“‘Does anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?’
‘Saints and poets, maybe, they do some.'”
—Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Seamus Heaney died last Friday. He was only 74– a bit young, in my opinion, in this late age, to shuffle off this mortal coil. His death is our loss entirely.
I don’t know his work well, which seems its own loss– as if I should have seized the opportunity to read him while he was still among us, the potential existent, I suppose, to write and thank him for his words. I first learned of him in my in-laws’ family room years ago via a visiting friend of a friend. This fellow was lanky and had hair that fell poetically over his forehead, and he carried a worn volume by Seamus (may I call him by his first name?) and somehow recognized in me a person who would be interested in poetry. “Seamus Heaney,” he said to me. “Seamus Heaney. You’ve got to read this guy.”
A few years later, Heaney won the Nobel Prize for literature.
But I didn’t read him them. I gave almost no time at all– in those days– to reading poetry. Novels were the thing. And though I was raised in the sort of family that was given to sudden outbursts of poetry recitation, we didn’t have volumes of it lying about on coffee tables.
Then my babies were born, and over the first decade or so of their lives I read them everything that A. A. Milne had scribed in verse for his own little boy, and also poetry by Rudyard Kipling and some others. Now, occasionally, my own children will recite a line or two by Milne. That’s lovely.
But my love for poetry– for grown-up (?) poetry– my need for poetry has developed quietly, too quietly, even, to take me by surprise. Years ago at a writer’s conference, I found myself buying absolutely everything that Luci Shaw had to offer: all of them slender books with beautifully photographed covers, five or six books, I think, that I maybe couldn’t afford.
There’s something romantic in that, isn’t there: poor, and buying poetry.
But I wasn’t so very poor, and romance isn’t the thing. Not for me, anyway, in poetry.
It’s the words. The words. The crystalline concision. The way that one word– just that one– will do, and does, demanding that one sit with it, attend, not meditate on it exactly but just allow it to sit, to sink, trailing its connotations even as one continues through the poem, gathering as if by static pull more words as one goes. By the end of the poem, breathless, one is laden with and lifted by them, transfixed, changed.
One recent summer, I took to saying words in threes in my mind: whatever words came, listing endlessly in triplicate, fascinated by the sounds they made in my head, marveling at their irrelevance to one another and their potential, by their proximity, to make (perhaps?) meaning: “singular,” “matted,” “triangulate.” “bison,” “metaphorical,” “archipelago.”
That kind of thing. Weird, I know– and immeasurably satisfying.
Visiting my sister and brother-in-law became–in new ways–a feast. Christopher Janke is a poet and also the editor of Slope Editions, and so their home is full of volumes of poetry. Through them, I made the acquaintance of the work of Jonah Winter and Kirsten Kaschock, whose poetry book, Unfathoms, is a word one could think about for days. I also met Betsy Wheeler and Penelope Austin, who does not have a website because she passed away before Slope published her work. But I have posted the work of Janke, Wheeler, and Austin here on this blog before, and works by both Janke and Austin hang framed for frequent perusal in my house. I will, no doubt, talk about them– especially Janke– here again.
Of course I still read novels. One must read what one is writing– that, I know, is certain. We none of us invent the wheel, you know. We learn from others.
But still I return to poetry. It is irresistible to me– both for the words and the spaces between them. It’s the space poets make, I think, that invites us in. Space for the words to take effect. So accommodating, a poet. Kind, in that way. So much writing has too many words.
On the night last February that I finished the second draft of my novel, after a solitary and celebratory dinner that included a lovely glass of prosecco and an arugula salad, I purchased (also in celebration) a volume of Seamus Heaney’s poetry in a used book store in downtown Charlottesville. I was reading that very book within the week that the poet died.
May I say it here? I will say it here, belatedly and whole-hearted: Thank you, Mr. Heaney, for your words– crystalline, spare. And thank you for celebrating with me.
And I would like to introduce you to another of my favorites, young and decidedly living– living the way that poets do, I think, which is so much more than the rest of us. Hannah Mitchell is a former student of mine, but I claim no credit for her talent, as she was my student for a brief spell, in an expository writing (of all things!) course that I taught bi-weekly (was it?) for the space of (less than) a month.
Hannahthewriter clearly understands what words can do, and occasionally news of her posting arrives in my email: small feasts that I openly instantly or save for later but always read and re-read again. She writes here, and if ever you have the option to read my work (here) or hers, you must absolutely always choose hers. Go there, and you will know why.
For my part, my email recently made an “improvement” to my account: it automatically determines whether my incoming missives are “primary” or “social” or “promotions,” and it relegates them accordingly. This is helpful on many levels, but it was not at all helpful to discover that, recently, Hannah’s posts had been deemed “social.”
This, I believe, is an error. Poetry is not social– or not merely, anyway. Poetry is primary. It is absolutely primary.
—Hannah Mitchell
