AMY MACDONALD: Good afternoon. I'm Amy Macdonald, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and Tom Putnam, the Director of the Kennedy Library, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming, and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media partners, The Boston Globe, Xfinity and WBUR.
Today's program at the Kennedy Library is a collaboration with PEN New England. As Chair of PEN New England and the Forum Producer at the Kennedy Library, I am wearing, with delight, two hats today.
It is so fitting that we are having this tribute with PEN New England, for Seamus Heaney was a champion of artists whose voices were suppressed and recently had lent his voice to the PEN International Campaign for the release of his fellow Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo.
And it is so fitting we are having this tribute at the Kennedy Library, for 50 years ago today, on October 26, 1963, President Kennedy dedicated the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, the only American President to talk about the importance of arts in a major speech about American culture. And let's take a listen; I apologize, there's a little snag in the audio.
[video played]
. . . for Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this college and country honors a man whose contribution was not to our size, but to our spirit; not to our political beliefs, but to our insight; not to our self-esteem, but to our self- comprehension. In honoring Robert Frost, we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.
Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been," he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair.
AMY MACDONALD: It is also fitting that the reporter who covered President Kennedy's visit at Amherst for The Boston Globe is our master of ceremonies today, Christopher Lydon. I've provided copies of the article. [applause] You can buy a couch for $69, if you look at the little advertisement at the end, next to his text. [laughter]
Two weeks before Seamus Heaney died, Caroline Kennedy, who had met the poet in June during her visit to Ireland to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her father's visit to his ancestral home, had suggested we invite him to speak today to commemorate this other 50th anniversary milestone.
Sadly, while we cannot be blessed with the presence of the man himself, we can be blessed with the memories of Seamus Heaney that our speakers will share with us today – Kevin Cullen, Rose Styron, Robert Pinsky – who have all graced our stage many times before, and we are blessed with the poems that he has left us in perpetuity.
Before I turn to Chris Lydon, let me introduce Breandán Ó Caollaí, the Irish Consul of Boston, who has our first tribute to Heaney, a letter from the President of Ireland, Michael Higgins. [applause]
BREANDÁN Ó CAOLLAÍ: Before I read the message, just briefly to say how honored and privileged I feel here today, given, as Amy said, it's the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's visit to Ireland and the sad coincidence of Seamus Heaney's death on the day when we were to commemorate his opening of the Frost Library at Amherst College. I'll read the message:
A Tribute to Seamus Heaney:
I'm delighted to have the opportunity to pay tribute to my late friend, one of Ireland's Nobel Laureates in literature. Seamus Heaney had a poetic gift, which insured his work would be read and admired across the globe. His work was rooted in the rugged and the often very severe historical landscape of his native Ireland. It grew and flowered from a deep understanding of its fellow Irishmen and women and have held [inaudible] the national psyche had been shaped and formed by that turbulent landscape.
Although grounded in a rural childhood, Seamus in his work was never afraid to move beyond the familiar in order to seek new truths and explore other possibilities. His brave vocabulary and refusal to be confined by traditional boundaries enables the reader to explore our human vulnerabilities in ways that are profound and allow a greater understanding of the complexity of mankind.
While renowned around the world for his vast and impressive talent, Seamus will always be remembered, including by his many friends in Boston and Cambridge, for his great humanitarian spirit, his deep integrity, for a personal generosity which touched so many lives in very different ways.
As the former Boylston Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and frequent visitor to Massachusetts, I am sure that Seamus would have greatly appreciated his life and work being acknowledged in the President John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. As President of Ireland, I thank you for that honor. [in Gaelic]
Signed, Michael D. Higgins [in Gaelic], President of Ireland.
Thank you. [applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Mr. Consul General. And thank you to the Republic of Ireland. It is a privilege and a great delight, as Amy said, to be gathering in memory of Seamus Heaney, much as it was a privilege and a delight to have him in our midst for 30-plus years. I remember walking of a dusk evening through Harvard Square -- must have been the late '70s -- and I saw this guy with a wonderful Irish Afro and I said, "You're Seamus Heaney." And he said, "Yeah."
This was sort of before the rock star period and I said, "I want to record you for Channel 2." And I made a bit of a career sitting kind of in awe of this wonderful man in the '70s and '80s, and later than that. We'll see a little bit of it.
But it was marvelous just now to remember the – it wasn't swagger exactly, but he knew who he was, and he was unmistakably a giant in Harvard Square 35 years ago. Henri Cole, the poet, says Boston/Cambridge -- this part of the world --- is the best poetry city in America, maybe the world. We have the tradition of Emerson and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, and so many others. But Seamus Heaney strode right into our world, like a giant. And it was unmistakably so.
Again, he didn't introduce us to poetry, but he widened the gate immeasurably. I think of him with Yo-Yo Ma. We'd heard of the cello before Yo-Yo Ma, and yet he did something for us in kind of welcoming us into his world. We'd met cooks and cooking before Julia Child, but again, she opened it to all of us. And I think Seamus did much the same in the very literary world of Boston. He showed us how a giant deported himself and taught and read, became a citizen of that whole world.
