On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost. – Seamus Heaney
From 1989 to 1994, Seamus Heaney was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The “essays” in Redress of Poetry are not really essays, but lectures he gave on poetry and writing during his tenure at Oxford. The subject matter is wide-ranging, with Heaney’s typical fascination with the nuts-and-bolts of language. It is (and always was) his “way in,” not only to his own poetry, but to life itself. As he wrote in the opening poem in “Death of a Naturalist,” he watched his father dig with a spade. All of his ancestors dug in the dirt. He picked up a pen instead: “I dig with it.”
As an Irishman, whose ancestors were forced to speak a language not their own, language had a resonance to Heaney, political and social and ancient … one of Heaney’s lifelong obsessions. We owe him so much. It was James Joyce’s obsession, too. One of the most famous scene in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the “tundish” scene at the university, a dawning awareness that the tongue he spoke in had been imposed.
Dad gave me this book for my birthday. I wish I had talked with him more about it, although we did discuss Seamus Heaney a lot.
The Redress of Poetry is one of those books I go back to often for reference purposes. Heaney, in these lectures, discusses his own work, the work of other poets, of the “purpose” of poetry in general (I mean, the title alone: The “Redress” of Poetry: that’s how important it was to Heaney, that was what it could do, if done right). The Redress of Poetry also includes lectures with in-depth of analysis of specific writers, Christopher Marlowe, Hugh MacDiurmid, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop. Heaney approaches things from a language perspective, obviously, but there is also that Irish perspective (the fact that he was lecturing at Oxford was a big deal: and his appointment was hailed even back in Ireland). Heaney’s work is much larger than an anti-colonial or post-modern tract about the horrors of oppression (and many of these lectures, including the one I will excerpt today is about what exactly is the purpose of poetry, a theme that obsessed him) but he was aware of the fact that Ireland has been oppressed/squashed/dominated/overrun, and such cultural experiences affect language and how a people express themselves. Many of the poets emerging from England’s former colonies address such issues, sometimes very beautifully.
But Heaney wonders: Outside of the concept of “redress” (i.e. setting something right, or upright), what is poetry supposed to DO? Propagandists for a certain cause will always wish poetry to uphold their particular viewpoint. This was the ongoing decades-long argument between soulmates W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne. Yeats definitely saw poetry as a tool, not just as an arm of self-expression. He wanted to create a solely Irish space in literature, to try to extricate Irish self-expression from its British antecedents. But Maud Gonne wanted him to be more fiery, more angry, to say what SHE wanted him to say, to really “stick it” to the British. But poetry that has that as its aim is usually short-lived and often (worse sin) extremely bad poetry.
Heaney wanted to discuss the concept of “redress”, using all of these different figures, and he wanted to open the students’ minds to the power of a well-expressed line, regardless of who wrote it. In other words, just because someone comes from an oppressed class or race does not mean that their poetry is good, or superior to the poetry coming from the ruling class. (The opposite is also true: just became someone comes from the ruling class does not mean their stuff is better, even though the perception may be that it is. For example: those who honestly believe, without even knowing that this is what they believe, that the male point of view is the default and every other point of view is somehow deviant, or different, will not be able to perceive the work of Sexton or Bishop or Plath, OUTSIDE of the fact that a woman wrote the verses. This is how voices get marginalized. Much work has been done to right that situation, and that is good. When you have a list of great 20th century whatever – novels, poets, writers – and there isn’t a woman on the list? You need to read more. You have blinders on. Don’t get defensive, just read more, your list is inadequate. But if a list is pre-20th century? Okay, that’s fine, there were more men doing EVERYTHING back then than there were women doing shit, and while there are the female figures who broke through, including giants like George Eliot who blows away her male contemporaries to such a degree she seems to have descended from another planet, the majority of worthwhile voices who “made it” to us will be male. Pre-20th century, you’re off the hook, but you have zero excuse for that bullshit after that.)
There is a lot of good that is done in seeking out under-represented voices, but not at the expense of those already in the canon, whose influence, good and bad, must be contended with. We all come from that wellspring, like it or not. And hell, it’s a rich and fruitful wellspring. That was James Joyce’s whole fight, his entire life’s work: how to wrench himself free from those who had oppressed his nation, how to wrench himself free from the defining concepts of nationality/language/religion/family. As he declared in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “‘This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.'” (That used to be the tagline for my site. Ringing words of independence, and yet also an acknowledgement that he has been “produced” by outside forces, as much as he hates it, as much as he bucks against that domination.)
