(Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Rosanna Warren) Sponsored by Bath Spa University. Celebrated poet and translator Seamus Heaney is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, essays, and translations, including Opened Ground; District and Circle, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; Human Chain; and Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. Poet, playwright, and essayist Derek Walcott is the author of eight collections of plays, a book of essays, and fourteen poetry collections, including Omeros, Tiepolo's Hound, and most recently, White Egrets. Playwright and novelist Steve May, Director of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, will introduce the two Nobel Prize-winning poets, who will present readings of their work. A discussion will follow, moderated by the poet and critic Rosanna Warren, author of Ghost in a Red Hat.

Published Date: April 24, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This keynote address was recorded at the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston. The recording features a conversation between Nobel Laureates, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, and is moderated by Rosanna Warren.

Judith Baumel:

Welcome. A cold, snowy, sculling night and it's so great to be in this warm place, so welcome to AWP. Welcome to this amazing keynote. I'm Judith Baumel, president of AWP. Yay, AWP. This is the largest conference we've ever had. We have 775 book fair booths, 12,000 people at this conference. This is the best literary party ever invented, so it's great. And we're all in the VIP lounge now.

We want to thank Bath Spa University for hosting the keynote. Their support for AWP over the years, and in particular, for this extraordinary event that was so hard to put together and so rewarding, is terrific. So Bath Spa University. Are you up there, Bath Spa? It'll flash through. A round of applause for their extraordinary support.

They're proving that literature is an international way of joining people and so to these wonderful people. So before we get started, I want to introduce Steve May from Bath Spa University, who will introduce our terrific presenters. Thanks.

Steve May:

Thank you all very much, I'm sure you all came to hear me tonight. But this is the ninth year that Bath Spa University has been involved or sponsored the AWP Conference. This is the commercial. As an institution with the largest and best creative writing programs in the UK, and possibly the world, Bath Spa has supported some great events in the past, but nothing can compare with this one. Who could ask for more? Not one, but two Nobel Laureates. So without more ado, can I, on behalf of Bath Spa University UK, introduce our host for this wonderful keynote conversation? Herself a distinguished scholar, award-winning poet, former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and currently teacher at the University of Chicago, Rosanna Warren.

Rosanna Warren:

Thank you. Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott come here in the glow of the Nobel, and many other prizes and honors, national and international, but you don't need me to tell you that. And you can Google the immense lists of their book titles, so let's leave the curricula vita to the internet and concentrate on poetry. No better way to do that than to be in the presence of these two at once. Masters and devotees of the art. Seamus Heaney as we learn from his poem, Terminus in the Hall Lantern, and in many other poems, was born in a farmhouse moss barn in Northern Ireland into a state of division. No wonder he writes that he had second thoughts as he hoped or dug and scrambled in the dirt. He found both acorns and rusted bolts, nature and technology. His language was divided between the local country vocabulary and standard English, between the Catholic farm world of his father's family and the Protestant shop world across the river, out of this primal state of division, but also of deep rootedness.

Heaney has in the course of 14 books of poems and many other books of essays and translations, made a generous wholeness in the imagination. He has been both an archeologist of ancient words and myths, and a diviner, a seer into the future. And while we find a strong impulse toward reconciliation and blessing in his work, he has written of poetry as a symbolic resolution of opposing truths. He has never turned his eye from the savage or the horrific. He has never sugarcoated sacrifice. In the heft of each word, in the torque of each line, he teaches us to weigh what blessing costs. Derrick Walcott on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia was also born into a state of division as his sailor character, Shabine, proclaims in the poem, the Schooner Flight. I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me. And either I'm nobody or I'm a nation.

In the course of his 14 books of poems and his whole other majestic as playwright, Walcott has played the English of Shakespeare, Marlow, Keets and Hardy, off the Patois of St. Lucia, a condition of plenitude, which has been both an extravagant joy and a source of suffering as when the trees of his island admonish him in the poem Cul de Sac valley. Exhaling trees, refresh memory with their smell [foreign language 00:06:41]. Hissing. Whatever you wish from us will never be. Your words is English is a different tree. Walcott is also a painter of powerful and subtle watercolors.