Especially with Seamus we're remembering how, like Yo-Yo, even like Julia, this was a man who is simply impossible to resist. He was the most attractive person and mind and bard one could have imagined.
An interesting variety of people here are going to remember Seamus. We'll see a little bit of him on video. But we begin with Kevin Cullen of The Boston Globe, who knew Seamus as kind of a student and a political reporter and remembered him wonderfully in the Globe on this death. Kevin Cullen. [applause]
KEVIN CULLEN: Seamus and I knew each other the way spies do. We bumped into each other at odd times and strange places we'd sometimes prefer to deny. There was an Irish Embassy do in London, a chance meeting at a public house in Dublin. We passed each other on the grounds of Queens University in Belfast once and ended up in Pat's Bar down at the docks, and we were there for the music. [laughter]
Years ago, there was a lovely woman named Noreen Courtney who worked at the Aer Lingus office in Boston when Aer Lingus still had offices in such exotic locales as Boston. This was before Seamus had won the Nobel Prize. Noreen took pity on the poor poet and the poor journalist and routinely bumped us up to first class. So we would sometimes find ourselves up front together, and one memorable flight we sat next to each other. And Mr. Jameson was hard to find that night. [laughter]
But my fondest memory of a chance encounter took place 11 years ago in the Harvard classroom of Helen Vendler, the great interpreter of Seamus's work. I was a Nieman Fellow, and Helen had graciously allowed me to audit her Heaney seminar with the condition that I kept silent because class participation accounted for a considerable portion of the students' grade.
Whenever he was at Harvard, Seamus would drop in on Helen's class, and on this day he appeared to be taken aback seeing me. Seamus was his usual self during the class – funny, selfdeprecating, perceptive and genuinely interested in the students. As class broke up, Seamus kept eyeing me, no doubt in shock that I had kept my mouth shut for an hour. Helen leaned in and explained the arrangement. He meandered over. "What are you doing this afternoon," he asked vaguely. "Nothing," I said, shrugging. "Stop by my office at half-five," he said, conspiratorially.
Now, this was classic Seamus. When I walked into the office, he took me around and introduced me to every secretary and custodian within an arse's roar. He brought me over to a woman and said, "Sheila, this is Kevin. Kevin's a journalist. Tell him nothing." [laughter] That was a sly reworking of Seamus's great poem in 1975 about the menace in his native Northern Ireland, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.
I suggested we retire to Daedalus, the Joycean-themed restaurant on Mount Auburn Street, sandwiched between Adams and Quincy Houses. "Perfect," Seamus said, "I have to be at Adams House for dinner with the masters at 7:30." I said, "No problem, we'll be there in plenty of time."
Aside from the restaurant's name, I knew Seamus would like the owners, a pair of Galway-born brothers, Laurence and Brendan Hopkins. And of course, the three of them were talking like old friends in no time. Seamus informed them how much he admired Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th-century poet and Jesuit priest. "Ah, Jayziz," Laurence said, slapping Seamus on the shoulder, "he's not one of our lot." [laughter]
Like most Irish, the Hopkins boys learned Heaney poems by osmosis. Like Yeats's verses, Seamus's are internalized, memorized at a young age in Ireland, murmured, as Yeats put it, "as a mother names her child, when sleep at last has come on limbs that had run wild."
As we sat at the bar at Daedalus, Seamus said hello to scores of people, many of them approaching, saying they hadn't seen him in ages. After winning the Nobel, Seamus's international obligations soared and his teaching gig at Harvard became more sporadic.
Most of the people who Seamus recognized at Daedalus were what you would call ordinary people, guys from the Harvard maintenance staff, a cook from Adams House, a secretary in one of the deans' offices, a librarian from the Widener.
Seamus Heaney the person was like his poetry, remarkably accessible. And while as a Nobel Laureate he consorted with the great and the good, he was, I think, more comfortable with the not so great and the not so good. If writing is a lonely, solitary pursuit, he was the most sociable of poets. He loved people as much as words.
He grew up in humble circumstances on a farm in County Derry in the North of Ireland, and it was of that North we often talked when we got together. So much of Seamus's life, so much of his poetry unfolded against the backdrop of the Troubles when Catholic nationalists and Protestant loyalists were engaged in murderous tumult. Seamus was a Catholic nationalist. He famously declined honors from the Queen, but he was not sectarian. And he lost friends from both sides to both sides. His poem "Casualty" was about a friend, Louis O'Neill, who was killed by a bomb in 1972. That evening in Daedalus, Seamus and I talked about a murder I had covered years earlier. It happened in 1997, just as the Troubles were winding down, just as it appeared, as Seamus put it, "hope and history would rhyme." It happened in Bellaghy, a sleepy village in County Derry where Seamus grew up. And it happened to a man, Sean Brown, who Seamus knew and admired.
