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Debate Doesn’t Really Change Things. It Gets You Bogged In Deeper. If You Can Address Or Reopen The Subject With Something New, Something From A Different Angle, Then There Is Some Hope. ... People Are Suddenly Gazing At Something Else And Pausing For A Moment. And For The Duration Of That Gaze And Pause, They Are Like Reflectors Of The Totality Of Their Own Knowledge And/or Ignorance. That’s Something Poetry Can Do For You, It Can Entrance You For A Moment Above The Pool Of Your Own Consciousness And Your Own Possibilities.

-Seamus Heaney

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Debate Doesn’t Really Change

Seamus Heaney

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Debate Doesn’t Really Change Things. It Gets You Bogged In Deeper. If You Can Address Or Reopen The Subject With Something New, Something From A Different Angle, Then There Is Some Hope. ... People Are Suddenly Gazing At Something Else And Pausing For A Moment. And For The Duration Of That Gaze And Pause, They Are Like Reflectors Of The Totality Of Their Own Knowledge And/or Ignorance. That’s Something Poetry Can Do For You, It Can Entrance You For A Moment Above The Pool Of Your Own Consciousness And Your Own Possibilities.

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You Had To Come Back To Learn How To Lose Yourself, To Be Pilot And Stray-witch, Hansel And Gretel In One.

Losing Yourself

At Home In Ireland, There's A Habit Of Avoidance, An Ironical Attitude Towards The Authority Figure.

The End Of Art Is Peace.

I Have Always Thought Of Poems As Stepping Stones In One's Own Sense Of Oneself. Every Now And Again, You Write A Poem That Gives You Self-respect And Steadies Your Going A Little Bit Farther Out In The Stream. At The Same Time, You Have To Conjure The Next Stepping Stone Because The Stream, We Hope, Keeps Flowing.

Irish Readers, British Readers, American Readers: Is It Odd That I Haven't A Clue About How Differently They React? Or Better Say, I Cannot Find The Words To Describe My Hunch About Them.

It Is Difficult At Times To Repress The Thought That History Is About As Instructive As An Abattoir; That Tacitus Was Right And That Peace Is Merely The Desolation Left Behind After The Decisive Operations Of Merciless Power.

It Is Always Better To Avenge Dear Ones Than To Indulge In Mourning. For Every One Of Us, Living In This World Means Waiting For Our End. Let Whoever Can Win Glory Before Death. When A Warrior Is Gone, That Will Be His Best And Only Bulwark.

The Most Exhilarating For The Writer And The Reader, Are Gift-things-poems Which Arrive On Their Own Energy, Poems That In William Shakespeare's Term "slip" From You.

Between My Finger And My Thumb The Squat Pen Rests; Snug As A Gun. ~from The Poem "digging

Believe That A Further Shore Is Reachable From Here.

Anything Can Happen, On The Other Hand, Is Not Only About The Atrociousness Of The September 11 Attack, It Is Also A Premonition Of The Deadly Retaliation That Was Bound To Come.

But Even So, None Of The News Of These World-spasms Entered Me As Terror.

History Says, Don’t Hope On This Side Of The Grave, But Then, Once In A Lifetime The Longed-for Tidal Wave Of Justice Can Rise Up, And Hope And History Rhyme

Once In A Lifetime

Best To Say That Once A Poem Is Finished I Trust It To Make Its Way, And I Trust Readers Will Find Their Way To It And Through It, If The Thing Has Got Itself Rightly Expressed.

The Bogholes Might Be Atlantic Seepage. The Wet Centre Is Bottomless.

Publication Is Rather Like Pushing The Boat Out; Then The Boat/book Turns Into A Melting Ice Floe And You Have To Conjure A Second Boat Which Again Turns Into A Melting Floe Under Your Feet. All The Stepping Stones That You Conjure Disappear Under The Water Behind You.

There Is Not Built-in Meaning To Anything, We Are Free To Add Any Meaning We Choose To Give It.

Walk On Air Against Your Better Judgement.

Allow Ourselves To Do As Ram Dass Said In His Delicious Phrase "be Here Now." If You Are Here Now You Cannot Fall Into Falsely Constructed Gender Projections.