Of course, part of the reason the canon exists is BECAUSE of the shutting-out of other voices, female, non-white, whatever. But that’s reality. If you’re going to have a collection of poetry from, say, the 16th century, then yeah, there aren’t gonna be a lot of women represented. Please don’t dig into second-rate bad stuff, rightfully forgotten, so that I, with my precious vagina, can feel “represented.” Please. I understand history. I’m good, seriously, I’m good. An approach like that assumes that I cannot relate to the works of, say, John Milton or William Blake, that I need to feel myself in any volume. But I get so much out of the work of Milton and Blake and Shakespeare and Dickens and Twain and Marlowe and on and on. They’re men, but they speak of things that concern all humans and they do in prose that has resonated for centuries. Just because some men can’t “see themselves” in the work of Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot or Elizabeth Bishop, or (worse) never even read them because they’re “books by girls,” who lack the curiosity to try to see the world through female eyes, doesn’t mean I have to be as blinkered or as stupid as they are. It’s their loss if they have never read George Eliot just because she’s a woman. Seriously.
If you are talking to only your group, the ones who agree with you politically or socially, then your work may be beloved by that small group, but it very well might not travel. That’s the challenge.
Chris Rock, who has been burning it UP lately in interviews, talked a bit about this sort of thing in a recent Rolling Stone interview. The whole interview is great, but here’s the section I am thinking of:
Someone like Chuck D will say that there needs to be more historical awareness among hip-hop fans, that it’s not right that the Stones can play arenas and stadiums and Public Enemy can’t.
The Stones can play arenas because the Stones have songs that are not purely based on references that you had to be there for. I love Public Enemy. But they don’t have “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Kanye will be able to play arenas maybe more than Jay Z honestly, because there’s a vulnerability and an emotional thing that happens in his music that doesn’t happen in most rap. I love rap, but rap is like comedy: It rots. Comedy rots. Trading Places is a perfect movie, just unbelievably good. But there are other comedies, not nearly as old as Trading Places, that just have references and things in them that aren’t funny five years later. And rap’s got a lot of that.
Rock comes back to that thought later, in terms of what he wants to do with his own career:
And now, it sounds like your big challenge is trying to make your stand-up more personal.
As you get older, you got to find topics that aren’t reference-dependent. Did you ever watch Bill Cosby Himself? Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert is the best stand-up movie ever, but Cosby Himself – sometimes it’s even better. There’s not one reference in that thing that doesn’t play. People deal with emotions in music all the time, but comedians are always talking about what they see. But we seldom talk about what we feel. That’s the next thing for me. It’s not taking it up a notch, but how do I move forward artistically and not level out? Like we said earlier, what’s my “Can’t Always Get What You Want”? I just want to figure out more universal, deeper things.
“What’s my ‘Can’t Always Get What You Want’?” Goosebumps.
In the excerpt below, Heaney says that poetry, whether it comes from a now-despised ruling class or a rising minority finding their voice – either way – poetry has to be “a working model of inclusive consciousness.” That, to me, is what Chris Rock is talking about.
These are explosive topics. I get it. Heaney gets it too. As an Irishman, he knew firsthand what oppression could do, and his awareness that the tongue he spoke had been imposed (violently) on his people is never far from his view. However: one must KNOW the canon before one can effectively deviate from it. That’s part of what he talks about in the excerpt below.
He ends with an in-depth discussion of 17th century metaphysical poet George Herbert. Herbert, a Welsh-born English poet is the epitome of the canon, his place secure, his influence vast. What I love about Heaney’s approach is he breaks down what he feels in these verses, what he perceives, and then you get the whole poem, so you can see it for yourself. Heaney has a way of making a poem jump off the page. Poetry can be challenging to read, you have to get into the zone with it. It’s a zone I find deeply pleasurable, akin to prayer or meditation, where you have to empty your brain of anxiety, little concerns, whatever, so that the poem can do its work. It’s deeply gratifying, albeit a challenge.
Heaney gave this lecture in October, 1989.
Here’s an excerpt where he talks about the concept of “redress” and what that might mean for poetry.
Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W.B. Yeats’s terms, the will must not usurp the work of the imagination. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a late-twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense – an agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.
Not that it is not possible to have a poetry which consciously seeks to promote cultural and political change and yet can still manage to operate with the fullest artistic integrity. The history of Irish poetry over the last 150 years is in itself sufficient demonstration that a motive for poetry can be grounded to a greater or lesser degree in programmes with a national purpose. Obviously, patriotic or propagandist intent is far from being a guarantee of poetic success, but in emergent cultures the struggle of an individual consciousness towards affirmation and distinctness may be analogous, if not coterminous, with a collective straining towards self-definition; there is a mutual susceptibility between the formation of a new tradition and the self-fashioning of individual talent. Yeats, for example, began with a desire ‘to write short lyrics or poetic drama where every speech would be short and concentrated’, but, typically, he endowed this personal stylistic ambition with national significance by relating it to ‘an Irish preference for a swift current’ and contrasting it with ‘the English mind … meditative, rich, deliberate’, which ‘may remember the Thames valley.’