Sean Brown was a teacher by profession, but his passion was Gaelic games. He was chairman of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Bellaghy, which is why loyalist gunmen murdered him. To them, Gaelic sports were a badge of Irish nationalism, something they hated. But to Brown's Protestant neighbors and Seamus, his murder was an obscenity because he was a kind and generous man to all he knew, without regard to religion.
There was a poem read at Sean Brown's funeral. It was not written by Seamus, but by Brown's 12-year-old neighbor, Fiona Smith, a Protestant. In it, she recalled that Sean Brown was kind to her and greeted her every day the same way: "Hello, Fiona, how was school today?" "I remember that," Seamus said, almost to himself. "The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul." I'll never forget how Seamus said that – it hurt his soul. He was in Greece when he learned of Sean Brown's murder, having just visited the place where the first Olympic Games were held, and it struck him that it was a crime not just against humanity, but against the ancient Olympic spirit.
When Seamus returned to his hometown after winning the Nobel Prize, it was Sean Brown who organized the celebration, which was noteworthy because everybody – Protestant, Catholic and neither – turned out to greet the local boy made good. In a tribute he wrote for Sean Brown, Seamus compared the cross-community celebration to a purification, a release from what the Greece called the miasma, the stains of spilled blood. If Yeats spoke of a terrible beauty, Seamus spoke of a terrible irony, "that such a good and decent man as Sean Brown could die at the hands of a sectarian killer."
"He represented something better than we have grown used to," Seamus wrote, describing his murdered friend.
I think of Seamus Heaney the same way. He represented something better than we have grown used to. He was, as Lowell said, the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. But it's too limited to describe Seamus as an Irish poet, because while his Irishness informed his work and certainly his identity, he was a citizen and a poet of the world.
For all his nationalism, he loved English poets. He loved Keats as much as Yeats. He believed that if countries were run by poets instead of politicians, we'd all be much better off. He loved Vaclav Havel, the poet who led the Czechs to freedom, and he especially loved Michael D.
Higgins, Ireland's president and a poet of some regard himself.
And it goes without saying, he loved above all else his kids and his Marie, his wife.
When I was at the Dublin bureau for The Boston Globe, living in Dun Laoghaire, I heard my fax machine whirring one day. It was from Seamus, just a few miles away on the Strand Road in Sandymount. He sent me a piece that his son Mick had written for a Dublin magazine. The next time I saw Seamus at an event at Dublin Castle, I leaned in to him and I praised Mick's writing. He smiled broadly, the proud papa. But he grabbed my elbow as I turned to go away and he started singing the praises of Catherine and Chris.
Besides his children, Marie took up most the space in that big heart. Marie and the land were the great loves of his life, and his ode to Marie managed to evoke both of them:
Love, I shall perfect for you the child
Who diligently potters in my brain
Digging with heavy spade till sods were piled Or puddling through muck in a deep drain.
It was getting close to 7:30 that night in Cambridge; I was checking the clock. Seamus, as the Irish say, couldn't be arsed. He was due for dinner with Adams House masters Sean and Judy Palfrey, who were friends of mine, and I'd be scandalized if I delivered him late.
But when I told Seamus it was time to go, he squinted up at the clock, nodded toward Laurence Hopkins behind the bar, leaned in to me and said in that delicious south Derry sotto voce, "Ach, we'll have one for the ditch, will we?" [laughter]
So we were 15 minutes late. We said our farewells outside of Adams House. "God bless you, St. Kevin," he said, bowing gallantly, and I laughed because I remembered how he had prominently mentioned St. Kevin during his Nobel lecture. Seamus and Marie had lived in County Wicklow, not far from Glendalough, the monastic site where St. Kevin lived in the seventh century. In his lecture, Seamus recalled the story of St. Kevin kneeling and praying at Glendalough with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross:
"A blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree," Seamus told that crowd in Stockholm. "Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings. True to life, if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder, manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew."
Seamus Heaney was very much like St. Kevin in that he held out his hands until the eggs that were his poems hatched, grew wings and flew away, all over the world. He dared to leave the bog. He made words a weapon of wonder and tolerance. He walked on air against his better judgment. [applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Kevin Cullen. It read beautifully in the paper; it sounded even better, Kevin. Thank you.
Rose Styron is a literary salon unto herself. She was married to a famous writer for many, many years. She is a friend of writers, a famous hostess of literary folk, friend of PEN and writers around the world, and she is in her own right a wonderful poet. Please welcome Rose Styron. [applause]
ROSE STYRON: I'm very proud to have been invited here to memorialize our wondrous friend Seamus Heaney at this great Library, which I love. We met over the years at Harvard, in Dublin and New York, each occasion full of meaning and surprises, and fun for me; he was fun, above everything else.
