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

debatable) but for all practical purposes how does this contend with Heaney’s sophistic attempts to make
inconsequential, as you say, “non-functionalist” language? If you believe there can be such, that is.
Tom Mandel
Well, if you are really asking how one “contends” with someone like Seamus Heaney, I think Charles nailed it: irony. I
hardly think trotting out avant-garde theory, on the other hand, puts much of a steed under your balls for jousting.
But, to each his own.
Ira Lightman
Jeff, you are the right person to lead a response to the O’Driscoll interview with Heaney. Many poets are simply
intimidated by the breadth of vision for a poet implied in the O’Driscoll questions. You have an active interest, a
frustration and a self-frustration under the glare of the intimidation. Many others crack giggly, nervous, sometimes
very funny, jokes.
What I mark, sociologically, about the Blairitely-political Heaney here is that now that Prynne has been marketed by
Bloodaxe, Prynne’s work cannot simply be dismissed. It is notable that a poem by Prynne hovers over Heaney’s
answer, a counter-intimidation, a presence of language style. The Language Writers, name checked with the usual
insouciance, do not really exist as poets of poems here, they are the bogeyman of the bigot.
But something has shifted, in Heaney’s canny ear for the narrow paddock of UK and Irish poetry-reading opinion,
and there is excitement for the reader, terror for Heaney, in the thought that neo-Georgian poetry cannot go on,
cannot be writing new poems now, in earnest, with the same insouciance as heretofore. The thought of political
legitimacy for Prynnites as much as for Heaneyites, and for some in a fringe-like feelers-out-for-the-future way
reading the Language Writers and (unmentioned here) the Modernist contemporaries of the neo-Georgians, ghosts
this moment.
Political efficacy (vote for me, buy my book) is all about having a certain gravitas of applying counter-intuitive
theoretical earnest with just a touch of demagoguery, while having a strength in being, if Blair, at least not son of
Blair with no theoretical earnest and a borrowed coat of many colours. Yes, David Cameron, I’m thinking of you.
Jeffrey Side
Thanks, Ira.
Aidan Semmens
Interesting stuff, Jeff-and interesting discussion here too. If I can add my late penn’orth, it comes not as a coherent
argument but in the form of a few stray observations.
I’d like to consider myself avant-garde, but I rather fear Heaney’s right to describe it as a historical term. Also, as
Chris Hamilton-Emery has suggested in Pages, ‘the paratactical and related techniques (and attitudes) that set “us”
apart from the neo-Georgians have become so widespread in their use they have become “mainstream”‘. (I don’t
myself believe that’s quite true, but I can see Chris’s point). On the other hand, if “avant-garde” and “modernist” (in
all its variations) are old-hat, how the hell can I describe, maybe to the person with only a passing interest if any,
what sort of thing this is that “we” are involved with?
A couple of observations arising directly from the Heaney interview:
As others here have already said, or at least strongly implied, O’Driscoll’s questions are generally a lot more
interesting and vital than Heaney’s answers.
I find it very interesting that the work of his own that Heaney most often refers to is North, which is now 34 years old.
(I’d like to say it’s his best work, but in truth I haven’t read most of what’s come since.) Can we infer that “success”
has softened him up, removed the hardness and grit, reduced him to a self-parody? He wouldn’t be the first or last to
suffer that fate.
79