I am heading into the third semester at Pacific, where in lieu of ongoing commentaries on individual works, I will be writing a longer critical essay. At this point, I am thinking about writing about Seamus Heaney, and in particular how he successfully navigates numerous dialectic elements in contemporary poetry, such as:
| Narration |
Lyricism |
| Free verse |
Meter & rhyme |
| Meaning |
“Precious Nonsense“ |
| Stichic |
Stanzaic |
| Plain Speech |
Elevated diction |
In addition, I will continue to read widely from a variety of sources. Here is what I am thinking about adding to my reading list:
On Poetry
- Fredrick Smock, Poetry And Compassion (thank you, Mr. Carter)
- Dorianne Laux and Kim Adonizzo, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
- Stephen Berg (ed.), Singular Voices: American Poetry Today
Poetry
- Umberto Saba, Songbook: Selected Poems from the Canzoniere of Umberto Saba (trans. Stephen Sartarelli)
- Marvin Bell, The Book Of The Dead Man and Mars Being Red
- Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes
- Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World
- Ron Silliman (ed.), In The American Tree
- Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems
- Eavan Boland, Selected Poems
- Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996
- Seamus Heaney, District and Circle
- Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems: 1978-1994
- David St. John, Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems
- Tony Curtis (ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney
- Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition
Ideas For Poetry Book Structure
- Issa, The Year Of My Life (trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa)
- Basho, Back Roads To Far Towns (trans. Kamaike Susumu and Cid Corman)
- Robert Lowell, Life Studies
- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard)
This is only a cursory sketch for now. Any suggestions?
The aims of the stichic and lyric forms are not mutually exclusive. But when the successful elements of the stichic–such as a sense of plain speech, teleological design, and a surprising or revelatory conclusion–can be reconciled with the successful elements of lyric–such as the dense aural pleasures of rhythm and rhyme, and the compounded significance of the broken line–a rare kind of fusion takes place. Consider Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Mint:”
It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.
But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.
The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.
Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.
Continue Reading “Seamus Heaney’s Tricky Music” »
I turned back to Heaney, like an old trusted friend, to see what I could learn about lyric poetry, and found this excerpt compelling:
… there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do with the ‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation’, from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet’s ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.
-Seamus Heaney, The Nobel Lecture, 1995
It would seem Heaney is advocating, to alter Dickinson’s famous quote, that poets can only “tell all the truth by telling it slant.” Or, as Ella Fitzgerald has been wailing at me through speakers of the coffee shop in which I find myself typing this now, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”
Contemporary sonnets are not easy to write.
Yet some have done it surprisingly well. Of the poems I liked best toward the latter half of this anthology, there seemed to be three general types of poems that employed either dense music to drown out the form; an “absurd” subject matter juxtaposed against the intricate, labyrinthine turns of the form; or a very faint adherence to the form, giving a vague echo or nod to the tradition while also breaking free.
Continue Reading “Tactics for Contemporary Sonnets” »
