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

Fenton isn’t quoted in the article, Alverez is. The quote is from a book written by Fenton in which he uses the same
Alverez quote. Morrison is quoted in context, as is Haughton. So I see no reason why they would be ‘appalled’.
‘Finally, your argument about the connotative aspects of poetry is, I’m afraid, plodding and doctrinaire. Connotation
in language is just one, often, minor aspect of poetic practice and by no means a defining one’.
Your last sentence shows you don’t really understand the difference between poetry and prose.
‘Some types of ambiguity are useful and enriching in poetry and some not. But even if we were to accept it as a
criterion, your insistence that Heaney as a poet undervalues the connotative aspects of language is refuted by almost
every quotation you’ve given from his prose’.
Like Swords, you demonstrate your ignorance of the differences between language used in prose criticism and poetic
language. Criticism has no requirement to connote, but to be precise. I’m surprised that someone who is fairly
intelligent should not understand this.
‘Your own prose is dreary and monotonous where Heaney’s is explorative and supple’.
To be too supple in prose criticism could lead to a slippery use of language, don’t you think?
‘But the real test would be his poems and, as I’ve said, you’ve deliberately avoided them’.
My aim was to look at his critical prose writing, not his poems.
‘It’s ghastly to excerpt lines as possible targets, and readers who know Heaney’s work could supply hundreds of
better examples, but can anyone imagine a Movement poet writing lines so full of linguistically self-referential tropes
as these typical lines from early Heaney: ‘The tawny guttural water / spells itself… ‘ or ‘the shower / gathering in
your heelmark / was the black O / in Broagh…’? Or a line taken at random from late Heaney: ‘Telluric ash and firespores
boil away’? That Heaney cleaves to the actual and the physical, and relishes description, is not in the least
evidence that his poems deny the linguistically extravagant and inventive, or that they fail to achieve effects beyond
the literal. (Just how connotative and challenging to literal paraphrase his poems are will be clear to anyone who has
tried to translate him into another language. I suspect quite a few “experimental” poets would be far less
problematic.)’
Both lines you quote are mediocre examples of poetry. Both, as you correctly point out, are heavily adjectival and
descriptive. Using words like “tawny”, “guttural” or “telluric” won’t detract from this. Where his poems attempt to
use linguistically interesting words, these words usually only serve to shore up reality, they fail to project beyond
their specified meanings. They function as adornments to description. They are tools to make explicit what would
otherwise remain vague, or connotative.
‘Your view of Heaney’s prose is blinkered and (both historically and geographically) parochial-there’s just no
sense at all of a writer who is having to engage with political turmoil up close and having to think hard about the
responsibility poetry might have both to its own imaginative freedom as well as to the social context-and for most
of Heaney’s writing life that has been one of murderous conflict’.
Again, I did not intend addressing these issues in the article. I was merely looking at the way he uses his prose
criticism as apologia.
Ira Lightman’s Response in Jacket to Jeffrey Side’s Article ‘The Dissembling Poet: Seamus Heaney and the
Avant-Garde’.
March 2009
I’ve been really enjoying reading Heaney’s poems this past week, and Jamie McKendrick’s too. I took both their
Selected Poems out from the Northern Poetry Library. I sincerely mean I enjoyed them, as I flicked through (as I’m
sure everyone does) to land on a handful for my personal anthology of Ira’s faves.
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