Seamus Heaney and all that…
There seems to be some debate raging in the pages of Jacket magazine, over the writing and the legacy of Seamus Heaney. Jeffrey Side has written an article somewhat critical of Heaney, in which he takes issue (as a jumping-off point at any rate) with Heaney’s dismissal of the avant-garde, and the ‘alternative poetries’ that exist in Britain, principally one supposes the Cambridge school and their various affiliates. The article (here: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/heaney-side.shtml) is largely written in response to Heaney’s original interview with Denis O’Driscoll, here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=182586. There are also a number of responses, the most entertaining of which comes from Jamie McKendrick (to which you can link through from the main article, ‘Letter to the Editor’).
There are I think a number of points here, not many of which, to be truthful, bear too much going over. The dismissal of Heaney, and the response (still in it’s early gestation, I would accept) does seem to be a rehearsal of that familiar old debate between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘avant-garde’ poetry ’scenes’. I remember reading a similar set of exchanges in response to Don Paterson’s TS Eliot lecture a few years ago, in which the familiar poles reasserted themselves. I must confess that I join this debate quite late on, but I must similarly confess to thinking, on reading these exchanges, ‘a plague on both your houses’.
To be sure, Heaney (whether it’s an informal comment or not) does seem to be on to something when he questions the willingness to ‘engage’ of a figure such as Prynne; just as his implied criticism of the avant-garde poets as lacking the ‘rooted normality of the major talent’ reads as a little too calculatedly unkind, or perhaps better, a little too clumsily provocative. A bit like conceding that a girl friend is attractive, ‘in an obvious way’.
But then the whole debate has something of the flavour of a marriage long gone awry. Whilst accepting that the argument ‘why can’t we all just get along’ is a tad facile, like that sad truculent step-child who might have uttered it, I do find myself seized of the desire to skulk, unhappily away…
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