The Dotted Line My Father's Ashplant Made On Sandymount Strand Is Something Else The Tide Won't Wash Away.

The Poems I Did Write There [in Harvard] Include Alphabets The 1984 Phi Beta Kappa Poem And A Sofa In The Forties. And, Of Course, The John Harvard Poem For The 350th Anniversary Villanelle For An Anniversary.

When I First Encountered The Name Of The City Of Stockholm, I Little Thought That I Would Ever Visit It, Never Mind End Up Being Welcomed To It As A Guest Of The Swedish Academy And The Nobel Foundation.

Poetry Is Always Slightly Mysterious, And You Wonder What Is Your Relationship To It.

Once Off The Bush The Fruit Fermented, The Sweet Flesh Would Turn Sour. I Always Felt Like Crying. It Wasn't Fair That All The Lovely Canfuls Smelt Of Rot. Each Year I Hoped They'd Keep, Knew They Would Not. -blackberry Picking

The Completely Solitary Self: That's Where Poetry Comes From, And It Gets Isolated By Crisis, And Those Crises Are Often Very Intimate Also.

Wherever That Man Went, He Went Gratefully.

I Have Always Thought Of Poems As Stepping Stones In One's Own Sense Of Oneself.

Stepping Stones

If Self Is A Location, So Is Love.

To Begin With, I Wanted That Truth To Life To Possess A Concrete Reliability, And Rejoiced Most When The Poem Seemed Most Direct, An Upfront Representation Of The World It Stood In For Or Stood Up For Or Stood Its Ground Against.

The Ireland I Now Inhabit Is One That These Irish Contemporaries Have Helped To Imagine.

A Public Expectation, It Has To Be Said, Not Of Poetry As Such But Of Political Positions Variously Approvable By Mutually Disapproving Groups.

I've Always Associated The Moment Of Writing With A Moment Of Lift, Of Joy, Of Unexpected Reward.

In Off The Moors, Down Through The Mist Beams, God-cursed Grendel Came Greedily Loping.

Im A Firm Believer In Learning By Heart.

Getting Started, Keeping Going, Getting Started Again - In Art And In Life, It Seems To Me This Is The Essential Rhythm Not Only Of Achievement But Of Survival, The Ground Of Convinced Action, The Basis Of Self-esteem And The Guarantee Of Credibility In Your Lives, Credibility To Yourselves As Well As To Others.

So Hope For A Great Sea-change On The Far Side Of Revenge. Believe That Further Shore Is Reachable From Here. Believe In Miracles And Cures And Healing Wells.

Whether It Be A Matter Of Personal Relations Within A Marriage Or Political Initiatives Within A Peace Process, There Is No Sure-fire Do-it-yourself Kit.

Ireland And The Irish

The Thing About Writing Is That If You Have The Impulse, You Will Find The Time.

A Writer Is Not Different From A Reader, In That The Common Ragbag Of Orthodoxies And Assumptions Is What A Poet Has To Work With As Well.

Even Though Helen Vendler Wasn't On The Harvard Faculty When I Came First In 1979, She Was A Guardian Spirit; Robert Fitzgerald Gave Me The Use Of His Study In Pusey Library. Monroe And Brenda Engel Kept Open House, Bob And Jana Kiely Made Me At Home In Adams House. Then, Too, In 1979, Frank Bidart, Whom Id Met In Dublin After The Death Of Robert Lowell He Was Over Seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank Brought Me Into His Circle Of Friends, Including Robert Pinsky And Alan Williamson.

I Don't Miss Teaching. I'm Learning To Take My Time For Myself.

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I Drink To Keep Body And Soul Apart.

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Suspect Too Much Sweet Talk But Never Close Your Mind.

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Debate Doesn’t Really Change Things. It Gets You Bogged In Deeper. If You Can Address Or Reopen The Subject With Something New, Something From A Different Angle, Then There Is Some Hope. ... People Are Suddenly Gazing At Something Else And Pausing For A Moment. And For The Duration Of That Gaze And Pause, They Are Like Reflectors Of The Totality Of Their Own Knowledge And/or Ignorance. That’s Something Poetry Can Do For You, It Can Entrance You For A Moment Above The Pool Of Your Own Consciousness And Your Own Possibilities.

