of it. Most poetry is generally about day-today rituals—poems drawn from deep-felt experiences. Since I’m a country girl, I suppose my love for nature shows itself in my poetry: the peacefulness it
尼西·卡萨是一位刚果裔爱尔兰作家，是受委托为“诗歌纪念项目”创作一首诗的十位诗人之一。该项目是都柏林大学学院爱尔兰诗歌阅读档案馆的一项倡议，得到了旅游、文化、艺术、爱尔兰语、体育和媒体部门的支持。她还获得了爱尔兰诗歌协会、艺术委员会和外交部颁发的《凯夫·卡内姆》(Cave Canem)国际驻地I - bfad。她的处女作《棕榈酒Tapper and The Boy at Jericho》(Doire Press 2022)被《爱尔兰时报》列为2022年最佳诗集。它还入围了2023年皮戈特诗歌奖。她的作品被收录在戈尔韦大学的档案和都柏林大学学院的特别收藏中。________尼西·卡萨和凯利·沙利文在2023年1月至8月间通过电子邮件通信。为了清晰和篇幅的考虑，他们的交流经过了编辑。kelly sullivan:你什么时候开始写诗的?nithy kasa:写作对我来说很自然。我总是写些东西，通常是我认为是一首歌的东西。但在我向校刊提交了一首“诗”之后，我收到了写诗的建议。我从来没有想过我的诗会给我一份事业——可能是因为我们被警告过，诗人努力谋生，几乎没有成功的机会。大多数写诗的人也必须有一份工作，如果可能的话，是教师/讲师。所以有人建议我找一份能给我带来舒适生活的职业，但要因为热爱而坚持诗歌。苏利文:你第一次看到谢默斯·希尼的诗是什么时候?你在几个网站上的个人简介说，你2005年从刚果民主共和国搬到戈尔韦。我想知道，你是否像爱尔兰的许多年轻人一样，第一次读到他的作品是在戈尔韦的课堂上?卡萨:是的，他们教过希尼、叶芝、马洪和卡瓦纳等诗人。我们读了许多希尼早期的《一个自然主义者之死》诗歌，每首诗都是一行一行地解释的。《期中假期》是我的最爱。我清楚地记得我的英语老师，他本身就是一位诗人，他把那首诗分解成:“婴儿咕咕叫是拟声词:当单词听起来像它们的意思时。”他还指出，希尼在遣词造句上是多么小心翼翼，以适应他诗歌中的说话者或人物。直到今天，《期中休息》还是我写作时的参考诗。沙利文:你的诗歌通常是关于我们所说的日常仪式，有时是关于你自己家庭的回忆或故事。在你的诗中，你也关注自然世界，通常关注自然，因为它与仪式和习俗有关，就像希尼的诗一样。你认为他的作品触及了你诗歌的主题或基调吗?卡萨:我从来没想过。大多数诗歌一般都是关于日常的仪式——从深刻的感受中汲取的诗歌。因为我是一个乡村女孩，我想我对自然的热爱体现在我的诗中:它能带来宁静。我认为我的作品——像《棕榈酒敲酒者》和《杰里科的男孩》——是主题和风格的一种融合。如此多的元素指导着我的工作:刚果民间故事，西马洛·卢顿巴等人的音乐诗歌，阿德里安娜·里奇和西尔维娅·普拉斯的风格，或者玛雅·安杰洛和伊凡·博兰的风格。我读过和听过其他当代诗人的作品，但正如你所指出的，似乎在这些影响的混合中，希尼也存在。带着这样的观察，仔细审视我的作品，我觉得我的诗歌与希尼的诗歌联系在一起是一种赞美。谢谢大家。沙利文:你的歌词风格非常流畅。我很清楚，在创作一首诗时，声音对你来说是非常重要的。你的作品就像希尼的作品一样，关注语言的声音，关注特定单词的差异——但也许这就是所有诗歌的意义所在……
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910457
Vera Kreilkamp
Editor’s Introduction Vera Kreilkamp Many in the english-speaking world remember that late summer day more than a decade ago when news of Seamus Heaney’s death reached us. A front-page article in the New York Times the next morning reported the loss of a poet whose mastery of language accompanied a remarkable sense of responsibility to his growing and sometimes grueling public role. Seamus Heaney: Afterlives focuses on the decade following Heaney’s death on 30 August 2013. The passage of time since has amplified his aesthetic and moral reach—offering new contexts and complexities to his achievement. Time has also made clear his enduring presence on an island he witnessed, sometimes with skepticism, transforming itself from the seemingly timeless rural community of his birthplace in the North to the globalized modern capital of Dublin in 2013. This special issue of Éire-Ireland contributes to the growing body of literary studies of Heaney’s writing but explicitly focuses on the afterlife period. Scholars explore recently available archival sources and forgotten publications and examine new institutional commemorations of his life. They also attend to the auditory and visual echoes of the presence Heaney left in recordings, radio broadcasts, and photographs as part of his legacy. In the issue’s nine interviews with poets publishing their first volumes after his death, the voices of younger Irish writers reflect on Heaney as a precursor—inspiring [End Page 5] them to discover their own subjects and styles as they respond to his accomplishments. As Annemarie Ní Churreáin writes, I’ll stumble across a phrase that excites my imagination or a word I want to sculpt into a title, only to be reminded, yet again, that he was here first. He rendered the thing so artfully that one has to be braced, doubly so, for the uphill push of making a thing shine newly. But that bracing, like many other types of restraint, can be exceptionally useful. For