Dear Sword,
To put the matter in context. Here is your response to my article with my
reaction to it below:
Response to Desmond Sword’s Response to my article
‘The Dissembling Poet Seamus Heaney and the Avant-garde’
Desmond Sword's Response
(March 31, 2009)
I have been following the scuffles on the cobbles of cyberville’s poetry village
which Side’s article kicked off and have to say, what a palava over a few
sentences by the Mossbawn magus. McKendrick’s initial assessment seems
about right. Side is interrogating what Famous said, with all the relish of a
traffic warden on price work. I have no problem with this, as I love a good row
as much as the next bore, and hopefully the three and four way straightner
between the two factions, will produce a bit more virtual rounds before
everybody gets bored or all blathered out and retreats to their respective
corners with a bit more ammo and animosity in the hearth for another flare up.
I think it only fait to point out I have no affiliation with anyone gassing here. I
am a bloke in a bedsit trying to get my own laughably titled career up and
running, and what struck me about Side’s rant, is the earnest, serious, self-
righteous po-facedness of it all, unleavened by any spark of wit or humour.
There is a notable absence of gags, which is excusable if the language is
shaped such as to hold the eye with its inventiveness, but the laboured long
winded phrases of the prosecuting doctoral student, read as if they are
written by… well, a phd student in the place of pretend, the try-out gaffe
which prepares us for real life by allowing us to indulge in exploratory stabs of
intellectually sounding chat – to approximate what we hope will lead us to the
real thing after the ticket’s been got and, qualified, we exit and drop the
linguistic tricks and ticks indicative of prolonged exposure at the coal face of
diligent, detached and dispassionate academic study.
The natural audience for this article, the language of it suggests, is a phd
student’s supervisor, as it is little more than extended riff from a jump in point
of Stepping Stones where the honey throated Irish warbler says the avant
garde is old fashioned – which Side believes worthy of a thorough and rigorous
interrogation, and uses mores and sensibilities of the student essay to do so,
and delivers in language one expects of a young fogey earnestly plodding in a
hutch at the academy, taking things very seriously because his own primary
intellectual audience for the last ten years up till 2007, was a phd supervisor
and a classroom of earnest wide eyed students in the teaching roles he took
on when not seeking poetic keys to the universe, passing on a hard won
mystical wisdom which our star Rumpole of the Jacket Magazine, begins
demolishing H’s rep with at the start of his cerebral prosecution of a man far,
far more famous than himself:
“Several things about this statement need to be addressed, so I will go
through it step-by-step to do so. When Heaney says that the term “avant-
garde” is old-fashioned, what does this really say regarding the term’s
significance in relation to his own poetic ideals?”
They *need to be addressed* Side tells us, but the closest he gets to
informing us why is very opaque and after finishing the article one is left with
an aftertaste which suggests the primary impelling force on a human level, is
the good old green eye rather than any burning conviction that some
theoretical travesty of natural law has been occasioned by a man nearing
seventy years of age, ten years with a buss pass and Side piously informing us
that his writing and blather is but the posturing of a sly, self-centred poet
who, by the way Side speaks of him, can’t wait to cross the Styx and get
reading what people are saying about him after his encounter with Charon,
which suggests
1 – Side does not conceive Seamus Heaney the human being, and in his place,
has a mere textual construction of Heaney the Writer, who was put on this
earth solely to wind Jeff up — enough to spend a long time and much effort in
seeking to prosecute him as a heretic and chancer who just sort of happened
to end up as the most significant living poet of the latter third of the 20C
writing in English, by a combination of lucky accident, scheming and
diabolically unfair practices which so offend the morally spotless Saint Jeff the
Inquisitor doing it for the poor deluded folk who think Heaney might actually
have a bit of talent.
By the time I reached this paragraph, I was ready to agree with anything Side
said, because I was so bored:
“It should be pointed out that defamiliarisation is dependent upon vision in
order to revive our awareness of objects that have become over-familiar
through constant exposure to them. To this extent, it is an empiricist mode of
writing. Seen in this light, Heaney’s transfigurations are not as transcendental
as they initially appeared to be.”
This language serves as an example of why the evidence for the prosecution is
so unconvincing. Side takes the very poetic qualities in Heaney’s word play,
and attempts to hold them up to a super-rational light of linguistic inquiry
which displays none of the inventiveness and originality he seems to be
arguing for.
He takes laughable liberties by inventing a self fulfilling range of traits, much as
an amateur psychologist or novelist practicing on people at bus stops would
decant into their journals a whole imagined inner topography based on the
fleeting glimpse: but with the difference is that Jeff is doing it straight. No
gags, where’s the wordplay that arrests the eye from start to finish? Nowhere
and nothing to detain us but academic argot and the poetic legaleeze leading
nowhere exciting or original. Insult the man, tear him down, administer a good
kicking, pan the git, but show us why and with passion, both of which are
(unfortunately) not in attendance and so Side’s attempt at immortality on the
back of what the immensely more exciting live Tipperary poet Noel Sweeney
terms: “a simple gentle country man” – didn’t land a blow except to show
himself as a bloke whose ambition is limited by a sense of feeling hard done by
and sublimating that into raving at the wind, his straw man here still far more
interesting in both print and (one suspects) person than his would be literary
assassin.