At such moments of redefinition, however, there are complicating factors at work. What is involved, after all, is the replacement of ideas of literary excellence derived from modes of expression originally taken to be canonical and unquestionable. Writers have to start out as readers, and before they put pen to paper, even the most disaffected of them will have internalized the norms and forms of the tradition from which they wish to secede. Whether they are feminists rebelling against the patriarchy of language or nativists in full cry with the local accents of their vernacular, whether they write Anglo-Irish or Afro-English or Lallans, writers of what have been called ‘nation language’ will have been wrong-footed by the fact that their own literary formation was based upon models of excellence taken from the English language and its literature. They will have been predisposed to accommodate themselves to the consciousness which subjugated them. Naturally, black poets from Trinidad or Lagos and working-class writers from Newcastle or Glasgow will be found arguing that their education in Shakespeare or Keats was little more than an exercise in alienating them from their authentic experience, devalorizing their vernacular and destabilizing their instinctual at-homeness in their own non-textual worlds: but the truth of that argument should not obliterate other truths about language and self-valorization which I shall come to presently.
In any movement towards liberation, it will be necessary to deny the normative authority of the dominant language or literary tradition. At a special moment in the Irish Literary Revival, this was precisely the course adopted by Thomas MacDonagh, Professor of English at the Royal University in Dublin, whose book on Literature in Ireland was published in 1916, the very year he was executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. With more seismic consequences, it was also the course adopted by James Joyce. But MacDonagh knew the intricacies and delicacies of the English lyric inheritance which he was calling into question, to the extent of having written a book on the metrics of Thomas Campion. And Joyce, for all his hauteur about the British Empire and the English novel, was helpless to resist the appeal of, for example, the songs and airs of the Elizabethans. Neither MacDonagh nor Joyce considered it necessary to proscribe within his reader’s memory the riches of the Anglophone culture whose authority each was, in his own way, compelled to challenge. Neither denied his susceptibility to the totally persuasive word in order to prove the purity of his resistance to an imperial hegemony. Which is why both these figures are instructive when we come to consider the scope and function of poetry in the world. They remind us that its integrity is not to be impugned just because at any given moment it happens to be a refraction of some discredited cultural or political system.
Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify. Its projections and inventions should be a match for the complex reality which surrounds it and out of which it is generated. The Divine Comedy is a great example of this kind of tool adequacy, but a haiku may also constitute a satisfactory comeback by the mind to the facts of the after. As long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function. It becomes another truth to which we can have recourse, before which we can know ourselves in a more fully empowered way. In fact, to read poetry of this totally adequate kind is to experience something bracing and memorable, something capable of increasing in value over the whole course of a lifetime.
, by Lawrence Wright. Nothing like starting off a new year with an in-depth examination of a cult I have been obsessed with and trying to infiltrate for over a decade now. It’s a very good book. There are sections when I think he soft-pedals too much, but the potential damage done by such a book cannot be overstated. Guess my infiltration days may be coming to an end.
. Phenomenal. One of the reads of the year. Not to be missed.
, by Chuck Klosterman. Ben and Siobhan both read this and adored it. It is SO entertaining. His essay on The Eagles is a classic. But there is a lot of great and thought-provoking stuff here.
, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A re-read. A favorite. 
, by Mark Helprin. The author of Winter’s Tale, one of my favorite books of all time. This is his latest, and it’s just as huge as Winter’s Tale. Over 900 pages. Another New York story, so detailed in terms of its neighborhoods that you could construct a map of New York from its pages. I love his writing and there is the sweeping romanticism that is familiar to me in his style. Normally I don’t go for New Agey stuff. For him, I make an exception. However, the female heroine of the book is such a perfect example of “male gaze” stuff (and honestly, I don’t have a huge problem with the “male gaze” – as long as it’s not the only gaze out there, then have at it, men, show me what you see, I’m down!). But Helprin is so in love with his heroine, and clearly is so attracted to her, that at one point, when she is by herself, going about her morning routine, he describes her as “perpetually attractive.” Dude. Get a room. 
