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

clichéd plot development, clichéd action, clichéd denouement’.
Granted, but so have many novelists. My point being, that Heaney’s story telling and cliché avoidance skills are
readily apparent, but this does not make necessarily for poetry. It can have poetic elements, of course, as do many
novels, but it is not poetry, in any crystallised sense. However, I have to admit, I love cliché; Bob Dylan uses them all
the time, resulting in unintentional metonyms. To me a poem has failed if cliché is too ruthlessly expurgated from it.
‘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’.
I am all for accessibility. Who can be more accessible than Dylan? Wanting a poetry that is not Heaneyeque does not
mean I advocate abstruse poetry, merely because it is not mainstream. My measure has always been Dylan, and the
other richly connotative songwriters such as Leonard Cohen et al.
‘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 am not disappointed that Heaney is not a prophet. I think we have a few to choose from already in poetry: Blake
and Ashbery, just to mention two, and in song-poetry: Dylan and Cohen, again, to mention but two.
‘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”‘.
It is difficult to include this element in polemical academic writing. I hope you have not found my informal emails to
you guilty of this. If so, I apologise.
‘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’.
You need to explain this to me, Ira.
‘I think Side doesn’t read Heaney’s borrowed quotation about Auden and “the normal” very probingly’.
If Heaney does intend to mean by “normal” what you assume he means then I take my comments back. However, I
think he simply means by the word a) an expression of a heterosexual sensibility and b) a poetic sensibility grounded
in commonplace experiences. In the absence of a conformation from him as to what he means either way by
“normal”, it merely comes down to interpretation, which we are both guilty of in this instance.
I can’t really respond to the rest of your piece, as it is a valid expression of your poetic taste. Each to his own, I
suppose.
Ira Lightman’s Second Response
April 2009
Jeff, these are all good points. Your one about liking Dylan (which I knew) and therefore not being against
accessibility, is well taken. Can you provide an example, though, of an accessible poet whom you like? Blake isn’t
throughout, as Dylan is. Cliché as casuistic politics, which is muckier and less groovy than the way I think you see
Dylan doing it, I have discussed in responding to Aidan. I only agree that Heaney has a “use of connotation that is
strictly controlled” insofar as he is, it seems to me, trying to write sing-song luxuriant lyric poems (that for me often
bore as poems). I don’t get what’s wrong with novelist poetry, Pound wouldn’t be against it. I don’t think queer
equals abstruse, and did not think you did. I think you’re wrong that Heaney’s some kind of Daily Mail reading
advocate of their kind of “normality”.
I think your emails are lovely, and that you treat me really respectfully and warmly, ditto with Marjorie; but I
maintain my point that neither of you are fab at tenderness in your polemics (and I still love reading them). I don’t
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