Nithy Kasa, We almost have to explain to ourselves that Heaney does not own these words: the “boglands” and the “prairies.” But this, in turn, only proves his mastery and his imprint on Irish literature. He’s very alive here in print and in conversations . . . already taking his place in our generation as the face of Irish poetry. Stephen Sexton observes that following Heaney as a poet offers a new freedom—and obligation: The poems are there, and now we have to find new ways to write about things. Heaney’s influence is tactfulness, responsibility. If you feel as if you have got something to say, do it as well and as compassionately as you can. In his Nobel Lecture “Crediting Poetry,” delivered in Stockholm in 1995, Heaney spoke about moving from the pre-reflective security of his childhood at Mossbawn, Co Derry, into the wideness of the world: into “the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival—whether in one’s poetry or one’s life—turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.” This iss
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910460
Guy Beiner
Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited Guy Beiner (bio) “Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. . . . but there’s no knowing where a remembered image will lead you.” seamus heaney1 Dissertations, articles, and books have been written about the centrality of memory in Seamus Heaney’s writing. When it comes to historical memory, perhaps no poem in his oeuvre is more iconic than “Requiem for the Croppies,” in which Heaney succeeded—as acknowledged early on by Brendan Kennelly—in “compressing an entire period of history into fourteen lines.”2 A first-person recollection of the defeat of the United Irish rebels, nicknamed “Croppies” for their short hairstyle, the poem also signals the resurgence of their legacy. This fast-paced sonnet has been repeatedly recited at commemorations of the 1798 rebellion, particularly during the bicente-nary in 1998 when it was inscribed on monuments in Castlecomber, Co. Kilkenny; Curraha, Co. Meath; and Dundalk, Co. Louth.3 Yet, rather than providing a definitive memorial text, for Heaney it marked the beginning of a troubled creative engagement with the heritage of the United Irishmen, which was as much about disremembering as about remembering. The poem touches upon a hidden culture of social forgetting in which the poet himself was submerged even as he pursued imaginative attempts to challenge, if not quite countervail, its dominance. The traces of this uneasy engagement with memory can be found in Heaney’s published work, as well as [End Page 51] in drafts found in his archival manuscripts preserved in the National Library of Ireland that he could not bring himself to publish. The Memory of the Dead The Heaney family farm in the townland of Mossbawn and the parish of Bellaghy, Co. Derry, was just five miles away from Toombridge Co. Antrim, a site famously associated with the 1800 execution of the local United Irish folk hero Roddy McCorley (figure 1). Mossbawn was also three miles away from Castledawson, the ancestral seat of James Chichester-Clark, a unionist politician of Protestant Ascendancy lineage who would become prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1971. This sense of in-betweenness was meaningful for Heaney: “I had Roddy McCorley at Toome Bridge and I had the Chichester Clarks at Castledawson and since then I’ve thought of this as a symbolic placing for a Northern Catholic, to be in between the marks of nationalist local sentiment on the one hand, and the marks of colonial and British presence on the other.”4 Situated within this delicate balance, the traditions of Ninety-Eight with which he was familiar from childhood were not explicitly related to contemporary politics. Heaney described the household at Mossbawn as belonging to “the Papish rather than the Republican class” without “any hint of blistering Republican dogma.” Growing up, he would hear less about the Easter Rising of 1916 with its more
