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

I felt if anything that Heaney’s early work is connotative, and McKendrick is right to say Side has Heaney wrong on
this. Heaney has a good eye, certainly, for what Robert McKee calls (talking of story) knowing a world so as not to
write clichéd plot development, clichéd action, clichéd denouement. Moment by moment, Heaney avoids this cliché,
of detail, and progression of detail, yet sometimes seems to affirm a cliché in the whole feel of the poem. I feel, and I
think Jeff should, that all writers should consider McKee’s advice on cliché in progression of detail, but we should all
think about cliché of the whole.
I see Jeff Side’s article as a revulsion from writing accessibly, so that we can see the whole and nothing but the whole.
And he is wedded to novelty and a certain queerness, and I share some of that. But I actually find all the terms
thrown up, by Heaney and by Side, useful.
In Side’s defence, I restate my point in my first letter that Side, like Heaney’s interviewer working from the
impression Heaney gives, is talking about reaching people with great art, where most everyone else seems to me to
be talking about the brawls in the taverns of poetry readers, readers who read books, not by any means the large
world of audience thought of by Side and the great poets. And of course why no one can write properly anymore, too
obscure, academic, and bad. That is why Side should lead the attack, as I said in my first letter, because he has nonpetty
ambitions. He starts the ball rolling. His writing comes from great disappointment that the mode and bulk of
Heaney’s writing doesn’t make Heaney the prophet. There should be a prophet of what Side hopes for.
I think Side doesn’t read Heaney’s borrowed quotation about Auden and “the normal” very probingly. I don’t think
it’s about being Joe Normal, but about what is normal to the human condition: love, death, stubbing your toe. This is
a fault Side shares with Perloff, who is very good at spotting allegiances to schools of epistemology (and unless we
are simply vulgar philistines, against all philosophy back to Socrates on principle, then we should look to spot that in
life too). Perloff and Side can misread the nuanced emotional specifics, the “I see what you mean” tenderness one
needs in conversation, when reflecting back “this is what I hear you saying”-although I can attest that they are both
people full of kindness and tenderness to people they encounter in life. The need sometimes to stop talking in your
own usual idiom (“change the record” as the saying goes) sometimes leads one into new language, but more often
into cliché, the shared. If it becomes then the thing that breaks you wide open to say it, then okay, disregard McKee.
Otherwise reaching out to cliché is casuistic politics, something I personally like, and I think Bob Dylan does, but I see
Perloff and Side don’t.
McKendrick hints that I am promoting my C.V. Of course I am, we all are in this debate, I think. But I want to own up
to what’s making me feel vulnerable, so that I don’t become knee-jerk. I look at some poems I’ve been writing lately,
for example, that I thought were a clever mix of Heaney and Prynne, and see (after days of reading Heaney) they look
more Heaney. Then an old friend writes to me that he’s just been reading them, and doesn’t get them at all. I wonder
If Heaney ever got that response, and how it would make him feel, say when a poem is in draft?
I myself balanced the response between: 1) disappointed that I hadn’t reached my friend, 2) wanting to do so with a
future poem, 3) feeling misunderstood, and 4) remembering others have liked the poems and volunteered anecdotes
about how the poems reminded them of incidents in their own lives, in a very close and particular way, that made me
feel useful and also that my poem had communicated.
To attempt some lit crit… Heaney’s poems in Death of a Naturalist (which says explicitly that he doesn’t want to be
an empiricist naturalist, or not just that) rather tendentiously compare things in nature to “bombs”, and I don’t think
that this is beginning photographically, and then laying on an extra meaning. It’s at least as much somebody wanting
to write about the bombs in late sixties Irish life, but finding words cohering into a musical pattern about a nature
scene, and also feeling he’s telling a story, and getting someone’s ear. Who hasn’t sat down and found the poem
writing them, not the poem they sat down to write? Critics (not least of my prose style) might say I have no skill in
telling stories, and might be right. But I do have my moments of reaching people with patterns of words. When
Heaney comes to write literally about bombs, in North, it feels like a sort of release of the breath held in the nonempiricism,
the odd metaphors of Death of a Naturalist.
Bursting out of my reading of Heaney’s books is the poem ‘Casualty’ by him, it is absolutely fabulous. Taking away
from the poems around, and the essays, and poems, it’s just fabulous, in the moment, present, line by line drama.
And I keep re-reading it, as I don’t with any other poems I’ve read this week.
I just want to say, therefore, not “what about the poems?” but “what about the single poem, the one page worth the
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