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

lifetime’s work”? I like what Heaney has written about Dylan Thomas. He seems haunted like Hamlet by the
apparition of the ghost that seems to be his father, that he may tumble over a cliff in following him. I’ve just recently
been re-reading Thomas, and some of Heaney’s reservations echo my own. But while this week I agree with Heaney
that “the necessary thing” still seems to come through, a Jamesian phrase, I really interpret that to mean some
feeling of a Dylan Thomas poem like ‘The Force that through the Green Fuse’ still seems to thrill me as it did when I
was a boy. Nostalgia makes me want to read some plastic oomph under the words, even when I don’t now like some
of the words he chose.
I think I will feel like this less and less, as time goes by. I think Thomas’ poems hold open some idea of a writing a
poem that lots of people will love which joys in the plasticity of language. But less, as time goes by. This is a sadness
for non-Georgians, akin to the sadness I identify in a neo-Georgian now that Prynne is published by Bloodaxe.
A Dylan Thomas poem that I had overlooked until re-reading him is the poem ‘Prologue’, again absolutely fabulous. I
have the same sense of sighing after every line, and feeling the drama of what next on each line, that I have in reading
Heaney’s ‘Casualty’. And in both poems, a sense of the whole. As Pound said, some innovators spawn imitators, and
their imitators teach us how to read them. I feel that later poets after Thomas make simple some of ‘Prologue’s
gestures, and now I can read ‘Prologue’. Perhaps I feel the same of Heaney’s oeuvre, and ‘Casualty’? Is it patronising
to say what I’ve said about Heaney if I conclude that even only one poem by him is great?
Jeff Side quotes Heaney about Bishop: ‘she never allows the formal delights of her art to mollify the hard realities of
her subjects’. What is tragically moving about this is that, again, it’s typical poet’s hopefulness to think one’s art
appeals, whereas it’s more likely a single poem that does, and one against the overall direction of the art. I don’t
think I want to go back to much of Bishop’s art, to many of Bishop’s poems, though I do want to go back to a few
Bishop poems, intensely. Heaney seems to be talking about a mode-where there are in fact only poems, or a poem,
in the oeuvre. He is speaking out of an aspiration, and a vanity, which touches me, as suffering does, as much as
Side’s remarks touch others, though they show it by responding in annoyance.
By contrast, there are definitely poets for me, like Stevens, Wordsworth, Sandburg, Dickinson, that I want to go on
reading, and re-reading. Such that the act of reading any poem of theirs keeps ramifying, making me love all the other
poems by that poet all the more. That’s my sense of a poet’s mode, and it’s very much inductive and a posteriori. I
don’t think even Wordsworth’s self-declared rules were a rule of “never” as Heaney implies Bishop’s (if they exist)
were. A rule of a mode cannot even be spoken of by a practising poet who won’t break it, if the poet is any good. They
write essays, as Heaney and Side imply, to reach out to the world, to mollify the audience, who get the poetry better
after reading the essays. (They get the poetry, I don’t know that they get the mode, the rules. The sort of inductive
total pleasure of “give us another one, please; we know it’ll be great too”.)
Rules! Many live in a world where they quail at the thought of breaking their own rule of being seen to write like
Prynne, or Heaney, depending on who they are, at all. Call it making things beyond the pale, or unsuitably, laughably,
bad, but it is arbitrary misguided rule making nevertheless.
Jeffrey Side’s First Response
April 2009
Ira, I have taken a few points you raise and put them in quotation marks to distinguish them from my responses.
‘I felt if anything that Heaney’s early work is connotative’.
I never said Heaney’s work was not connotative, but that his critical writings and aesthetic is weighted against a use
of connotation that is not strictly controlled. Language will always be connotative whether one likes it or not; the
question is whether a poet uses language to make it more or less so, intentionally. I think Ashbery tends towards the
former and Heaney the latter. It takes great talent to do both so yes Heaney is talented. I did not intend to suggest he
was not; it’s just that this sort of talent (more usually seen in fiction writing), for me at any rate, is misapplied when
in the service of poetry.
‘Heaney has a good eye, certainly, for what Robert McKee calls (talking of story) knowing a world so as not to write
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