Seamus Heaney on Paul Muldoon

[Seamus Heaney and friend]

A couple of points of interest from the discussion last night:

First, thanks to Gregory for pointing out that Seamus Heaney's review of Paul Muldoon's The Annals of Chile (1994), containing the poem "Incantata," is included in his book of selected essays, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (london: Faber, 2002).

The relevant passage runs as follows:

In Paul Muldoon's new book .... personal grief and creative glee keep playing into one another's hands. One of several extraordinary poems here is called 'Incantata', a lamentation for the premature death by cancer of a young and gifted artist. This is both a cry of heartbreak and a virtuoso performance. The higher the lift-off the poem achieves, the deeper the registers it engages ...

'Incantata' commemorates the life and work of Mary Farl Powers, an artist who was much cherished because of the intensity of her striving for spiritual and technical perfection. 'Incantata' is an example of what we might call 'the Lycidas syndrome,' whereby one artist's sense of vocation and purpose is sent into crisis by the untimely death of another. Here Paul Muldoon is possessed by a subject that puts all his brilliance to the test, with the result that he blossoms into truth and humanizes his song to an extraordinary degree. [395-96]

Elsewhere he refers to Muldoon as "one of the era's true originals."

The 'Lycidas' reference is of course to Milton (Shelley's 'Adonais,' on the death of Keats, might be another example - or, for that matter, Tennyson's In Memoriam).

I don't know how Paul Muldoon would have reacted to that "blossoms into truth" phrase - or the one about "humanizing his song" ... Did that have anything to do (as Gregory suggested in discussion) with the tone of Muldoon's own remarks about Heaney in his recent book of essays The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures (New York: Farrar Straus Girous, 2006)?

One of the poignancies of "Keeping Going" is the speaker's assertion - one we don't expect from a Heaney speaker - ... [of] the insurmountable fact of the limitations of art:

But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong

This is not to say that a poem ... doesn't have some efficacy in the world, doesn't effect some change. It must change something, as these ... examples so elegantly display. One of the ways in which they do this is to clear their own space, bringin us 'all together in a foretime,' if I may borrow that phrase from section 3 of "Keeping Going" ... This condition of a "foretime" of the poem is, yet again, a version of what I described earlier as the "problem" to which the poem is a "solution" ... We appeal to the "foretime" of "Keeping Going" and recognise ... that to carry itself forward in the world - testing itself, and us, against a sense of how it itself "was / In the begining, is now and shall be' - is indeed the end of the poem.

This almost sounds as if he regards poems as self-justifying, posing a "problem" to which they themselves are the "solution." It's certainly a far less ringing pronouncement than Heaney's.

Oh, and as a footnote, I checked my ownb copy of Graham Lindsay's Lazy Wind Poems, which certainly does contain pp. 25-40. I can make a copy of them if you like, Bruce, but it might be better to send the book back to AUP and get a replacement one with the full text in it ...

Poetry Session 3: Graham Lindsay

[Photograph: Bill Lindsay (nzepc)]

If you've read the interview with Graham Lindsay which I included in your course anthology, you'll remember that he talks about his "notebook process":

"I started writing and publishing when I was in my late teens, and that’s twenty, twenty-five years ago [the interview was conducted in 1997]. Over that period of time I’ve been using a kind of notebook process. When something occurs to you, you have a notebook handy so that you can actually put down some approximation of that idea or thought or feeling at the time, whilst you’re hot, whilst you’re familiar with it. So, having adopted that approach, I’ve found that I don’t really know at the time that I’m writing something, whether or not I’m going to be able to do anything more with it. I’ve got to go through it, perhaps months, years later, to see what is of interest there, what I can do something more with.

At this point Graham got up to show me the notebooks in his desk. The bottom drawer was packed full of red, hard-backed 4B1 notebooks. Above was another drawer, perhaps slightly less full. There were, he told me, 132 of them.

During their third birthday symposium in July 2004, Graham was presented with one of the nzepc's special Tapa notebooks. He returned it to Auckland University Library's Special collections for archiving in July 2005. Here's one of the pages:

[10-2-4T]

she said they get some
weird people off the street
during the writing courses
I said I'm one of those people
pretty soon she made a gesture to the effect
'the purpose of my visit had been met'
maybe she shifted in her chair

Yeah, Graham! I fear I'm one of those people, too ...

only two or three weeks ago we said to each other,
How long has she got? and agreed
two, maybe three years at the most.
The following week she was dead. That last night,

following her up the stairs (my job in case she fell -
he daughter pulling her by wrists) I said the usual
encouraging things like Shake a leg, Granny, and
Go Granny, you're doing well (she had lost the ability to retort).

She put everything into it,
as if it were the last leg to the summit.

Graham also provided an introduction to the notebook:

I felt really honoured to be presented with my tapa notebook. Stephen Innes's choice for me turned out to be a good one too. The cover looks to me to suggest a cosmological scene or one to do with navigation, a dark star seen over the shoulder of a solar flare or above an outrigger sail.

I decided to use my notebook to present a selection of notes from my time as the 2004 Ursula Bethell / Creative New Zealand Resident in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury. Michele indicated some graphic elements would also be welcome so I began sketching signs on roads and pathways on my cycle route to and from the university.

I've been keeping notebooks for ages, but I've never tried to develop a handwriting style. Occasionally, I've been impressed when a 't' makes a sort of mast or the looping tail on a 'g' looks pretty wild. But I've always considered notebooks as places to catch thoughts and language rather than aesthetic objects or places where thoughts are completed. I usually go back to see what still interests me to see if I can do anything more to it to make it publishable.