, by Michael Ventura. A re-read in preparation for 
. Another re-read. I went through it slowly, reading an essay a day, and it took me months. I re-read it as I was doing 
, by Rachel Kushner. Normally I am suspicious of any book that is hyped as much as this one was, that is universally hailed as this one was. The buzz was so deafening I resisted, and finally succumbed, because my curiosity got the better of me. The way people were talking about her writing … I had to experience it for myself. All I can say is: Believe the freakin’ hype. She really is that good. And it’s somewhat sui generis. She blows away all the big-shot-fiction-BOYS writing right now, I’ll tell you that. It’s so good that I am now a fan for life. Reading her writing is reminiscent of discovering the writing of Annie Proulx for the first time, or Katherine Dunn: equally gutsy and muscular and singular writers. I had a very rare feeling reading The Flamethrowers: that I was encountering a new kind of voice. That was the vibe I got from the reviews I had read, and didn’t quite know what to make of it until I read it myself. Yup. There it is. Something new. An exhilarating and confident book. 
, by Anjelica Huston. Marvelous, detailed, so Irish. What a fascinating story she has. She has a second volume out now and I look forward to reading it. 
, by George Orwell. Felt a hankering. I read it every couple of years, and always find it bracing, always find something new to discover. 
, by Kay Redfield Jamison. Doctor-ordered reading material. I had read her memoir years ago, before my own diagnosis, interestingly enough. Touched With Fire has helped me tremendously. It’s also pretty sobering. But, you know, one has to be strong and face the reality. Highly recommended, even if you are not afflicted with the cray. Fascinating portraits of many many artists. 
, by Truman Capote. Re-visiting a lot of perpetual favorites this year.
, by Dan Callahan. Dan is a friend, and also one of the best writers on actors/acting process/acting today. His fascination with Vanessa Redgrave’s work breathes passion into every page. 
, Max Hastings. Could not put it down. It’s so good that I yearn for him to do the same thing for every year of WWI. Please, Mr. Hastings? I fell asleep once while reading it, the pages opened to 
, by Joseph Conrad. Another story about a “double,” this one even more disturbing than the Dostoevsky because you are just … not … sure. The captain of a ship in the Indian Ocean takes a castaway on board, out of a clear and flat sea, and hides the castaway in his cabin. It strikes the captain that this person seems … very much like himself … although he can’t quite put his finger on it. The world starts to destabilize, sanity starts to shatter. It’s such a short little story, but huge in scope. 
, by George R.R. Martin. So far I have only read the first in the series. 
, by Lois Lowry. A re-read in preparation for the film, 
. The collection has been in my library for what feels like forever. It is a collection I dip into repeatedly, for the comfort and humor of his writing, its plain-spoken often very funny humanity, his thoughtfulness, his observations. I re-read it this year as I was going along sharing 
, by Jean-Paul Sartre. A re-read in preparation for 
, by Rebecca West. I was so enthusiastic about this book that my mother is reading it now! I mean, you hesitate to say to someone: “Here is a 1200-page book about Yugoslavia in 1938. Have fun!” But Mum is reading it and adoring it. In its own strange way, it is a total page-turner. One of the great books of the 20th century. 
, by Gillian Flynn. A re-read, in preparation for the film. I tore through it in two days. It’s loopy ridiculous vicious fun.
, by Greil Marcus. Essential reading. I reference this book all the time. I’ve read it maybe 10 times. Musical profiles of Robert Johnson, Harmonica Frank, Randy Newman, The Band, Sly & the Family Stone, and a gigantic sweepingly important essay on Elvis Presley called “Presliad.” 
, by Thomas Pynchon. A re-read in preparation for the film, which is on 
, by Farran Smith Nehme. Farran is a friend and this is her first novel. I tore through it at the speed of light, resenting the time I had to put the book down and go to sleep. It takes place in the ancient times of 1980s New York, when there were revival houses showing old movies all over the city. If you were an obsessive in those days, you did not have the Internet. You had to seek out your tribe, doggedly, persistently, out in the real world. People who love old movies and love silent films are a passionate eclectic bunch. Best of all, though, it is a screwball comedy with a good old-fashioned mystery at the heart of it, with a cast of wacko characters charging in and out of the action, all obsessives to some degree. There were lines that made me laugh out loud. It’s a celebration of film, and a celebration of loving what you love as much as you want to love it, dammit. The romance in the book is prickly and filled with ambiguity, calling up the screwball romances of 1930s film. It works on every level, the plot level, the character level, and the mood that Farran is able to create. The book honestly feels like a screwball, with cars careening down blocks and people leaping out of them like maniacs, wisecracking dames and over-it New York cops, nerdy weirdo professors and an elegant yet fierce old lady, the heart of the mystery our heroine uncovers. It is a deeply honest book and I found it tremendously moving. (My good friend Ted 
, by Evelyn Waugh. How does one write a sort of screwball comedy about England’s preparation for and fighting in WWII? I have no idea, but read Sword of Honor and that’s what you’ll find. I was sorry when this one ended. 