All his life in words and in paint, he has been trying to give form to the islands he loves and knows to the condition of exile from those islands to the pain of their history, not least of which is the history of slavery. To their essential beauty which he keeps seeing in relation to and indifference from the classical standards of European beauty. He has, let us not forget, rewritten the Odyssey in the poem, epic poem, Omeros. And like Seamus Heaney, he has not shied from chronicling horror, and like Heaney, he has reinvented a language for blessing. I have asked each of our masters to start by reading a poem to give us tuning forks to set a pitch for our thoughts and their conversation will develop from there. And they will conclude by each reading one final poem. Thank you. Ask Derek to read first.

Derek Walcott:

The sun has fired my face to terracotta. It carries the heat from his kiln all through the house, but I cherish its wrinkles as much as those on blue water. Gnats drill little holes around a saw toothed cactus, A furnace has curled the knives of the oleander and a branch of the lag wood blurs with wild characters. A stone house weights on the steps. Its white porch blazes. I tell you, a promise brought to me by the surf. You shall see transparent hell and pass like a candle flame in sunlight, weightless as wood smoke that hazes the sand with no shadow. My palms have been sliced by the twine of the craft I have pulled out for more than 40 years.

My Ionia is a smell of burnt grass, the scorched handle of a cistern in August squeaking to rusty islands. The lines I love have all the knots left in. Through the stunned afternoon when it's too hot to think. And the muse of this inland ocean still awaits for a name. And from the salt dark room, the tight horizon line catches nothing. I wait. Chairs sweat, paper crumples the floor, a lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc. Then in the door lights, not Nike loosening her sandal, but a girl slapping her sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.

Rosanna Warren:

Thank you.

Seamus Heaney:

Oysters.

Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary. My palate hung with starlight. As I tasted the salty pleiades, Orion dipped his foot into the water. Alive and violated, they lay on their beds of ice, bivalves. The split bulb and philandering sigh of ocean, millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered. We had driven to that coast through flowers and limestone. And there we were toasting friendship, laying down a perfect memory in the cool of thatch and crockery. Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow. The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome. I saw damp panniers, disgorge, the frond lipped, brine stung glut of privilege, and was angry that my trust could not repose in the clear light like poetry or freedom leaning in from sea. I ate the day deliberately, that it's tang might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

Rosanna Warren:

Thank you Seamus. So first I wanted to ask you two about acts of initiation. The way each of these poems that you've read is about initiating a poem, but in some larger sense about poetry itself as being an initiation into some mysteries. And Derek, the poem you just read, which is from your book, Midsummer, brings together many of the elements that we recognize from your work, the Caribbean landscape, the speaker, very much in the landscape, the new world, the classical Greece. You shall see transparent Helen pass like a candle flame, and at the end there's an epiphany. So I wondered if you could just tell us a little bit, anything more about this poem and about the way poetry starts here and any other way it starts or what initiation means.

Derek Walcott:

What is the question?

Rosanna Warren:

Well, sorry, but this poem seems to me it's about the poem not starting in a sense. Chairs. I wait. Chairs sweat, paper crumples the floor, a lizard gasps on the wall. And then there's an epiphany and it's in the door light. And it's very important that it's not Nike.

Derek Walcott:

I understand. I think the poem comes out of silence first and that silence has to be made, but yet it can't be made artificially. You don't decide, I'm going to write a poem, I'll keep quiet, I'll write a poem. The silence is made. Everything like that sounds so affected. But the silence is made by the beginning of the poem itself. In other words, there's a prologue to the articulate, which is the silence. Before it becomes articulate, the silence creates the poem. And then you have to be able to detect what's a phony silence. But this is not a real silence. This is the thing pretending to be a silence. So you write another bad poem, but when it does happen with luck, you arrive at a serenity that great poets have described, which is a stillness at the core of everything, everything around you that begins to articulate itself.