Last month, I was in Ireland missing him particularly as my daughter and I drove towards Sligo to visit the grave of the other great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. I thought suddenly of the postscript to Seamus's beautiful book Spirit Level that begins: "And some time make the time to drive out west." He described the wild winds we were just then almost blown down by, standing on the shore. That poem ends, "As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/And catch the heart off guard and blow it open." How often Seamus Heaney blew our hearts open.
I was in Dublin this time to award our annual Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award. Last year, it went to Aung San Suu Kyi, who came directly from receiving her Nobel Prize. She sat next to Seamus in this vast, full Dublin auditorium, probably holding his hand, aware that his soft hyacinth-blue sweater matched his eyes, listening to Vanessa Redgrave read Seamus's "Republic of Conscience" for which the Award was named. He had agreed to read it this year from the stage, and of course we were sad about that.
Then I guess I came home last year and planted the hyacinth-blue flowers, like those I'd admired blooming by his and his fantastic wife Marie's door. They are an October flower, full now, on the Vineyard, still, like his memory for all of us.
I recall he wore the same blue sweater this past winter when we met in Boston for a tribute from his students and pals at a national book festival. I was lucky because I'd moved to Martha's Vineyard full time this past year and had no idea that during storms and hurricanes, you could not get back because the ferries didn't run and the planes didn't fly. So I had three days with Seamus here in Boston, which were a terrific gift. He was wearing the same blue sweater, as I said. [laughter]
But this year, this September, Harry Belafonte and the young Malala from Pakistan, the 15-yearold heroine – I'm sure you've all heard, because she was here a couple of weeks ago – they stood in Suu Kyi's place on the platform. This was before, like last year, they received their tributes and musical accompaniment from Bono.
She, Suu Kyi, had said movingly when she stepped up to the mic and thanked Bono and all of us a year ago, as thousands cheered, something like, "Until I left my homeland, Burma, last week, I didn't know how much everyone cared."
Seamus, beyond his extraordinary poems and ready, intimate humor was first among persons who care about the savagery and suffering and promise in our world; about poetry of course; about his family and young people; Irish farmers and patriots; and about you and me.
I thought I'd read a bit from his long poem, written for Amnesty International in 1985, "The Republic of Conscience." I'll just read the first few stanzas.
I
When I landed in the republic of conscience it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.
At immigration, the clerk was an old man who produced a wallet from his homespun coat and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.
The woman in customs asked me to declare the words of our traditional cures and charms to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
No porters. No interpreter. No taxi. You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
II
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning spells universal good and parents hang swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells are held to the ear during births and funerals. The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat. The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen, the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.
At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office –
and to affirm their faith that all life sprang from salt in tears which the sky-god wept after he dreamt his solitude was endless.
Many stanzas later this poem ends with Seamus's faith, looking forward to a time when, as he wrote famously, "hope and history rhyme."
Thank you. [applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Rose Styron.
Robert Pinsky is a special man in this very poetic town of ours, where Nobel Prize winners and Poets Laureate and big Pulitzer poets are thick on the ground. Robert was, of course, a Poet Laureate, and a very special one for me. In some strange kinship with Seamus he just widened the gates, especially with his favorite poem project in which all sorts of ordinary people, including me, recited their favorite poems. He was also a close friend of Seamus's and it's a great pleasure to have him and hear from him next. Robert Pinsky. [applause]
ROBERT PINSKY: Thank you so much, Chris. I'm honored to be here. I'm going to try to talk to you about the relationship between good character and good art, and in this case I think great character and great art.
Great artists are not always nice people. Sometimes they're right sons of bitches. [laughter] But they make great art. And the same way in which people say thank God for Anton Chekhov, we can say thank God for Seamus Heaney.
In the late '80s or early '90s, I was Seamus's guest and I found myself, among other places, at Carysfort College, a very modest women's college where Seamus was not only an English teacher, he was chairman of the department of English. And at some point, I found myself in the coffee room with the English teachers at Carysfort College. And they said, unanimously and ardently, "Seamus Heaney was the best department chairman we ever had."
These were not provincial people. When they spoke of how he advocated for them, how conscientious and hardworking he was, how he helped advance them as a group and individually, they were aware that he was already at that time – '89 or '91, whatever it was – they knew that Seamus already was a world figure in the art of poetry. And they were literate, cultivated people; they knew he was a great artist and they invited me to join them in amazement that they were beneficiaries of his ordinary, modest, decent, good character -- which appears in his writing as well in the lines that Rose quoted to you and in the lines that I'm going to read to you about one of the late victims of the Troubles in a bombing. You see the same old-fashioned sense of decency and modesty.
In "Casualty" he writes about that man in a kind of attention you can't fake in art. This quality of attention as to other people who are your coworkers has to be genuine or you can't do it. He says about him:
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke Our tribe's complicity?
"Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man,"
I hear him say. "Puzzle me
The right answer to that one."