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910471
Grace Wilentz, Kelly Sullivan
Grace Wilentz Grace Wilentz and Kelly Sullivan grace wilentz was born in New York City. She moved to Ireland in 2005 to study the Irish language and became an Irish citizen in 2015. Educated in the United States, England, and Ireland, she worked with Seamus Heaney while an undergraduate at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, The Harvard Advocate, the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and on RTÉ radio. Wilentz’s first collection, The Limit of Light (The Gallery Press, 2020) was named one of the best books of the year by the Irish Independent and the Irish Times. She was recently awarded a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. ________ Grace Wilentz and Kelly Sullivan spoke in person over lunch in Greenwich Village, New York, in November 2022 and completed the interview through written correspondence. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: I was going to start the conversation with a question about your real-life interactions with Seamus Heaney. I would love to hear more about that. When did you first work with him? grace wilentz: In the early 2000’s, after Heaney’s Electric Light was published, I was a young poet, interested in tuning in to what was happening in poetry globally. At the time I was making my way through Heaney’s work, but it would be another few years before I graduated from high school, went off to college, and had the opportunity to work with Heaney. In September 2003, I started at Harvard, and the following semester I enrolled in my first creative writing course with the poet Peter Richards. Heaney was a visiting professor at the time although he’d stopped teaching undergraduate workshops by then. I remember [End Page 198] that he lived in Adams House and was known not only for being approachable, but actively friendly. I was disappointed that Heaney wasn’t teaching undergraduates anymore although he would offer a reading or a talk to the wider university community. Though graduate students in the English Department quietly nicknamed him “famous Seamus,” a lot of students didn’t read contemporary poetry or necessarily know who he was. I remember economics and computer science majors with stories of Heaney carrying his tray from the buffet to the long tables in the Adams House dining hall and asking if he could join them for lunch. They had great chats with him, even if they only learned later who he was. The opportunity to work with Heaney came as a total surprise to me. But to tell that story, I need to back up a little and give some context to my own journey with Irish poetry. I have no Irish roots, but in my house growing up there was great respect for Irish writing. I grew up in Greenwich Village where my dad, Eli Wilentz, ran a bookstore during the beat scene called The 8th Street Bookshop—and with his brother Ted also set up two small presses, Corinth Books and Totem Press. They collaborated with L