And if you work in rhyme, then you are in for a panic because you can begin a poem in rhyme, confidently, et cetera, et cetera. So you get about four or five words, four or five beats. Then you write the word, that's the end of the line. Then you do another line with another rhyme, then you got to do the third line with the first one. And that, as you know is hell. So you're going on pretty well, 4, 5, 6. And then you say, oh, shit, here comes a rhyme. What is it? Et cetera. This is a process. Rosanna knows because she's herself, a very fine poet.

Rosanna Warren:

Well, thank you.

Derek Walcott:

I think what I'm saying is that I think in all the arts you have to recognize that silence that arrives and that we as artists make those silences that may be false or treacherous. But when they're real, then luckily the work of art arrives.

Rosanna Warren:

Thank you. That's so hopeful and beautiful. Thank you. And Seamus, your oysters too seem to be about a quickening into verb.

Seamus Heaney:

Yeah. Well, oysters ends up with using the words poetry and freedom, pretty big abstractions. And on the whole, it's the kind of language I avoided for a long time. I was kind of afraid of it. And in that particular poem, as in the poems we love, I was carried beyond what I expected from myself and ended up using this language, poetry, freedom, verb. I have to say that I usually consider myself a noun, basically, but be transformed into a verb seemed to me to be the call of poetry. And certainly it was a moment when that poem marked from just writing about poetry, writing poems, which were about poetry, sure. But they were trim as Mr. Beckett might've called them. And this was not trim, at least it was a surprise. And that's what we need.

Rosanna Warren:

And you surprised yourself, or the poem surprised you in the process of its unfolding?

Seamus Heaney:

Yeah, the thing about silence is very good and true, but at the same time, I think you have to be able to dwell in clamor as well. And that's the condition that we inhabit. And I think of Young Master Keats, who was a great fellow for company and carousing and all kinds of things. And his initiation came. I mean, I think of him going home from that night with, I've forgotten who the friends were, but he read Chapman's Homer. Chapman's homer was read to him. He came home, he left at two in the morning, came home around five, wrote a sonnet in excitement. And the excitement was born out of communality and belief in the whole enterprise. So that was important too. Yes. Comradeship, sisterhood, all that really important in the art.

Rosanna Warren:

Yes. Something else about this poem, Oysters, Seamus, I wanted to ask you about. It seems to me that there's a fulcrum in it from the fellowship where the characters in the poem are toasting friendship with these oysters. And then you get the Romans and they're hauling the oysters south to the glut of privilege. And then the speaker of the palm is angry that my trust. So suddenly the whole emotional temper of the poem changed, and it seemed a poem that seemed to be quite lighthearted and celebrating a luxurious smack on the palette is quickening into verb in a very complex condition of conscience. Self mortification. It's very complicated.

Seamus Heaney:

Well, it's set in the west of Ireland with the Atlantic ocean light coming up, the light of freedom or poetry. But it was written in the mid seventies when the Northern Ireland troubles were in full swing and anybody from the north had a sense of shadow over their lives. And what happened for people who roam to the west of Ireland for pleasure and delight? For a moment, you are free of the shadow and you are in the light. And that is basically, I suppose, what the poem says, I want to handle all this, but I want to be free of it too. So I think it was a necessary poem at the time.

Rosanna Warren:

Yes. Well, going from the question of initiation, I wanted to come back to this word, master. I named our poets here masters. They are certainly to me masters. But I wanted to ask you both about your masters and one master, I think you would say in different ways perhaps that you'd be willing to think of that way would be Robert Lowell. So maybe starting with you, Derek, could you talk about what Lowell's work has done to you? And perhaps Lowell is a man, a presence, an imagination.

Derek Walcott:

Can I deal with the first part and I'll come to Carl?

Rosanna Warren:

Sure.

Derek Walcott:

When I began, I had an exercise book in which I used to copy poems. Stylistically I'd modeled myself on doing a Hopkins, done his quotas, do the double rhyme, so forth, Gordon, everybody. So I printed a book myself. There were no publishers, and most of the people said, this man tries to write like everybody, Gordon, Pound, Elliot. And of course that was the point, that I was trying to write like everybody but this critic discovered that, right? Anyway, so I kept this up for quite a while and I'm still keeping it up. I've still stolen from Heaney a couple of times.

