Imagine the look on my guidance counselor’s face when I told her that I wanted to transfer into the English department. My grades were good; what was wrong? I told her that I simply wanted to pursue something more–how could I say it?–human. She suggested that I consider a career in the exciting new field of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

After signing a legal contract wherein I promised that I would not, under any circumstance, try to beg my way back into the Engineering department, I found myself sitting auditorium-style with three hundred other students, eagerly attending a lecture by Robert Hass. Within minutes, I felt all three hundred students disappear, and I seemed to be sitting fireside with my favorite poetry-loving uncle. Professor Hass mentioned that Seamus Heaney was returning to Berkeley to discuss his new translation of Beowulf, and to read some poems. He encouraged us all to attend.

After graduation, I followed a high-tech career up to the executive level, reading and writing poetry less and less with each promotion. I started my own company, got married, and moved out to the country to be closer to my parents, who were soon to be grandparents. After the death of our infant son, all my worldly ambition evaporated. In poetry, I found solace, and a means to engage the complexity of human experience on its own terms–not as a reductive conclusion or homily, but an expansive and containing act of art. Still, I felt divided–between the new self that embraced the wildness of a contemporary American voice, and the keen, impressionable undergraduate quoting Keats late into the night.

Seamus Heaney appeared before me, blinking under the spotlight. He read poems and told stories, explained the music of Anglo Saxon, quipped about his traditional education that, “those of us who chose Latin were bound for the seminary; those who studied French were bound for something known as ‘the world.’” Here was a man who navigated many worlds: Protestant and Catholic, farmer and academician, poet and critic. In his poetry, he seemed to take on the best of the British lyric tradition, the contemporary voice, the Irish tradition of music and story, Classics, folklore, the Bible, free verse, form–and tackle subjects as close to the bone as the death of friends and family during the atrocities of twentieth-century Northern Ireland. Yet the man was also a celebrant of simplicity, humanity, and hope.

This is why I chose, after recommitting to my writing by undertaking an MFA, to examine the work of Seamus Heaney closely. In the coming weeks and months, I will continue to post some of my research and revelations to this website, and welcome your thoughts.

Hass alternates between philosophical statements and strong, carefully-chosen images, upping the ante each time. The first pairing is: “The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea” with the image “[t]hat the clown- / faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk / of that black birch is, by his presence, / some tragic falling off from a first world / of undivided light.” Here abstraction and specificity fuse in the first moment of elaborating on the theme of loss. The second example only escalates and develops this theme with “…the other notion that, / because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies.” Again, drawing on the detail of nature (ostensibly details gathered from Lagunitas), Hass develops the theme of loss outward into the ineffable–into the marvelous idea of naming (an archetype, as in Adam from Genesis) turned on its head to be a kind of elegy, or consolation for loss.

Here Hass departs from this powerful image-idea pairing of elegy with blackberry, into another kind of meditation which pairs lovemaking with longing for the free feeling of childhood. This further develops his foray into the ineffable, and into loss (since childhood is so universally felt to be irrevocable)–only to return to the idea-image pairing of elegy and blackberry in the scene focused on sensuality and the body, with “Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying, blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. [italics in original]” Returning not to the idea, but the act of repeating the word which is the name for the unattainable and transitory sweetness of a blackberry gives the poem a kind of breathless rhapsody that feels deeply resonant and earned.

Had Hass cut right to the recitation of the word “blackberry” after pairing it with elegy, the poem would have felt strained. But through the gentle, careful layering on of imagery from childhood like “the little orange-silver fish / called pumpkinseed” and well-crafted phrases, such as his wonder at his lover’s presence “like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river”–lead us through territory that is at the same time both diverse and carefully focused around articulating the in-articulable–the great, existential longing, the “thinking about loss” Hass set up in the beginning almost as boldly as one would declare a thesis in an academic paper.

This is, however, no academic exercise–but a carefully honed meditation on one of the great, if not perhaps the only, great theme in poetry. Rather than simply waxing philosophical, Hass gets inside loss and the ineffable in this work through its deceptively careful structure, pairing phenomenal imagery and rich description with equally compelling intellectual statements, fusing them with such intense heat as to create something altogether alchemical and new–a kind of lifting above any single idea or image into the territory of the ineffable itself.

Today we are resting (I’ve been reading Robert Hass and an essay by Richard Jackson on imitation that will fold nicely into my upcoming talk), adjusting to the new time, and getting ready to head down to Portsmouth tomorrow to visit Val’s oldest school friend. The following day we’ll catch a ferry to the Isle of Wight, then back to Golders Green on Wednesday. I hope to bring back some photos of the lovely South coast, and to get some more reading done on the train there and back.

I have set up a Flickr map (thanks, Nathan) and plan to add pictures as we go.