Here, the unmistakable vocality of poetry unaffected joins the vocality of that other person, a life in an actual voice. In a pub. Where he's about to be blown up or has been. The two voices of poetry and of that man subsisting together with a kind of firm dual attention to the world and to the art.
On that same visit when we went to Carysfort, Seamus took me to a favorite pub. I can't remember the name of it, but it had a very special snug; it was a snug that only one group of people could do; it was a very small snug. My grandfather had a bar in New Jersey, The Broadway Tavern, and one of my greatest honors I've ever received is when we got back to the house, Seamus said proudly to Marie, "Pinsky went right for the snug!" [laughter] "Found it immediately."
I want to avoid sentimentalizing our friend. It is true that he had great character and he was a great artist. I want to say a little bit about what an irreverent, improper, subversive, derisory sense of humor he had. [laughter]
He was disrespectful in a way that was not vicious. He was undermining and subversive that was free of cruelty, though he was profoundly unimpressed by large amounts of money, great degrees of fame, political power, eminence, and indeed great art.
This is not my story; it's the story of the fiction writer Susan Dodd. While at Harvard, they were colleagues. Seamus is invited to one of – you'll all know what it's called, it's called the "Ancient Hibernian Society of We've Made It; We're as Good as the Yankees." [laughter] Or some such organization devoted to the idea that being Irish is splendid in many ways, including fame and eminence.
Of course, Senator Edward Kennedy was there. And Seamus. Susan Dodd said to me, "I certainly never told Seamus I was once married to Senator Dodd. Someone must have." Seamus comes back, chortling, saying, "Hahaha, Ted Kennedy introduced me to Senator Dodd." And that gave the Seamus the opportunity to say, "Dodd, Dodd, would you be any relation to the writer Dodd?" [laughter]
I'll dare to tell another story. And I'm hopeful that naughty words, if they're in somewhat an Irish accent, Irish version, it's like speaking Yiddish. [laughter] Things are not quite as dirty or improper if you say them if you're Irish and Yiddish. There are two groups, the Jews and the –
I'm aware that the panel is at least 50% Irish; I don't know about Rose --
There are two groups that do tell jokes. And Seamus and I have had marathon nights of telling jokes that do not end, goes on for hours and hours.
He also told anecdotes. And the moment the naughty word that I love shows the irreverence not only for fame and power, but also for great art. And Seamus told me this account of some Irish literary eminence meeting the young William Butler Yeats. And it was when Yeats was at his most pale-browed, lock of hair on the forehead, cape-wearing, Celtic Twilight phase. And this older Irish literary man is asked, "What did you think of Heaney? What did you think of him? What did you think of young Heaney?" And the eminence says, "Think of him? What did I think of him? I think he should be put back in and fucked-for again." [laughter]
What a wonderful expression. [laughter] Fucked-for again! And the joy on Seamus's face, I'm sure he repeated the phrase twice; I'm sure he said it again in the course of telling that story. And that's one of hundreds.
I'll try to redeem myself [laughter] by reading a small and modest and gently self-mocking – you'll notice that Yeats story, it's not cruel to anyone. It doesn't deny that Yeats became a great artist. And it is this spirit of Heaney, he makes fun of himself or of you or of others; it's remarkably free of any desire or need or impulse to wound or hurt.
And this poem, he's a little bit heretical himself, perhaps. This also just seems so beautiful. I'm sure many people here know the poem, "The Guttural Muse." You saw me dash off; I decided it was important to read a poem, and I took the book, so I'll read this one. I'll close with this.
The Guttural Muse
Late summer, and at midnight I smelt the heat of the day:
At my window over the hotel car park
I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.
Their voices rose up thick and comforting
As oily bubbles that the feeding tench sent up
That evening at dusk – the slimy tench
Once called the "doctor fish" because his slime
Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.
A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.
Thank you. [applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, everybody. Much conversation still to go, but I wanted to let Seamus speak for himself. It turns out I have lots and lots of tapes of Seamus reading for us at Channel 2, often in the Grolier Book Shop, but I haven't seen this for 25 years, at least, but saw it this morning and was just touched by two poems that he read for us in the courtyard at Adams House on a beautiful sunny spring day. And they were two poems among my favorites, many favorites of Seamus's about, in a series of sonnets in honor of his mother, really, or in memory of his mother, one in which they're peeling potatoes in her mother's house, and another in which they're folding bed linens just off the line.
This is raw tape. We did edit it before we put it on air, but this is the raw tape; it has several hesitations. Seamus isn't sure whether he should be looking at me or looking at the camera. Then he sees somebody he knows, and of course he has to stop and wave. But it's the man himself in his beautiful prime. So let's take a few minutes just to go to the Adams House courtyard with the man.
[video played]
HEANEY: These are two poems from a sequence of sonnets written in memory of my mother. She died over two years ago. The first one's the house where she grew up, my maternal grandparents' house. And the second one is a memory of childhood with my mother. So they're just two fairly direct, simple poems.