Seamus Heaney:

Dante.

Derek Walcott:

And then when they got tired of it, they said what an original voice. But the original voice had everybody in it, including particularly Lowell. One of the things I remember about Lowell, which is very inconsequential now in a way, was dropping capitals at the line. That was a very brave thing for me to do because I was in a particular school that had to have a capital letter at the beginning of every line. When I dropped the capital, it was like dropping my drawers.

So you want to start a sentence, a line with no capital, it's going to be in lower case. So lower case, maybe Lowell case, made me do feel very, either liberated or stupid. I wasn't sure. But Carl Lowell, everybody knows this, but in case you don't, he was called Carl as a shortened, a Christian nickname for Caligula.

It's not too much of a compliment because he had manic rages that he couldn't control too. I never saw Carl crazy. I sometimes felt he was on the edge of it a few times, but I never saw him conduct himself in any way else. But as a very beautiful, gentle, genuinely angelic man when I knew him, the influence of everybody too. He was an example of somebody who absorbed influencers as well. So that for me to be influenced by him was a natural thing. Luckily, I came from a poor island in a sense in which there weren't too many pretensions about being a poet. That the best you could do was to write as well as you could, et cetera.

Also, it was a new experience to be a writer in the Caribbean, and it was extremely exciting. But what was exciting about it was this freedom to imitate, the freedom to plot your own career, not career. Career was an obscene word that I hardly used, even now. But to decide that you were going to charge your apprenticeship thoroughly, learn to sound like Hopkins, learn to sound like everybody and forget your own voice. Pastor Nak said it himself. This is not going to make me, I'm not saying I'm a great poet, I'm saying, he said, great poets have no time to be original.

Seamus Heaney:

Thank God.

Rosanna Warren:

Yes. Seamus, how about Robert Mo for you?

Seamus Heaney:

Well, Lowell, I read is an undergraduate in a book called The Penguin Book of American verse. And the Quaker graveyard at Nantucket was there, of course. And I regarded it as a canonical poem of the English language. And it was within me and beyond me at the same time. And I kept reading him and I rejoiced in the readings, but I think I didn't really feel any influence by Lowell until he wrote a notebook and history and stuff like that for Lizzie and Harriet. So at that point, I felt the need to break down something. And there was a kind of rage in the form of those blank sonnets saunas without rhyme that kind of punched you in the face almost.

And there is definitely an influence of Lowell in book called Fieldwork, which was written in the seventies. I actually met Lowell for the first time in 1972 in London. And then he came to Ireland. He lived in Ireland with his wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood. And they used to come into Dublin every now and again and carouse a little bit and have a meal and so on. So we had a sense of being close to greatness in that way. But one of the things I found about meeting great ones in the course of my life is that you don't need to talk about your own work or their work to them. You feel verified if they are taking you seriously at some level or if there's some flow between the two of you. And Lowell was so merry ironical and slightly dangerous that if you were in his company and getting on with him, you felt there.

That's me and Kyle. We are buddies, but I don't think he affected my writing so much. He certainly affected my sense of being a poet, whatever that means. Being accepted just by the comitatus or the familia. And what else about him? My wife and myself with three little children were living in a small cottage in Contiwaco. And Lowell at this time was with Lady Caroline and rather a grand house way down in Kent Mill gate. There was a west wing and an east wing and so on. Anyway, Lowell came into the house and the little ones were running about or vomiting about whatever they were doing. And he always spoke with his hand too. You see a lot of your children.

Rosanna Warren:

See a lot of your children.

Seamus Heaney:

Which we did. But he was beloved. He conducted himself like a great one. Actually, the poets who were my masters were maybe petite metra, but Patrick Kavanaugh, the Irish poet, was very important to me to get started. Ted Hughes was very important. Hopkins was very important. The first poems I wrote were complete Hopkins pastiche, starling thatch watches and sudden Swallow, straight breaks to sudden rib roof rafter, so on. I could go on, but no need. Yeah.

Rosanna Warren:

Well, passing to another. Oh, sorry. Yes, please.

