I saw Hughes and Heaney together once at Loughborough, and the Hughes
reading shocked me because of the complete indifference to his own written
presentation. His line endings (I was very preoccupied with line endings
then, trying to work out why my favorite poets then like Dorn and Creeley,
finished lines where they did) bore no relation to what he uttered, indeed
it was obvious that the lines could never be spoken, even intoned, as
written. I felt that he was perpetrating some fraud. Heaney's performance
included the poem about seeing a skunk and being reminded of his wife back
in Ireland. Its embarassing claim to self-revelation about his intimate
life felt manipulative, because we were supposedly meant to feel an
intimacy with him. Recently I saw Heaney in Stirling and this time he was
very Bardic, speaking to a rapt audience, faces in a trance, as he spoke
one poem without a text by looking into space and pulling words out of
space as if finding them there, and then read a poem based on the Oresteia,
epic values for poetry. As was said by Ric, a radio two broadcast. For what
it's worth, I think that Heaney does the hegemonic poem reasonably well,
and even allows more when the Irish politics takes momentary control of the
poem.
To understand more about greatness and self-presentation in
confession and anecdote, see Neal Bowers Words for the Taking, about his
poems about his dead father which were plagiarised by another writer, and
notice how Bowers insists on the way these poems are his possessions, like
family heirlooms or emblems of status.
Peter Middleton
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