Grace Wilentz出生在纽约。她于2005年搬到爱尔兰学习爱尔兰语，并于2015年成为爱尔兰公民。她曾在美国、英国和爱尔兰接受教育，在哈佛大学读本科时与谢默斯·希尼共事。她的作品曾发表在《美国诗歌杂志》、《哈佛倡导者》、《爱尔兰时报》、《爱尔兰诗歌评论》、《刺人的苍蝇》和RTÉ电台。韦伦茨的第一部作品集《光的极限》(画廊出版社，2020年)被《爱尔兰独立报》和《爱尔兰时报》评为年度最佳书籍之一。她最近获得了艺术委员会/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon颁发的新一代艺术家奖。________格蕾丝·韦伦茨和凯利·沙利文于2022年11月在纽约格林威治村共进午餐，并通过书面通信完成了采访。为了篇幅和清晰度，这篇采访经过了编辑。凯利·沙利文:我本来想以一个关于你与谢默斯·希尼在现实生活中的互动的问题开始谈话的。我很想多听一些。你第一次和他共事是什么时候?格雷斯·韦伦茨:21世纪初，希尼的《电灯》出版后，我还是一个年轻的诗人，对全球诗歌的发展很感兴趣。当时我正在摸索希尼的作品，但又过了几年，我才从高中毕业，去上大学，有机会和希尼一起工作。2003年9月，我进入哈佛大学，在接下来的一个学期，我参加了诗人彼得·理查兹的第一门创意写作课程。希尼当时是一名客座教授，尽管那时他已经停止教授本科生研讨会了。我记得他住在亚当斯公寓，大家都知道他不仅平易近人，而且非常友好。我对希尼不再教本科生感到失望，尽管他会为更广泛的大学社区提供读书会或演讲。尽管英语系的研究生悄悄地给他起了个绰号“著名的谢默斯”，但很多学生都没有读过当代诗歌，也不一定知道他是谁。我记得经济学和计算机科学专业的学生都有这样的故事:希尼把他的托盘从自助餐端到亚当斯楼餐厅的长桌旁，问他是否能和他们一起吃午饭。他们和他聊得很开心，尽管他们后来才知道他是谁。与Heaney合作的机会对我来说完全是一个惊喜。但为了讲述这个故事，我需要回顾一下我自己的爱尔兰诗歌之旅。我没有爱尔兰血统，但在我成长的家庭里，爱尔兰文学受到了极大的尊重。我在格林威治村长大，父亲伊莱·威伦茨在垮掉的年代经营着一家名为“第八街书店”的书店，他和哥哥泰德还开了两家小出版社，科林斯出版社和图腾出版社。他们与勒罗伊·琼斯(后来改名为阿米里·巴拉卡)合作，共同出版了黛安·迪·普利马、艾伦·金斯伯格、特德·琼斯、安妮·沃尔德曼和杰伊·赖特的第一本书和早期作品。我父亲编辑了一本关于垮掉的时代的重要选集，那家书店真的比我们今天所认为的书店要大得多。它是一个文化中心。他们举办派对，所以他和许多作家以及克兰西兄弟等艺术家都很友好。弗雷德·麦克达拉在书店的读书会和派对上拍摄了布兰登·贝汉、阿奈斯·宁和格蕾丝·佩利的照片。在我父亲看来，叶芝才是真正的诗人。我记得他去爱尔兰旅行时，在叶芝的坟墓上做了一幅拓印画，把它裱起来放在我们的房子里。所以，也许所有这些都让我对爱尔兰文化产生了兴趣。在我上大学前的那个夏天，我看到了一些Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill的英文诗歌。她的作品真的很吸引我，尤其是她对爱尔兰神话和……
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910466
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Kelly Sullivan
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Kelly Sullivan nidhi zak/aria eipe is a poet, pacifist, and fabulist. Her first collection, Auguries of a Minor God, was published with Faber and Faber in 2021. “Incantation for the Hare” published here for the first time, was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s “The Names of the Hare,” his translation of the Middle English poem “Les Noms De Un Levre En Englais.” This incantatory poem formed part of Eipe’s research project Honey and the Hare, carried out during her tenure as the Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin in Spring 2023. She is poetry editor at Skein Press and contributing editor at The Stinging Fly. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke to Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe over Zoom on 9 March 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. kelly sullivan: Do you remember when you first read a Seamus Heaney poem? nidhi zak/aria eipe: I actually read his Nobel Laureate lecture before I read any of his poetry—during a phase in my life when I loved reading those speeches. The New Press published a collection of the laureate talks over twenty-five years. After that, the first Heaney poem I read was “Badgers” from Field Work, which I love because I’m a huge animal fan. sullivan: So you didn’t read Heaney in school? eipe: No. I did most of my schooling in India with a British Romantic-era literature curriculum.We read a lot of Blake, Keats, and Wordsworth and didn’t get exposure to many different kinds of poets. The [End Page 151] curriculum was strangely curated: we read one poem from each poet and period in an anthology of about thirty poems. My experience seemed similar to many people who only studied poetry in school: the formal way of writing poetry didn’t really appeal. What I did love was the mystical poetry I used to read: early Indian and Sufi poets in translation. I was in college before I was introduced to poets like Neruda, Lorca, Rilke, Miłosz, and Szymborska and started to encounter poetry more widely. sullivan: And were you writing yourself? Or