This first one is the house where she grew up.
Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.
The china cups were very white and big – An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.
The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone
Were present and correct. In case it run, The butter must be kept out of the sun.
And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair.
Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise when you stir.
It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,
Where grandfather is rising from his place
With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head
To welcome a bewildered homing daughter Before she even knocks. "What's this? What's this?" And they sit down in the shining room together.
When all the others have gone out to Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
Do you want me to look at you or it?
LYDON: You do very well talking to the camera, so …
HEANEY: Yeah. These poems are quite personal. I don't like looking at the Frank [the camera man]; I look like I'm pleading for effect.
LYDON: No, no. You like looking at the camera. Or would you rather look at me?
HEANEY: I don't know.
LYDON: I think you do very well with the old malloch[?] there.
HEANEY:
When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From the other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives – Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
Is that Nancy, I'll just speak to Nancy. [Waving to someone]
LYDON: Whenever you say, Thomas. Are you ready, Frank?
FRANK: Recording.
LYDON: Okay.
HEANEY: This is a sonnet from a little sequence I wrote in memory of my mother who died a couple of years ago. It's a memory of folding sheets, which is a very intimate sort of act, I think. And at the same time it's a standoff; you're always pulling against the person at the same time coming close. So it seemed to me a perfect image for certain kinds of parental relationships.
The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was X and she was O
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
[applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: So many Seamus-isms, shall we say, including that "undulating thwack." Among other things, what a magnificent reader, and a slyly dramatic reader of his work, Seamus was, you know?
ROBERT PINSKY: Slightly and measuredly dramatic. He has great respect for the vowels and consonants, and for the melody of every sentence. Ya-da-di-di-diddy. He doesn't ever ham it up in any way to neglect both the cadences which people talk about quite a lot, but also the melodies. Each sentence has a shape like a melody. And when he reads, he reads with a lot of artful … He's used to being a charmer and doesn't stop being a charmer; he's been a charmer all his life. He doesn't stop doing that, but he doesn't milk it. He knows these are very well put together techniquely.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Rose, we're all in this together. What do you hear in that Seamus of the, shall we say, mid-'80s, maybe late '80s.
ROSE STYRON: Oh, I think he was younger than that.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Well, that would have been probably around 1985; it's getting on to 30 years ago.
ROSE STYRON: Oh, 1985 when he did that particular poem?
KEVIN CULLEN: He was 45. The eyebrows had not caught up to the hair yet; it's an Irish thing. [laughter]
ROSE STYRON: What did you ask me? I'm sorry.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: No, I wanted to hear your reactions to just the man reading. There are so many layers of tingle and pleasure.
ROSE STYRON: Oh, I know. He was intimate in every way with both his poetry and the people around him and the issues of the world that he attacked quietly, poetically, loudly. And he was always so present that it's hard to believe he isn't present right this minute.
ROBERT PINSKY: The asides indicate that. If you want us to talk about the video, the little aside about "where should I look, at you or at it?" He's quite candid about what he's thinking, and he says, again without melodrama, "The material is quite personal, I don't want to seem to be pleading." So he's establishing his humanity and that he's vulnerable to looking well or ill. And he's also quite respectful to the people making the video, too. And that all, again it can't be faked; that's all just exactly who he is. What you see is what you get.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: What did you see, Kevin? Jump in.
KEVIN CULLEN: One thing that struck me about his passing – I actually got a call like five in the morning from a friend in Dublin – is how personal so many people both who knew him and who knew him through his art took it. When I did that piece in the Globe, I got hundreds and hundreds of emails from all over the place – Ireland, here, England – and everybody had a Seamus story. And it made me think about … Lowell compared him, obviously, to Yeats. My guess is that William Butler Yeats was not nearly as accessible as Seamus, and that not as many people had Yeats stories as Seamus stories. [laughter] I'm guessing; I have nothing to back that up. But it really is remarkable.
The other thing I saw, the first time I met him I was actually a sophomore at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, and he gave a reading at Herter Hall. I remember this because our Irish history professor, Joe Herndon, said, "You guys got to go see Seamus Heaney." We were, okay. And I'll remember this till I die, that ten students went up to him after this reading and he had time for every one of them. The time he had for everybody, whoever you were, whether you dug ditches at Harvard, whether you … He loved Dublin taximen …
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: They dig ditches at Harvard?
KEVIN CULLEN: They do. To keep people like me out. I remember once he said to me, I don't know the context of the conversation, "Some of the greatest poets in the world drive taxis in Dublin." I can only imagine those conversations between Seamus and the taxi drivers. Actually, Seamus would get in the front seat. That's what the Irish do, they don't get in the back seat of a taxi, you get in the front.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I want to just change the subject a little bit, but I also want to tell a quick story, as quick as I can tell it, the question of Seamus, his conduct in the republic of poetry, as a citizen, a big citizen in that world. Very briefly, there was a night when we were doing the news on Channel 2 and word came that Robert Penn Warren had been named Poet Laureate. And I thought we had to mention it somehow at the end of the news, and I called Rosanna, his daughter, and said, "Do you have a fragment of Robert Penn Warren that we could read to close the news?" She said, "I'll call you back," and she did.