Jeffrey Sides Response to this
(March 30, 2009)
Desmond, your personal attacks on me are uncalled for, and you make several
assumptions about me that are wrong (such as that I am still doing my PhD,
when, in fact, I completed it some time ago). Nowhere in your response to my
Heaney article do you address the issues I raise, being more content to make
sweeping statements and attempts at wit—badly typed by the way.
You assume, without any evidence whatsoever, that my motivation for being
critical of Heaney is because of a secret admiration for him, when you say that
my ‘impelling force on a human level, is the good old green eye’. But let me
assure you that this is not the case. If it were so, I would have written a
criticism of Ashbery who I do admire and who far outstrips Heaney in poetic
talent and modesty. I am one of those people who when they admire someone
keep silent about it. It seems to be you who is envious of whoever it may be,
as may be indicated when you say about yourself: ‘I am a bloke in a bedsit
trying to get my own laughably titled career up and running’. I am sorry you
are in this position, and I know how hard it can be getting heard, but
projecting some of your insecurities onto me is hardly called for.
Another thing you seem overly upset about is that I write in an academic
register, rather than colloquially. I am sorry for that, but it is something of a
habit, and I have always considered such a register respectful to readers. I am
also sorry that you see my writing as devoid of wit or humour and that it has,
as you say, ‘a notable absence of gags’ (whatever that means).
When you quote the following from my article:
‘It should be pointed out that defamiliarisation is dependent upon vision in
order to revive our awareness of objects that have become over-familiar
through constant exposure to them. To this extent, it is an empiricist mode of
writing. Seen in this light, Heaney’s transfigurations are not as transcendental
as they initially appeared to be.’
Then say:
‘This language serves as an example of why the evidence for the prosecution
is so unconvincing. Side takes the very poetic qualities in Heaney’s word play,
and attempts to hold them up to a super-rational light of linguistic inquiry
which displays none of the inventiveness and originality he seems to be
arguing for’
You do not address the cogency or otherwise of the quote, but the manner in
which it is written. You confuse the language of academic register with that of
poetry. Perhaps this distinction should have been mentioned to you at some
point in your poetic journey. .
Finally, I have to take issue with you when you say: ‘what struck me about
Side’s rant, is the earnest, serious, self-righteous po-facedness of it all’,
because it is you who seems to have an elevated sense of your own
importance regarding poetry. Here are some extracts about yourself from your
blog (http://desmondswords.blogspot.com/)
‘This site you are now reading was kept by me for 8 months as a means to
explore and bring to the surface the various disparate voices in my head; part
of the process called finding your voice. It is the place I left the lyric poetry I
wrote. The other sites linked to this blog (click view my complete profile on
your immediate right) house the other styles of writing. Scalljah is comedy,
Desmond Swords—Poetics started out as a place to put my avant-garde
poems, and after a while developed into a place for experimental prose, and
As/Is is a collaborative blog I still post on and is where I honed my
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry skills under the silent tutelage of the conveyer belt
of Post Modern verse, Sheila E Murphy, who is a natural and very generous
poet.’
‘I trained for 3 years at writing school in my home town of Ormskirk on the
West coast of the UK, (BA Hons Writing Studies and Drama) before decamping
to Dublin to chase the dream of becoming a poet, which seems to be what has
happened.’
‘What I wrote on 14/11/06 was just another piece of writing on my journey to
self confirmation as a poet.’
‘I write in all genres of poetry and prose, which is why it’s taken a few years
for the voice to come through.’
‘Lots of people calling themselves poets but only very few actually are.’
I didn’t know if my dream of wanting to be a poet was me fooling myself or if
the spark of intuition that set it off was based in something real, so I decided
to cover my backside by learning to write in all poetical forms, from strict
meter to cutting edge avant-garde and slam; and to centre my practice in
memorisation, just like the Irish Fili, or “bards” who were in existence for about
2000 years up until Cromwell came to Ireland at the start of 17C and this
ancient tradition collapsed.
You then go on to include a very poor poem that you have written
called ‘Ormskirk’ that begins like this:
I grew up in the womb of West Lancs, where
skinheads dwelt in bushes by train tracks and
cut childrens’ heads off if ever they dared
go under the tunnel after the last
light had sunk signalling it was time to
come home. Playtime finished at sunset when
I was seven, and in the darkness spooks
ghosts, ghouls or Father Christmas could descend
into the night depending on what time
of year it was.
Now who is it, I wonder, who sounds self-righteous, earnest and po-faced?
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