did you really begin writing poetry after you encountered another world different from the British romantic poems you read in school? eipe: I wasn’t writing poetry myself. I used to experiment with all kinds of genres, but poetry was the one that I didn’t ever think I could write; every time I did write a poem, it fell short of what I envisioned in my head. I wrote a few poems in high school but didn’t ever consider myself a poet. The turning point for me was when my mother died, quite suddenly, five years ago. Soon after I lost the ability to write anything, which was a very strange experience for me because I’ve always had been able to express myself through language. After she died, I found that my link to English—actually my mother tongue—disappeared. And so I had to feel my way into writing and into language again; that’s when poetry actually happened for me. sullivan: So quite
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe和Kelly Sullivan Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe是一位诗人，和平主义者和寓言家。她的第一部小说集《小神的预兆》于2021年由费伯出版社出版。《野兔的咒语》首次在这里出版，灵感来自谢默斯·希尼(Seamus Heaney)的《野兔的名字》(the Names of the Hare)，他翻译了中世纪英语诗歌《Les Noms De Un Levre En Englais》。这首咒语诗是Eipe研究项目Honey and the Hare的一部分，该项目于2023年春季在都柏林三一学院三一长室中心艺术与人文研究所担任鲁尼作家研究员期间进行。她是Skein出版社的诗歌编辑，也是The sting Fly的特约编辑。________ Kelly Sullivan于2023年3月9日通过Zoom与Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe进行了交谈。为了篇幅和清晰度，这篇采访经过了编辑。凯利·沙利文:你还记得你第一次读谢默斯·希尼的诗是什么时候吗?nidhi zak/aria eipe:实际上，在我读他的任何一首诗之前，我都先读了他的诺贝尔奖得主演讲——在我生命中的一个阶段，我喜欢读那些演讲。新出版社出版了一本关于25年来获奖者演讲的文集。在那之后，我读的第一首希尼的诗是《野外工作》中的《獾》，我喜欢这首诗，因为我是一个超级动物迷。沙利文:所以你在学校没读过希尼?eipe:没有。我在印度上的大部分学校都是英国浪漫主义时期的文学课程。我们读了很多布莱克、济慈和华兹华斯的作品，却没有接触到很多不同类型的诗人。课程安排得很奇怪:我们从大约30首诗的选集里，读每个诗人和每个时期的一首诗。我的经历似乎与许多只在学校学习诗歌的人相似:写诗的正式方式并不真正吸引人。我真正喜欢的是我曾经读过的神秘主义诗歌:早期印度和苏菲派诗人的翻译。在我上大学之前，我被介绍给聂鲁达、洛尔卡、里尔克、Miłosz和辛波斯卡等诗人，并开始更广泛地接触诗歌。沙利文:那你是自己写的吗?或者你真的是在遇到另一个不同于你在学校读到的英国浪漫主义诗歌的世界之后开始写诗的?埃普:我自己并没有写诗。我曾经尝试过各种体裁，但诗歌是我从未想过我能写的;每次我写诗的时候，它都没有达到我脑海中预想的效果。我在高中时写过几首诗，但从未认为自己是个诗人。对我来说，转折点是五年前我母亲突然去世的时候。不久之后，我失去了写作的能力，这对我来说是一种非常奇怪的经历，因为我一直能够通过语言表达自己。她去世后，我发现我和英语——实际上是我的母语——的联系消失了。所以我必须重新摸索写作和语言的方式;那是诗歌真正发生在我身上的时候。沙利文:最近吗?那段时间你做过翻译工作吗?我知道你用苏菲派诗人和其他语言来传达小神的预兆。这是你找回母语的一部分，还是写作过程的一部分?eipe:是的。我一直对翻译很感兴趣，喜欢阅读我能理解的外来语言。我小时候在修道院待过一段时间，可以去那里的图书馆。人们会从世界各地来参观，并留下他们国家的书籍。通常这些书里的语言我不懂，但书页上字母的形状让我很喜欢。所以在我早期的翻译尝试中，我会为这些词创造意义。后来，我开始学习法语和西班牙语，以及不同的印度语言，比如梵语。我开始……
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910467
Gail McConnell, Kelly Sullivan
Gail McConnell Gail McConnell and Kelly Sullivan gail mcconnell is a Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast. She is interested in living with the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness, and the politics of language and form. Her debut poetry book The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, the poetry pamphlets Fothermather and Fourteen, made two arts features based on her poetry, and presented a program on Seamus Heaney for BBC Radio 4. ________ Kelly Sullivan interviewed Gail McConnell by Zoom on 16 February 2023. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. kelly sullivan: I’ve been starting with a general question. You grew up in Belfast. Do you remember when you first encountered Heaney’s poetry? gail mcconnell: I probably first encountered his poetry in secondary school at about fourteen. And I’d say the poem we read first was “Mid-Term Break,” a classic on the syllabus for people of that age. We also read poems like “Digging,” “Personal Helicon,” or “Bogland”—those early, mid-and late-sixties poems. Our image of Heaney was of