Derek Walcott:

Let me just add something. He's not here now, so I'll talk about him. I think that the great achievement for us reading in my time was how Haney avoided completely the hypnotic influence and almost unshakeable influence of Yates. So you couldn't expect any Irishman writing poetry, not to sound like Yates in a devotional way through Shaw, but also in a compulsive way. And Heaney didn't do that. And I think what happened that was interesting and amazing too, was the originality of the pursuit that kept going on his own naughty style that had nothing to do with the rhetoric, if you want, of Yates and may have owed a lot rather to Patrick Kavanaugh perhaps. But what happened was I think that the poetry got closer to the language after the whole warp of EHC and influence that everybody had and that Lakin had even to his last, he had it. Heaney didn't have that, and whatever he seemed to be doing was very exciting and private. That's what I'm saying.

Rosanna Warren:

You want to speak to that.

Seamus Heaney:

I think it's only decorous that I should wait for a moment before praising Derek.

Rosanna Warren:

He's going to wait for a moment before praising you. Well, what about while you're waiting to praise Derek, perhaps we could talk about the English language as a medium. Seamus, you've written eloquently in prose and verse about the hybrid nature of the English language and about Gaelic, about McDermid Gaelic. And I just wanted to throw a few words at you that come out of your poem, Fosterling. And I had to go look these words up, and they're not in easy dictionaries. So the words that I love, just for example, are glar, glit and dailigone. And I would just love to hear you do a riff on glar, glit and dailigone and what they do for you.

Seamus Heaney:

Yeah. Well, glar is an Irish word and it means thick, sticky mud. Glit is related to glitter. It's the kind of thing that per Tom talks about in the heath scene of Lear where he drinks the standing water. It's like slime on water, and I suppose there's a little glitter there somewhere else. So dailigone is a Scots word came over to Northern Ireland with the Scottish planters in 17th century. So it's daylight going. It means the twilight. So indeed, I put them in those words and there was no note. It's a nice question whether to put notes at the end or not. If you put notes at the end, you're canonizing yourself to some extent. And on the other hand, if you don't put notes, you are puzzling the reader. And that's perfectly all right.

Rosanna Warren:

Perfectly all right. There are dictionaries.

Seamus Heaney:

Well, some those mightn't come up in dictionaries. That's the other problem.

Rosanna Warren:

But perhaps this goes back to Hopkins or anything else about the larger sense of the textures of English that you've been trying to bring into English, your English.

Seamus Heaney:

Well, I suppose that Anglo-Saxon poetry did mean something to me. I heard it in my own way perhaps, but the melancholy and the actual melody of it, the emotional weather of Anglo Saxon when I was a student, meant a lot to me. And Hopkins was a straight link through to that. And well then there was Joyce language question in Ireland until maybe 30, 40 years ago. It was bound up with the Irish historical experience of breaking away from Britain, the establishment of the Irish free state. And the free state tries to establish the Irish language as the spoken idiom of the country, rather the way Israel was able to make Hebrew their language. It didn't work, but the ideological pressure was strong right through to very recently so that if you grew up in Ireland, and especially in my case in Northern Ireland, where being a nationalist involved you with fidelity to things Irish rather than things British, the language question was preeminent.

And there was always a pressure, not unconscious, just half conscious. There was a pressure saying English is not really your language. You lost your language. Oh, 19th century. And there was a whole cultural nexus hanging around that position. But Mr. Joyce, when you came up and read him and came to your senses, had dealt with all that. I mean, Joyce just reminded you that Irish experience and English language, there was no problem. All you had to do is be good at it. Good at the language.

And there are many famous scenes which we will not rehearse here of Joyce and so on. The other thing to say is that the Irish language is now thriving in a different way, even though it wasn't successful as a renewal for the whole country in the last 20 years or so, the language has become an artistic medium, and they're very good writing in Irish in the north and the south. And the old apartheid between English Irish and the pressure to do it in Irish is gone. Speaking of Yates, Yates gave a soothing remark to Irish writers. He said late in his life when he was being castigated for not having Irish, and he certainly didn't have it. He said, Irish is my national language, but English is my mother tongue. That's the kind of thing that made them disliked in Dublin.