So the idea of making a selection from my notebooks, even though it seemed straightforward, caused various performance anxieties, like having my teaching inspected, or replicating a 'spontaneous' conversation.

Which is why I thought Murray Edmond was onto it when he used a ringbinder for his 'tapa': if he made a mistake, he would be able to have another go. I'm not saying he did, just that he could.

In fact I was given two tapa notebooks, I used the other one to do dummy runs in. (It has a cover that vaguely looks like a handmirror with a pixie face in it.)

I did some drafting on my computer too. Though I often went back to the original wordings and constructions because of not having an open-ended amount of time. In the interim I came across this quote from Toss Woollaston: 'Smoothing over work you have just done is going backwards. Tidying up is the devil—you don't touch that in painting. If relations are wrong you make huge alterations, you don't tidy up—you repaint the whole thing every time you touch it.' (From Gregory O'Brien's book Lands & Deeds). I think that's relevant? Also I roughed out a layout on my computer.

I had thought about making my own 'tapa' notebook using locally made paper and learning how to bookbind. I had thought about learning calligraphy. I've always admired my father's handwriting, he used to transcribe his favourite poems by Chinese poets onto a newsprint block. He had a beautiful hand. I've hankered for years to have a go at painting my poems. These thoughts were all part of that. When I accepted Michele's invitation to meet a deadline though I had to get on with it and so the originally intended format was retained.

The title The Priests of Nothingness comes from a quote, which I have included in the notebook, about these Japanese monks called Fuke monks who used the flute as a meditation tool. As the quote says, 'They would walk through the streets . . . trying to play the one note that would enlighten the world.' That's partly what I think poets try to do. I think poets are priests of nothingness.

curtains shifting in light air

shaft like a lift well
on its side:

at the near end
blue light playing along its edges

the far opening on smokey-grey
star clouds

~

It's this "notebook process" I'd like to start off with at our session on Monday. You'll note that the tapa notebook process was far more elaborate - almost staged, in fact. The spontaneity of a notebook can hardly be evident when you've done "dummy runs" in another notebook first, and even done some drafting on the computer first.

I guess that's the reason why Graham had provided that semi-apologetic introduction to "The Priests of Nothingness," as he ended up calling the collection as a whole.

I guess I'd like to talk about the Beats (Ginsberg, Kerouac et al.) and their cult of spontaneity in word in deed. Then go on to Black Mountain (Olson & Creeley) and the "open form" they introduced to NZ poetry in the 70s, when Lindsay first started writing and publishing. I'd also like to talk about Zen, domesticity, George Oppen, and a host of other subjects -- but we'll see hwo far we get.

In any case, this conversation can segue over into the discussion of Peter Reading and Paul Muldoon we're timetabled to have after mid-year break (note the change in the timetable: two poetry sessions in a row, sandwiching the holidays, and then two fiction sessions in a row).

Reviews: Graham Lindsay

Graham Lindsay, Lazy Wind Poems. Auckland: AUP, 2003. ISBN 1-86940-285-5. 72 pp. RRP $21.99.

All of the books in this issue of brief deserve far more space than I can give them, but that goes particularly for Graham Lindsay’s latest. It’s nice to see the old master at work again, and to see assembled the inspired domesticity poems which have been appearing here and there over the last few years. I actually wrote Graham a fan letter when I read the painfully brilliant “ballad of Fanny Grace” in brief 16, but seeing it in context now makes me think even more of it: “Love your mother-in-law / when her daughter / (finally coming to bed) / tells you how she was / just tucking her mother / in for the night” [56-7] – it’s tempting just to go on reciting from this succession of mad, pointed anecdotes about senile dementia and the love and good humour that make it possible to endure it.

The book’s divided into four parts: “making love,” which takes us from an ultrasound scan of the new baby, through childbirth, birthdays, first words: “ ‘Bye bye dart’ [17]. There’s a lot of babytalk in there, and a lot of household detail of the kind which I’d normally skip, but Graham makes it work in two ways: firstly through the sheer fervour of his surrender to parental love: “Close the little papa’s eyes / close’m eyes, close’m eyes” [11], and secondly by his skill in ambushing us with the disconcerting detail:

He’s the only

person in the world
I’d let use my handkerchief
then put it back in my pocket. [19]

The second section, “you are here,” begins with “cab dub,” a brilliant and disconcerting series of discourses from the backseat of a taxi-cab, then moves through rugby to a strangely dislocated local version of Peter Rabbit. “Big feet,” the third section, consists largely of family poems (including the mother-in-law one quoted above), and finally “swingdoor” takes us back around into the poet’s more conventionally introspective territory: “All this beauty fading away.” [72] This really is a book to die for.

- Jack Ross, brief 29 (2004): 82.

Lindsay, Graham

[NZ Book Council Writers Pages]


Graham Lindsay (b. 1952)

Author Pages:

Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive

NZ Book Council

nzepc

Bibliography

POETRY:

Thousand-Eyed Eel. Taylors Mistake: Hawk Press, 1976.
Public. Dunedin: Ridge-Pole, 1980.
Big Boy. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986.
Return to Earth. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1991.
The Subject. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994.
Legend of the Cool Secret. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 1999.
Lazy Wind Poems. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003.

EDITED:

Morepork. 1-3. Dunedin: Ridge-Pole (1979-80).