Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

Miscellany
Responses to Critics-Part I and Part II
Part I consists of negative reactions to my essay ‘The Dissembling Poet: Seamus Heaney and the Avant-Garde’, and
my responses to this. The essay was published in Jacket in 2009, and the editor, John Tranter, shortly afterwards,
decided that to get some sort of critical debate about Heaney started, there should be an invitation to Jacket readers
to submit their reactions (positive and or negative) to the essay. These reactions would then be published alongside
the essay, along with my responses to them. In this section, I have included all the negative reactions to the essay.
Part II consists of my response to Seth Abrahamson’s critique of my Introduction to a feature at The Argotist Online
called ‘The Academisation of Avant-Garde Poetry’.
Responses to Critics Part I
Jamie McKendrick’s Response in Jacket to Jeffrey Side’s Article ‘The Dissembling Poet: Seamus Heaney and
the Avant-Garde’.
March 2009
Contemporary criticism owes a huge debt to figures like Jeffrey Side who fearlessly expose the lies and subterfuges
of the mainstream. It’s worth the effort subjecting an off-the-cuff remark by Heaney in an interview to a severalthousand-word
scholastic investigation (and with proper footnotes too) if it can serve to show just how nefarious
these tendencies really are. How dare Heaney suggest, for example, that J. H. Prynne and his followers have avoided
publishing with commercial presses when the blame can be laid at the mainstream’s door? Even if Prynne himself
has declined to be published in certain commercial anthologies and other poets affiliated with him have expressed
scorn for the larger poetry outlets, that doesn’t let the mainstream off the hook. What’s to stop them subsidizing
experimental work out of their own pockets, amply lined as they are and stuffed with undeserved tenners? [UK tenpound
notes.]
As Side has so unequivocally demonstrated, pretty well everything Heaney writes in his criticism clearly comes from
a defensive attitude towards his posthumous reputation. What could be clearer? Like other figures in the
mainstream he can sense the tide is turning. These days there are queues forming down many high streets for the
work of poets whose reputations Heaney is now subtly trying to undermine.
And it’s good to see that point about Heaney’s aesthetic subservience to the Movement reiterated-an argument on
which figures like Robert Shepherd have lavished much critical care-for surely no-one can now doubt that the
principles of composition learnt at the feet of Eric Hobsbawm [McKendrick means Philip Hobsbaum], when he was a
teenager, have shaped and powered Heaney’s entire “career”. It’s obviously an irrelevance that no one now reads
Hobsbawm and hundreds of thousands of readers know and enjoy Heaney’s poems. In this respect, it’s also wise of
Side to refrain from quoting a single line of Heaney’s poetry because that would unnecessarily complicate his
brilliant insight about Heaney’s un-connotative use of language.
It was also heartening to see Ira Lightman’s invective: a prose style like his must take a certain aesthetic
commitment-his last paragraph, no small feat, almost outdoes Side in its sharpness and vehemency:
Political efficacy (vote for me, buy my book) is all about having carrying a certain gravitas of applying
counter-intuitive theoretical earnest with just a touch of demagoguery, while having a strength in being,
if Blair, at least not son of Blair with no theoretical earnest and a borrowed coat of many colours.
And why should severe difficulties in writing a single coherent sentence be an obstacle to judging the supposed
intricacies of poetry? Finally, I don’t see why Mr John Muckle thinks he has a right to step in with his seemingly
logical and unruffled observations. Can’t he just see how cunning and defensive and dissembling Heaney is? To
doubt Side’s own veracity would be a typical mainstream ploy.
135