Rosanna Warren:

Thank you. And Derek, not only have you written in so many different kinds of dialects and made them come onto the page from the islands, but you also often turn language in your palms into something very physical like this line, the rigidly metered early rising rain where sometimes language, the English language say in your palms, turns into rain or it turns into soil or it turns into a wave of the sea. So I'm just curious to have you say anything that you want about the English language and how it uses you, how you use it.

Derek Walcott:

I think every poet is bilingual. Of course there's an ordinary language that we talk and there's an interior language which immediately makes us bilingual. Anyway, in my particular case, I am bilingual in the sense that there is French Creole and there's English, and then of course there are divisions inside English of Trinidadian and Jamaicans and Lucian and so on. And then there's a French Creole, which itself may have divisions, but French Creole is a dialect. It can't work to describe it a dialect, because to me it's a language and to everyone else, it is a language, and it's a totally different language, but we are more than bilingual. We are like trilingual or quadrilingual because we speak French Creole, which is a language now, and the dialect that may be in French Creole, that may be Creole and so forth. So there are several divisions that happen.

When people ask me, why don't you write in your own language? I say, English is my language, because I do not think in Creole. If I fought in Creole, I would write it. My instinct, my articulation does not come out in French Creole. So I write in what is articulated, dictated virtually to me by what's inside me. And it's not French Creole. Naturally I use it and it's a terrific thing. And I once tried not to translate a poem, an English poem of a certain tightness into French Creole and to try to keep the tightness of the quatrain together. And it was enormously exciting to do that because not only did that happen, I thought, Jesus, there's a metaphor. The metaphor changed. This happens a lot working with Joseph Brodsky. We will talk about him.

When he changed the metaphors, not only the translation, the metaphors would change in translation. So there may be a feeling of a different kind of a metaphor within the dialect language, which is exciting. So my excitement is still to write in that language or to adapt adapt it for, especially in the theater. It works more easily in the theater because in the theater, a character is given the language. It's not your language, it's not you speaking. It's another character speaking.

Rosanna Warren:

Yeah. But you've invented characters like Shabine in the Schooner Flight who speak in a kind of dialect.

Derek Walcott:

You see, somebody would tell you it's not authentic Trinidadian, it's mixed. It's kind of Jamaican mixed with Trinidadian and so on.

Rosanna Warren:

Yeah. Well, you spoke of Joseph Brodsky, and that was my next question, and it picks up on something, Seamus, you said earlier about the brotherhood and the sisterhood of poetry. So there's somebody missing here. It's Joseph Brodsky, who should be with these two. In all the years, when we were young men, we saw you three as our local masters. And so I would just invite you both to talk about Joseph.

Derek Walcott:

I learned one thing from Joseph. By the time I met him, let's say, I hate to use such words, but it's true. I had some kind of reputation as a writer. So I met him as a known writer, but I wasn't working until I met him.

Rosanna Warren:

What do you mean you weren't working?

Derek Walcott:

Well, Joseph worked every day, and he worked every day on poetry. Now, decent people don't do that in English. Europeans do that, but nobody brought up in the English tradition would write verse every day. That's embarrassing. But he was a writer. That's what he did. So I realized that I was hanging out, I was liming, I wasn't doing any work. And then I watched Joseph work and I said, this is what you better do you idiot. Get down and really work. He was this example of industry. I realized later than the phenomenon of his industry was based on his fear of death is based on the fear of a heart attack all the time. So he lived with that. But the example of that was his intolerance of idiocy. Really he couldn't stand stuff that he didn't like, and he would tell you that. So he taught me how to be, I don't know, irascible

Rosanna Warren:

You didn't already know?

Derek Walcott:

No. Professionally irascible. But obviously people have written criticizing Joseph as a poet in English, which I don't do because I think that he added to the language by the translation that he did, because you can say, well, it's not an English poem, of course, it is not an English poem. It is a poem in English written by a Russian. Okay, is that okay with you in your democracy?