It was a short poem -- and I won't read it all -- but it's a poem called "Tell Me a Story," and it begins: "Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood/By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard/The great geese hoot northward."
She also mentioned that Derek Walcott was a great fan of her father's work, so I said we'll do something with Derek Walcott the next day. And so I said, "Mr. Walcott, would you meet us in the Grolier?" He said, "Of course, I love Red Warren." So he comes into the Grolier Book Shop there on Plympton Street and he says, "Where's Seamus? We need Seamus. Somebody go get Seamus." And Seamus eventually was summoned from Adams House on crutches that winter. But he sat down and he said, "What are we doing?" "Red Warren." "Well, yes, but I don't have the books." And Louisa Solano brought him two or three Penn Warren books. And he went off in a corner and started doing his thing. We have this on video, too, of him sort of scouring these books.
And at the end of 10 or 15 minutes, he said, "I've got what I need." And what poem did he read but "Tell Me a Story." And my heart skipped a beat. I thought, wow, these guys know what they're doing. It's sort of like hitting a curve ball. It's not magic, you have to work it, but he not only then talked out of a great devotion to Penn Warren, interesting reflections also on the whole idea of the Poet Laureate, but I thought so much of his sort of public persona -- one thing, he came and talked -- but his unerring instinct, like a heat-seeking missile for the heart of that story. And I thought the whole universe of poetry has lost something in this big citizen, completely at home with all – Joseph Brodsky, Milosz – he was out there and he knew how to read them all.
ROSE STYRON: And he used to quote them in letters to friends, Brodsky and Milosz and Red Warren. I wonder if he ever met Red Warren; do you know?
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I would expect he did.
ROSE STYRON: Ask Rosanna. I'm curious. Because they were a lot alike in some ways, especially the boyhood and the relation with the land and the sky and the birds.
KEVIN CULLEN: I was struck by how much Seamus was aware – as I said, what I said about the Troubles – influenced so much of his personal life, his professional life, everything about him, but he had this remarkable ability to remain a partisan artist and not have his art hijacked by either violent republicanism or even constitutional nationalism. For years, I remember asking people when I was covering the Troubles, if Heaney's name would come up, “Where did he lean? Did he lean toward the republican side? Did he lean towards the SDLP, the constitutional nationalism?” And there's a very famous confrontation on a train between Belfast and Dublin, in which Seamus was confronted by Danny Morrison, who was a leading member of the IRA and then Sinn Fein. And Morrison more or less said to him, "Hey, why don't you write a poem for us?" And Seamus did write poems that touched on the Troubles very often, not just "Casualty" about his friend Louis, but about the hunger strikers, and about going to the wake of one of them. As he said to Danny Morrison, "I may write a poem, but it won't be for you. If I write it, it will be for me."
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I think that's an incredibly important point. You said it exactly right, he would not be hijacked by politics, and he put the art first and last. Which also connects with the end of that Penn Warren poem, just to read "Tell Me a Story," but it ends:
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
Now, those were Robert Penn Warren’s words, but Seamus read it almost as his own. And it is, in service of your point, I think, Kevin, that politics is politics, and it is a century and a moment of mania, but tell me a story of deep delight while we're add it.
Robert, I put it to you, who have we got on the bench? Who fills, so unpretentiously, that world ear, world voice?
ROBERT PINSKY: There are many wonderful Irish poets. Michael Longley was in town not long ago. Michael Longley is, I think, a great poet. And predicting these things and ranking these things, I remember reading about … The Atlantic Monthly had a big occasion, “What will we do now that the giants are all gone?” And the giants were John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Longfellow. We'd had this great period, what next? And of course, American poetry was about to become the modernist poetry that influenced poets from New Zealand, to Betsjoeanaland, to Brazil. So we don't know.
But there is only one Seamus. There is no Seamus before him; there won't be a Seamus after him. There'll be somebody doing the art, because it's a very fundamental art. It's like dancing or singing. Academic prejudices may not make it seem that way, and one reason I valued Seamus and his friendship and his work is that he was scholarly, he studied poetry, he knew a lot, and he was free from the kind of academic logic-chopping or pedagogical emphasis on beginning with interpretation. He knew you begin with pleasure. And somebody we don't know is working on that right now.
KEVIN CULLEN: If Seamus was here, I have no doubt that he'd tell you to read Paul Muldoon. He'd tell you to read Greg Delanty, the great Cork-born poet, who is up in Vermont now, and was very, very close to Seamus and would be considered one of his protégés. I don't know if any poet had more protégés than Seamus. And not just Irish guys and not just Irish women. He just had so many people that would have felt to be a protégé of his, because of his generosity.