somebody who came from where we came from: Northern Ireland rather than the south. And we heard the classic stuff about rural life, probably read Heaney alongside a poet like Robert Frost, and thought about the life of a farmer. I think we read more Heaney poetry than I can specifically remember because I often describe to my students a feeling of “Heaney fatigue” that people have when they’ve come through Irish schools. [End Page 162] Many young people who have read Heaney until they leave school encounter him at university and think “a Heaney poem again!” And the version of the poet they’ve been given is uncomplicated—not particularly political or not political in a complicated way: he was Catholic, and nationalist, and he represented that community. And he was one of the first people from his background to achieve global standing. But politics and controversies weren’t central—rather the Heaney of “Digging” and the agricultural and imaginative labor he wrote about. sullivan: I’m really struck by what you said about Heaney fatigue. Do you encounter that with your students who come into the program now? And do you teach Heaney? Do you put Heaney poems on your syllabi? Or are you saying, we’re not going to talk about this figure anymore, even though you’re at the Heaney Centre? mcconnell: No, we do teach Heaney. You can’t not. But Irish and American criticism has responded quite differently to Heaney’s legacy. And some of the critiques over the decades have been harsher in Belfast and in the North than they have been in the States. So with a book like North that we teach for the M.A. in poetry, you’ve got Ciaran Carson calling Seamus Heaney a “laureate of violence” and, in the same issue of the Hone
盖尔·麦康奈尔是贝尔法斯特女王大学的英语讲师。她对与死者、暴力、生物性、酷儿以及语言和形式的政治生活感兴趣。她的处女作诗集《太阳是开放的》(写于边缘，2021年)讲述了她父亲被爱尔兰共和军谋杀的故事，获得了约翰·波拉德基金会国际诗歌奖和克里斯托弗·伊沃特-比格斯纪念奖。她出版了《北爱尔兰诗歌与神学》、诗歌小册子《父母》和《十四》，根据她的诗歌制作了两个艺术特辑，并在BBC广播4台主持了谢默斯·希尼的节目。________ Kelly Sullivan于2023年2月16日通过Zoom采访了Gail McConnell。为了清晰和篇幅的考虑，这篇采访经过了编辑。kelly sullivan:我从一个一般性的问题开始。你在贝尔法斯特长大。你还记得你第一次看到希尼的诗是什么时候吗?盖尔·麦康奈尔:我第一次接触他的诗可能是在大约14岁的中学时期。我想说，我们首先读的诗是《期中休息》，这是那个年龄段学生的教学大纲上的一首经典。我们也会读《挖掘》、《个人螺旋》或《Bogland》之类的诗——那些六十年代早期、中期和后期的诗。我们对希尼的印象是一个来自我们家乡的人:北爱尔兰而不是南方。我们听到了关于乡村生活的经典故事，可能还读过希尼和罗伯特·弗罗斯特这样的诗人的作品，思考过农民的生活。我想我们读的希尼诗歌比我记得的还多，因为我经常向我的学生描述一种“希尼疲劳”的感觉，这种感觉是人们从爱尔兰学校毕业后产生的。许多毕业前一直读希尼作品的年轻人在大学里遇到他时，会想“又是一首希尼的诗!”他们对这位诗人的描述并不复杂——不是特别政治化，也不是以一种复杂的方式政治化:他是天主教徒，是民族主义者，他代表了那个群体。他是第一批从他的背景中获得全球地位的人之一。但政治和争议并不是核心，而是希尼的《挖掘》和他所写的农业和富有想象力的劳动。沙利文:你说的希尼疲劳症让我很震惊。你现在在你的学生中遇到过这种情况吗?你教希尼吗?你们的教学大纲里有希尼的诗吗?或者你是说，我们不会再讨论这个数字了，即使你在希尼中心?麦康奈尔:不，我们确实教希尼。你不能不这么做。但是，爱尔兰和美国的批评对希尼遗产的反应却截然不同。几十年来，贝尔法斯特和北爱尔兰的一些批评比美国更为严厉。我们在诗歌文学硕士课程中教授《北方》这样的书，你会看到Ciaran Carson称Seamus Heaney为“暴力的获奖者”在同一期《诚实的北爱尔兰人》中，Edna Longley也批评了《北方》是如何使历史神秘化的;而在大洋彼岸，海伦·文德勒却对同一本书赞不绝口。由于历史和地理上与这场冲突及其遗留问题的接近，希尼在60年代用英语授课并教授Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon和Medbh mcgukian的地方，历来受到更多批评。因为我在女王大学获得了爱尔兰文学的硕士学位，作为一名学生，我通过批判的方式认识了希尼——这可能也影响了我教他的方式。我继承并延续了女权主义的辩论;显然，关于Heaney作品中的性别政治总是会有争议，尽管我想这些年来我已经改变了一些想法。在女王学院的诗歌硕士课程中我们把《北方》作为一本有争议的书来教。我们看看其中一些批评的回应，并思考它们为什么会出现……
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910465
Seán Hewitt, Kelly Sullivan