, by Roger Angell. The book has been in my collection forever and includes some of my favorite pieces of Angell’s writing. I re-read it as I was doing 
, by John McGahern, one of my favorite writers. I read Amongst Women only once, and my father and I had many beautiful and intense talks about the book (as well as John McGahern’s other books). I have been unable to pick up Amongst Women again for years. It’s about an Irish family, and the father’s relationship with his three daughters. I come from a family with three daughters. So it’s intense, too close. I decided to give it a try again, resolving to put it down if it was too upsetting. There were moments when I almost put it down, but I stuck it out, being gentle with it, reading it in the morning, instead of at night. If I read it at night, I feared it would impact my sleep. The book is a marvel of emotion and character development. There is an anguish in it. He is as good as it gets. 
, by Michael Lewis. A re-read. I think after Amongst Women I needed to relax. I love the book. 
, by Robert Gordon. So glad I read this one! It made me yearn to go back to Memphis! Written by a Memphis resident, a writer and film-maker, it tells the story of the Memphis he knows, its characters, its music scene (removing Elvis and the other giants from the picture). What else was going on? Who else was a playah? Amazing portraits of individuals, from wrestlers to coffee shop owners to sculptors to Furry Lewis to Alex Chilton. I adore this book.
, by Joseph Conrad. What a book. My God. A re-read. 
, by Patrick O’Brian. Volume 8 in the Aubrey/Maturin series. I had started this series and fell swiftly in love. Read volumes one through seven. Turned my dad onto them. He read the entire series in a two month period (maybe shorter). It was the last thing he could really read. He read like he knew that. So I have been unable to pick up the series again since then. It’s too sad for me. But I decided to give it a shot, and did so in a spirit of wanting to feel close to my dad. I love the books so much, and actually am now glad that I have so many more to look forward to. 
, by August Strindberg. A re-read, in preparation for the Liv Ullmann-directed film. 
, by Laura Hillenbrand. I could not put down Seabiscuit, and had heard from many that Unbroken was of the same caliber. I finally re-read it, wanting to read the book before I saw Angelina Jolie’s film (which I really liked, a couple of quibbles, but in general, really liked it). The story is incredible. It makes me think of Cary Grant’s exclamation in the middle of Bringing Up Baby, “How can so many things happen to one person?” 
, by Seamus Heaney. I have been reading a couple of Seamus Heaney poems every morning for the entirety of the year. It’s become a wonderful meditative practice. Dad gave me Opened Ground, an enormous and beautiful volume. It’s been so wonderful re-reading these poems, one by one by one. I have my favorites, and have often opened the book to find this or that specific poem, but it was great to re-read them all. 
, by Seamus Heaney. Continuing with the Heaney theme, since I enjoyed the ritual so much, I picked up his first volume of poetry and read through it, a couple of poems a day. I’m in the groove with it now. 
, by Seamus Heaney. The second volume of his poetry, published in 1969. 
, by Henry James. Inspired by a recent viewing of The Heiress as well as 
, by Patrick O’Brian. Stephen Maturin takes center stage in this one, his life as an intelligence agent making up the majority of the story. I must mention that in the first chapter, Jack Aubrey sits at an outdoor cafe, and he is wearing a hat with a diamond mechanized thingamajig on it, that whirls and spins when you push a button, making Jack Aubrey into, basically, a Christmas ornament. O’Brian’s description of the hat, of the hilarious reactions of the people at the table, made me put the book down and have a nice healthy FIT of laughter. There’s also one section when Aubrey falls into a well and has to claw himself out of it. He’s a character out of a screwball in Treason’s Harbour. Onto the next book in the series in 2015!
, by Seamus Heaney. Heaney’s third volume of poetry, published in 1972. Bad bleak times for Northern Ireland and you can feel the outer world and its politics and bombs and checkpoints start to infiltrate his verse. 
, by Seamus Heaney. Heaney’s fourth volume of poetry, published in 1975. The title says it all. Powerful stuff. I will continue on through all of his volumes in 2015, I have most of them. I’ve really been enjoying re-discovering his stuff. I have had to stay away from it for a while, because of Dad. Just too connected to him. It feels okay now. It’s okay to connect myself to Dad through literature. It was one of our ways of bonding on this plane of existence. 
, by Seamus Heaney. Dad gave this collection to me. It’s a later collection, published in 2006 (Heaney’s second to last volume of poetry). Beautiful stuff. 