I was listening to Irish radio in the aftermath of his death, and so many of them were on Irish radio talking about … They approached him out of nowhere and he would take their poems and he would read them, and he would send them long letters about what he liked, what he didn't, what they needed to work on. And I really wonder if there's any other poet in the world, particularly a Nobel Laureate, who took the time to encourage young poets like Seamus did.
ROBERT PINSKY: It's true that he was wonderful that way. I feel like my job is to always put in something a little bit subversive. He was also aware of all the envy, that Ireland was a small country. I've read a lot of Seamus Heaney tributes in the recent weeks. I can't remember whose has this in it, but I remember hearing the same thing from Seamus. He said one of the first things he had to do in response to the Nobel Prize was write letters to all the other Irish poets of apology. [laughter]
KEVIN CULLEN: That's awesome.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Robert, I wonder, is there more to say about the Chekhov connection? You speak of great, great artists who were great human beings. Seamus wrote about Chekhov, "Chekhov on Sakhalin."
ROBERT PINSKY: Which is the model of what Rose was talking about, of having a social conscience …
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Yes, speak about it.
ROBERT PINSKY: … and of the kind of generosity that Kevin was talking about. As I began, sometimes you read the lives of great artists and they're appalling; they're not necessarily good people. What's interesting to me about Seamus – I'm not quite sure I know enough about Chekhov to say the same – is that the same qualities that made him a very, very admirable, model person are qualities that are in the poetry; they're part of the art. So it's not first there's this nice guy and then he writes these poems. It was all of a piece.
And the friendship, the gift for friendship, the gift for saying, "This is Kevin Cullen, tell him nothing," that not unaffected pleasure in all kinds of people is there in the writing, is part of the writing. I'm trying to emphasize an unsentimental side of it; it was also there in saying, "I'm not going to write a poem for you, I'm going to write a poem for me." He could be pretty fierce in protecting his own autonomy and his own art.
And I can tell you a time he … I won't go into the details of my decision, but I was making a decision to go with different jobs and where I was going to live, and various people were telling me this and that. And Seamus asked, "Well, which would be best for your writing?" Period. "You've got a family. Let's assume that you're going to support them, take care of them; all that will go well. What's going to be best for your art, what's number one?" And it was very clarifying.
ROSE STYRON: It was amazing how he looked everyone in the eye and knew who they were.
I just saw a letter that he had written to his friend Bill Shipsey, who's the one that started Art for Amnesty. He's a barrister in Ireland, quite a wonderful man, and the letter was sent to me by Bill, who said, "It was like losing my father a second time when he died." And he sent me a few letters that Seamus had written him recently to show that he not only cared about Havel and Chekhov, whom you've mentioned, but deeply about Marina Tsvetaeva, whose diaries he had just read and talked about at length. And Brodsky. So he was involved in younger and older poets and what they had to think. They're quite remarkable, some of these letters. And earlier this year, I guess it's been almost a year now, he was asked to write a poem on the spur of the moment for Loretta Brennan Glucksman, who was retiring as head of the American Ireland Foundation, is that …
KEVIN CULLEN: The Fund.
ROSE STYRON: And he produced, on the spur of the moment, and came to New York to give it to her this many, many-stanza wonderful poem. So he cared about people individually, and he really understood what the live and the dead were about.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Among other things, he was a wonderful prose writer, too. Do I have time to read just a little fragment of his, I think it was his Nobel Prize speech. But he told this story and he told it to us on the radio, too, about an incident in the Troubles. Bear with me.
He's talking about:
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men, and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road.
Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here." As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were
Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward.
Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said, No, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line. But instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, Catholics presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
A perfectly awful story, but Seamus concludes about it:
It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.
That touched the risk for something better. It touched him and it touches all of us.
Is there a last word, Kevin? There's never a last word.
KEVIN CULLEN: There's never a last word when it comes to Seamus Heaney, but the one thing I was so struck by in the aftermath of his death, I received a lot of emails in response to what I wrote in the Globe, and the best part of it was almost three-quarters of them said, "Since hearing that Seamus died, I've gone back and I've started rereading his poems." And I think that's the greatest tribute we could pay to him.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Yeah, please. Rose, a last word?
ROSE STYRON: Passing it on to Robert.
ROBERT PINSKY: I was thinking about the prose passage you read and memorable phrases in it to me include, "The man was caught between witness and dread." A mournful pair of nouns.
And then after the anecdote, "the interstellar cold." So you have "witness and dread" and "interstellar cold." And the last noun in the piece is "music."
KEVIN CULLEN: I'm guessing if he was here that he'd pull you aside, Robert, and say, "I really enjoyed that you got curses said on the stage." [laughter]
ROBERT PINSKY: No question.
KEVIN CULLEN: But he would say, "In the meantime, that'll be three Our Fathers and four Hail Marys." [laughter]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, all. And thank you, wonderful audience. [applause]
THE END