Seán Hewitt Seán Hewitt and Kelly Sullivan tongues of fire, Seán Hewitt’s debut collection published by Jonathan Cape, won the Laurel Prize for ecopoetry in 2021. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Penguin USA) came out in 2022 and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature that year. His second poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, will be published in 2024. He also published an academic monograph J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021). Hewitt grew up in Warrington, England, and is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin. In 2023 he was elected to the Royal Society of Literature. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke to Seán Hewitt via Zoom on 30 January 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. KELLY SULLIVAN: Do you do you remember when you first read Heaney, and do you remember feeling any kind of connection to the poems—or was it just something you had to do for school? HEWITT: We first read Heaney as part of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). I think the poems were all from Death of a Naturalist—the big ones. The title poem, “Mid-Term Break” and “Digging” are the three I remember most clearly. What struck me about “Death of a Naturalist” was the earthiness of the language. Looking back, it seems as if it had an erotic—very sensuous— language. That struck me as different from the other poets we looked at who are quite plain spoken; Simon Armitage, Carol Anne Duffy, and Philip Larkin came from a different place with more obvious humor or plain speech. I liked the music of Heaney, but those other two poems, “Mid-Term Break” and “Digging,” are so present that they feel clichéd for me now. I know them so well that I kind of run away from them. But “Death of a Naturalist” still holds its [End Page 142] resonance—more elusive without that wrapped-up ending that the other two have. SULLIVAN: Did you, growing up in Britain, think of Heaney as an Irish poet or was he just another lyric poet when you first encountered him? HEWITT: I definitely thought of Heaney as an Irish poet. But I question that now because I wonder, was he presented to us in our anthology as a British poet? I remember there were four poets that we read, and he was the only one who wasn’t British. But he may have been presented to us as that in a four-nation sort of anthology: Gillian Clarke, a Welsh poet; Carol Anne Duffy, Scottish; Simon Armitage, English; and Seamus Heaney, northern Irish. So although I thought of him as Irish, I think he was presented as part of UK poetry. But, yes, I was aware of him as a northern Irish poet. SULLIVAN: Do you remember when you started to read Heaney’s work on your own or sought him out as a poet? HEWITT: It would probably have been in my second year of university that I first picked up his books. I used to shop in charity shops, never in bookstores, which meant that for a long time my poetry reading was in the classics like Tennyson or Wordsworth. Where I
Seán休伊特Seán休伊特和凯利·沙利文的《火之舌》，Seán休伊特由乔纳森·凯普出版的处女作，获得了2021年的桂冠生态诗歌奖。他的回忆录《黑暗无边》(美国企鹅出版社)于2022年出版，并获得了当年的爱尔兰鲁尼文学奖。他的第二本诗集《狂喜之路》将于2024年出版。他还出版了学术专著J. M. Synge:自然，政治，现代主义(牛津大学出版社，2021年)。休伊特在英国沃灵顿长大，是都柏林三一学院文学实践专业的助理教授。2023年，他当选为英国皇家文学学会会员。________凯利·沙利文于2023年1月30日通过Zoom采访了Seán休伊特。为了篇幅和清晰度，这篇采访经过了编辑。凯利·沙利文:你还记得你第一次读希尼的时候吗?你还记得你和这些诗有什么联系吗?或者这只是你在学校必须做的事情?休伊特:我们第一次读Heaney是作为普通中等教育证书(GCSE)的一部分。我想这些诗都是出自《自然主义者之死》——那些大的。题目诗“期中休息”和“挖掘”是我记得最清楚的三首诗。《博物学家之死》打动我的是语言的朴实。回顾过去，它似乎有一种情色的——非常感性的——语言。这让我感到震惊，因为这与我们看到的其他诗人不同，他们说话很坦率;西蒙·阿米蒂奇、卡罗尔·安妮·达菲和菲利普·拉金来自不同的地方，他们更有明显的幽默或朴实的语言。我喜欢希尼的音乐，但另外两首诗，《期中休息》和《挖掘》，太现实了，我现在觉得它们太老套了。我太了解他们了，以至于我都想逃离他们。但是《一个博物学家之死》仍然保持着它的共鸣——没有其他两部小说那样的包围式结局，它更加难以捉摸。沙利文:作为在英国长大的你，当你第一次见到希尼的时候，你认为他是一位爱尔兰诗人，还是只是另一位抒情诗人?休伊特:我肯定认为希尼是一位爱尔兰诗人。但我现在对此提出质疑，因为我想知道，他是作为一位英国诗人出现在我们的选集里的吗?我记得我们读过四位诗人的诗，他是唯一一个不是英国人的。但他可能以四国选集的形式出现在我们面前:威尔士诗人吉莉安·克拉克;卡罗尔·安妮·达菲，苏格兰人;西蒙·阿米蒂奇，英语;谢默斯·希尼，北爱尔兰人。所以，虽然我认为他是爱尔兰人，但我认为他是作为英国诗歌的一部分呈现的。但是，是的，我知道他是一位北爱尔兰诗人。沙利文:你还记得你是什么时候开始独自阅读希尼的作品，还是把他当作诗人来寻找他的吗?休伊特:大概是在我大学二年级的时候，我第一次读到他的书。我过去常在慈善商店购物，从不去书店，这意味着很长一段时间里，我读的诗歌都是丁尼生或华兹华斯这样的经典作品。在我长大的地方，二手商店里没有那么多当代诗歌。在我身后的书架上有一本《新诗选集》的原版，还是费伯灰色的《诗选集》?《精选》提供了希尼最伟大的作品，但我印象最深的是在一家慈善商店找到的《唧唧灯》。我喜欢的是，在打开它之前，我对其中的一首诗一无所知;他们对我来说都是新的。我不懂一些，因为有一些经典的参考文献，我无法理解。那时我才意识到希尼还有很多事情要去发现。《寻找唧唧灯》就像是，哇，好吧。在那个年纪，我会买一本书，花很长时间反复阅读其中的诗歌，我想我现在很少这样做了……