Seamus Heaney:

I first encountered Joseph on his way to this country. It was 1972, I think it was a poetry international festival in London. Joseph had landed in Austria with Auden. Auden was reading in the poetry festival in London, and Joseph was with him in a red haired and red shirt and terrifically chic glamour, somebody escaping from Soviet behind the iron curtain and in London that night. But also at that time, because of the killing and so on, Belfast had a certain chic glamour. So I could see him looking at me, and I was looking at him, and we kind of greeted at some point. But then quite soon after that, I went to Massachusetts to a poetry festival and Joseph Red and boom, the experience of listening to that undoubting voice just was extraordinary. And then gradually through meetings in Ann Arbor places, I got to know him.

And he was, as Derek was saying, he was kind of acted the boss poet, you should be doing this, and X is the great one. And Y well, but the astonishing thing was his familiarity and at homeness in English poetry, in standard English poetry at the end. And there was nobody more instructive to talk with and only more exciting to talk with about poets, about poets from John Dunn up to Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy, right through to the present day. So what I got from Joseph was the example of some of the totally devoted to the art and honest. And as Derek said, not prepared to suffer fools gladly, not only in print, but face-to-face. And I have to say that having seen that in action, I inclined to suffer them a bit. The alternative.

Rosanna Warren:

Yes. I think I'll ask one more question and then ask each of you to read a final poem. And I guess the question I wanted to ask was about the relationship to the Greek and Roman classics. So Seamus, you've translated two plays of Sophoclean but when I think of you and the classics, I most deeply think of you and the poet, Virgil. You've written eclogues. In many different poems you've rewritten parts of the Aeneid or even translated passages. You talk about initiation, you've re-imagined the Golden Bow. So I would love to hear you talk about Virgil.

Seamus Heaney:

Well, Virgil was a set book when I was a lad in sixth form. The set book was book nine of the Aeneid, but our teacher kept saying over and over again for that year, oh boys, I wish it were book six. And this had more effect on me than anything else in the class. And the older I got, the more I went back to book six. And Virgil is actually, as you well know, it's very difficult to translate to get an idiom again that is true to Virgil, very hard. But I had a shot at book six, but I did the couple of the act logs. Yes. The thing about book six is that it's everybody's book, and in the sense that you want to go down to the underworld to meet the father and encounter the shades of the beloved and the deserted, the number of people there that's died all.

And there's the father, and the person I love most in it is Paul Ris, the guy who is a Helman's man, and he's washed overboard, and he isn't buried. Well, he isn't buried, therefore he can't get into the Elysian fields. He can't get across the sticks. So I don't know, it's the mortality and lacrimae rerum, tears of things in Virgil. I'm just at the minute reading of it and I'm realizing of it in translation. I show you the very different writer altogether. And obviously poor old Virgil was suffering from his own majesty, the ones who came after him, where were writing a completely different thing. But it's the tenderness and the sense of the living and the dead, commingling is lovely.

Rosanna Warren:

And there's something also in the poems that you've written that are eclogues. They're not translations of, they're your own eclogues. There's a sense of communing with the rural Virgil, but there's the epic Virgil in some of your other poems that are more quickened by a sense of epic sorrow in maybe the Northern Irish experience.

Seamus Heaney:

Exactly.

Rosanna Warren:

So there are several Virgil's in your work.

Seamus Heaney:

Well, there's also the Virgil who leads Dante around.

Rosanna Warren:

Yes.

Seamus Heaney:

And he's pretty important figure. But my problem is that I can't find a noise for the big book. For the actual.

Rosanna Warren:

You thought of translating the whole Aeneid?

Seamus Heaney:

No, never.

Rosanna Warren:

I just thought that's what you meant by a noise for the big book.

Seamus Heaney:

No. Well, I've had to go at doing the whole of book six, but that's hard enough. So I think the golden bow is such a beautiful image.

Rosanna Warren:

And you've done it beautifully, and it brings us back to initiation and the mysteries. Yes. Derek, I would ask you about you and Homer because you've been rewriting Homer, you made the play of the Odyssey. You've written Omeros, but constantly in your lyric poems, you're saying it's not Nike, but a girl knocking sand from door on the frame, knocking sand from her sandal, or you're both having your cake and eating too, or as you said in the Gulf, the classics can console, but not enough. It's very complicated, this Homeric world for your imaginative world.

