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

Internet Discussions
The following are a few of the online discussions I have taken part in over the years. They cover a range of poetry
topics and related areas. Some of them lasted for more than a few days, and most ended ether abruptly or fizzled
out due to lack of continuing interest from its participants.
In most of the discussions, text that appears within square brackets are explanatory notes made by me to clarify in
certain instances to whom a particular response is being addressed or for other explanatory purposes.
Only one of the discussions has been edited by me to improve clarity, and to remove various digressions from the
topic being discussed, and that is the British and Irish Poets Listserve discussion of October 2016.
A Facebook discussion about my article ‘The Dissembling Poet: Seamus Heaney and the Avant-Garde’
Jeffrey Side
From my new blog entry:
March 2009
[Quoting from the blog entry] ‘I came across an interesting interview with Seamus Heaney (a recent recipient of the
David Cohen prize for literature, being awarded £40,000) by Dennis O’Driscoll (‘Beyond All This Fiddle’) where
Heaney says about the avant-garde:
It’s an old-fashioned term by now. In literature, nobody can cause bother any more. John Ashbery was a
kind of avant-garde poet certainly and now he’s become a mainstream voice. The work of the
“Language Poets” and of the alternative poetries in Britain-associated with people in Cambridge
University like J. H. Prynne-is not the charlatan work some perceive it to be; however, these poets
form a kind of cult that shuns general engagement, regarding it as a vulgarity and a decadence. There’s
a phrase I heard as a criticism of W. H. Auden and I like the sound of it: somebody said that he didn’t
have the rooted normality of the major talent. I’m not sure the criticism applies to Auden, but the gist of
it is generally worth considering. Even in T. S. Eliot, the big, normal world comes flowing around you.
Robert Lowell went head-on at the times-there was no more literary poet around, but at the same
time he was like a great cement mixer: he just shovelled the world in and it delivered. Now that’s what I
yearn for-the cement mixer rather than the chopstick.
Several things about this statement need to be addressed, so I will go through it step-by-step’.
Ira Lightman
Good blog entry, Jeff, and thanks for drawing my attention to it.
I was lucky enough to be visiting Rob MacKenzie, of ‘Off Ardglas’, I know there are two, my Rob has not been writing
for sometime, when I read your blog.
Rob and I had just been talking about poetry, and some of what Heaney is trying to say was echoed. Certainly,
Heaney is hampered by being an absolutely terrible poet himself, a quite execrable translator of Beowulf, and
someone who only has energy in the early work, and then one makes a conscious effort to try to read his later work
to keep up the momentum, as a kind of interest in a celebrity.
Also, for those of us who do not hold the spiritual and religious life as something one has to “be open to” be mocking
and embarrassed about, like Heaney and Hill, in talking publically about; then it’s Auden and not Eliot, finally. It is
the faux-nervous kvetching that destroys Heaney, Hill and Eliot for posterity, although Eliot is more, as Pound had
him, an interesting wreck.
I share his [Heaney’s] feeling of wanting to get through to a larger public, without sacrificing what a whole poem can
77