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/eir.2023.a910458
Rand Brandes
The Seamus Heaney Archives Rand Brandes (bio) An Origin Story The afterlife of the major Seamus Heaney archives, those used by several scholars in this issue and around the world, did not begin when Emory University’s Rose Library and the National Library of Ireland (NLI) received their boxes of correspondence and manuscripts. These archives emerged without teams of white-gloved specialists going through drawers and closets or sifting through random stacks of disorganized papers. When both libraries received the post-appraisal materials from Heaney’s attic study, the archival process had been ongoing for several years. The poet was able to keep his own writing house in order, but finally things had reached a tipping point and he agreed to let me help with some of the heavy lifting in 1993. I had already been working in the top floor of his Dublin home on Sandymount Strand for a few years. This attic, accessed by a narrow winding staircase (think Yeats’s tower), was his writing space as well as his poetry library with a small window at one end. In the late 1980s Heaney had opened this space to me for occasional lodging and, more importantly, for the research I was doing with Michael Durkan on Seamus Heaney: A Reference Guide.1 After a few visits, I became increasingly more worried than Heaney about the mounds of paper and stacks of notebooks covering every surface, including the floor (figure 1). Following several intense family discussions, which included Heaney’s expressing a sense of being “over-exposed” in public and literary arenas, we agreed on a plan for me to assist him in [End Page 7] “rationalizing” (his word) the attic and his papers. In September 1993, after I received a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Dublin with him, we began the process of preparing the papers in his home for eventual relocation. We first dismantled the attic studio he had been using since 1976. I physically assisted in the demolition and renovation process, bringing in file cabinets and other storage units, and we began the process of organizing, cataloging, and preserving his manuscripts from the 1950s forward. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Seamus Heaney’s Desk, 1993. Photograph by Rand Brandes. When Heaney turned fifty in 1989, he had been publishing for thirty years and had been teaching at Harvard for eleven. By 1993 he had composed fifteen volumes of poetry (including selected poems), three collections of prose works, and one verse play, and he had edited several anthologies, one with Ted Hughes. In addition to the drafts that went into the published works, there were mounds of unpublished manuscripts; correspondence, both personal and administrative; and stacks of unsolicited manuscripts in the corners of his studio. His publications claimed their territories, accompanied by hundreds of reviews clipped out of newspapers and magazines by [End Page 8] professional clipping services—sent “compliments of the publisher” in large canvas maili
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