Derek Walcott:

The Homeric thing is kind of cliche and obvious. We have an archipelago, which means a lot of seas. We have ships kunas traveling between islands. Every island is different, and every island coming out of the sea, anytime of day or night is totally magical to see. But at each island, there's a different story. Each history of each island is different. So that's very much like the Odyssey. And of course all the lies that Odyssey are part of the histories of these islands because you get all that bullshit also from the islands. I have repeatedly told people, I am not a Homeric scholar. I have never read the Iliad, never. It's embarrassing how ignorant I am, but all these guys slicing heads, I didn't get to that too much. What is very strong in Homer? I don't want to start. It's hard to imagine that the prose Homer that we have was inverse.

Because the prose can be so continuous that parts of it have got to have been in prose for me, because the descriptions of the storms in the Odyssey are not like rhythm that stops at the end of a line and the continuous description of the tactile or physical thing of water and rocks and stuff. If that is in the, whatever the meter is or examiner or whatever, then it is phenomenal. But the syntax that we get to translate Homer in is contemporary syntax. It is not the syntax of the peace. I don't think you can get that. So that anything we do in translation of Homer has got to be immediately contemporary. And that's the immediacy that I feel that exists in the Odyssey.

But I also feel that he's a very good writer in the sense of Hemingway's description of what nature should be. And that the descriptions of the storm in the Odyssey, a pure Hemingway, right? But they're inverse. And that's a fascination. The fascination is what is this rhythm, right? That's there. It is so colloquial as description, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's my fascination with it. It's not in the story so much, not in the epic aspect of the story. And that's why he'll always be present for a writer because he's so present in terms of the physical thing.

Rosanna Warren:

Well, let's conclude by asking each of our poets to read Seamus. Would you read Postscript, which seems like a good post poem to conclude with?

Seamus Heaney:

This is another poem about driving into the west of Ireland for refreshment renewal. And sometime make the time to drive out west into county Clare, along the Flaggy Shore in September or October. When the wind and the light are working off each other so that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter and inland among stones, the surface of a slack gray lake is lit by the earth, lightning of a flock of swans. Their feathers roughed and ruffling white on white. They're fully grown, headstrong looking heads tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there. A hurry through which known and strange things pass as big soft buffetings come with the car sideways, and catch the heart of guard and blow it open.

Rosanna Warren:

Thank you.

Derek Walcott:

The lost empire. And then there was no more empire all of a sudden. Its victories were air, it's dominions dirt. Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan. The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy's shirt, like a red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges. Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags, fluttering down in the dusk. The golden aegis went out with the sun. The last gleam on a great crag with tiger eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of the Raj to a sobbing bugle. I see it all come about again. The tasselle, the cortege, the clock of the tossing team with funeral pompoms. The sergeant majors shout, the stamp of boots than the valley. There is no greater theme than this chasm deep surrendering of power. The whited eyes and robes of surrendering lords, reg tunics and the great names, Sind, Turkistan, Cawnpore, dust dervishes, and the Saharan silence afterwards.

A dragonfly's biplane settles, and there on the map, the archipelago looks as if a continent fell and scattered into fragments from Point du Cap to Moule a Cheque, bois canot, laurier canalles, canoe wood, spicy laurels. The wind churned trees echo the African crests at night. The stars of far fishermen's fires, not glittering cities, Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris, but crab hunters torches. This small place produces nothing but beauty. The wind warped trees, the breakers on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens a galloping Mare on the plain of Vieuxfort make us merely receiving vessels of each day's grace. Light simplifies us whatever our race or gifts. I'm content as Kavanaugh with his few acres for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea's lace, to see how its wings catch color when a girl lifts. Pure Heaney.

Rosanna Warren:

I think we're done. I think we should go.

Judith Baumel:

Thank you, Rosanna. Thank you, Derek. Thank you, Seamus. What a great night. Thanks again.

Speaker 1:

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