Anything Can Happen Is Also, Incidentally, A Poem That Arose From Teaching. I'd Talked About The Horace Ode (i, 34) [on Which The Poem Is Based] In A Lecture I Gave At Harvard In The Fall Of 2000 Entitled Bright Boltsand Remembered It After The Twin Towers Attack.

Memory Has Always Been Fundamental For Me. In Fact, Remembering What I Had Forgotten Is The Way Most Of The Poems Get Started.

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No Bit Of The Natural World Is More Valuable Or More Vulnerable Than The Tree Bit. Nothing Is More Like Ourselves, Standing Upright, Caught Between Heaven And Earth, Frail At The Extremities, Yet Strong At The Central Trunk, And Nothing Is Closer To Us At The Beginning And At The End, Providing The Timber Boards That Frame Both The Cradle And The Coffin.

I Am Not A Playwright. A Playwright Would Take "antigone" And Hit It A Few Clouts And Knock It Out Of Shape And Restructure It. My Versioning Was Strictly Verbal.

Behaviour That's Admired Is The Path To Power Among People Everywhere.

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.

I Suppose I'm Saying That Defiance Is Actually Part Of The Lyric Job

The Gift Of Writing Is To Be Self-forgetful...

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Hope For A Great Sea-change Timid To Rebuke And Too Petty To Forgive.

Strange, It Is A Huge Nothing That We Fear.

In Fact, In Lyric Poetry, Truthfulness Becomes Recognizable As A Ring Of Truth Within The Medium Itself.

Sink Every Impulse Like A Bolt. Secure The Bastion Of Sensation. Do Not Waver Into Language. Do Not Waver In It.

When I Was Teaching, I Gave A Lot Of My Mind And Anxiety To It. There Was Always Something Clenched And Anxious In Me Until The Classes Were Over.

Poetry Is Language In Orbit.

Write Whatever You Like!

I Always Believed That Whatever Had To Be Written Would Somehow Get Itself Written.

There Is Risk And Truth To Yourselves And The World Before You.

The Main Thing Is To Write For The Joy Of It. Cultivate A Work-lust That Imagines Its Haven Like Your Hands At Night Dreaming The Sun In The Sunspot Of A Breast. You Are Fasted Now, Light-headed, Dangerous. Take Off From Here.

I Might Enjoy Being An Albatross, Being Able To Glide For Days And Daydream For Hundreds Of Miles Along The Thermals. And Then Being Able To Hang Like An Affliction Round Some People's Necks.

One Of The Very First Poems I Wrote Was Docker That Fist Would Drop A Hammer On A Catholic And One Of The Sturdiest Was Requiem For The Croppies, Written 50 Years After 1916 [the Year Of The Easter Rising]. Being Responsible And What It Means, What It Demands, Have Indeed Preoccupied Me Maybe Too Much. But This Is It, This Is The Thing, This Is What You're Up Against.

On The Contrary, A Trust In The Staying Power And Travel-worthiness Of Such Good Should Encourage Us To Credit The Possibility Of A World Where Respect For The Validity Of Every Tradition Will Issue In The Creation And Maintenance Of A Salubrious Political Space.

All I Know Is A Door Into The Dark

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I Credit Poetry For Making This Space-walk Possible.

Without Needing To Be Theoretically Instructed, Consciousness Quickly Realizes That It Is The Site Of Variously Contending Discourses.

But That Citizen's Perception Was Also At One With The Truth In Recognizing That The Very Brutality Of The Means By Which The Ira Were Pursuing Change Was Destructive Of The Trust Upon Which New Possibilities Would Have To Be Based.

Even If The Last Move Did Not Succeed, The Inner Command Says Move Again.

Two Buckets Were Easier Carried Than One. / I Grew Up In Between.

The Gift Of Writing Is To Be Self-forgetful... To Get A Surge Of Inner Life Or Inner Supply Or Unexpected Sense Of Empowerment, To Be Afloat, To Be Out Of Yourself.

I Have Begun To Think Of Life As A Series Of Ripples Widening Out From An Original Center.

Part Of My Gradual Education Of Myself Has Been To Think That There Is A Deep Relationship Between The Nature Of The Creature And The Worth Of The Art.

Deep Relationship

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