A good response Jeffrey.
I think Heaney's take on it is a result of a late developed
defensiveness. He is not the only highly successful mainstream figure
who has been forced, by the avant guard's failure to die off quietly,
to address an issue which is clearly irritating to him. By now it is
clear that any future reassessment of poetry written in English from
these times is going to be faced by a much wider span of different
poetries than people like Heaney ever imagined would happen. The huge
success of avant writing from the U.S. and the ever more apparent
importance and relevance of the Cambridge school and other Brit late
modernists (or whatever) has given such writing and poetics a lasting
status regardless of what happens in the mealy mouthed broadsheet
reviews. In this situation Heaney's status as a 'great poet of our
times' is under threat, and the poetics he has been a life-long
champion of has to compete with poetic approaches that make his appear
tired and irrelevant. Hence the tetchiness.
This is not a put-down of Heaney as a poet by the way. You know what
it's a put-down of.....
Tim A.
On 21 Mar 2009, at 15:57, Jeffrey Side wrote:
> New blog entry:
> http://jeffreyside.tripod.com/
> "The Dissembling Poet: Seamus Heaney and the Avant-garde"
> I came across an interesting interview with Seamus Heaney (a recent
> recipient of the David Cohen prize for literature, being awarded
> £40,000) by Dennis O'Driscoll (‘Beyond All This Fiddle’ ) where
> Heaney says about the avant-garde:
> ‘It’s an old-fashioned term by now. In literature, nobody can cause
> bother any more. John Ashbery was a kind of avant-garde poet
> certainly and now he’s become a mainstream voice. The work of the
> “Language Poets” and of the alternative poetries in Britain—
> associated with people in Cambridge University like J. H. Prynne—is
> not the charlatan work some perceive it to be; however, these poets
> form a kind of cult that shuns general engagement, regarding it as a
> vulgarity and a decadence. There’s a phrase I heard as a criticism
> of W. H. Auden and I like the sound of it: somebody said that he
> didn’t have the rooted normality of the major talent. I’m not sure
> the criticism applies to Auden, but the gist of it is generally
> worth considering. Even in T. S. Eliot, the big, normal world comes
> flowing around you. Robert Lowell went head-on at the times—there
> was no more literary poet around, but at the same time he was like a
> great cement mixer: he just shovelled the world in and it delivered.
> Now that’s what I yearn for—the cement mixer rather than the
> chopstick.’
> Several things about this statement need to be addressed, so I will
> go through it step-by-step to do so.....
>
> http://jeffreyside.tripod.com/
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