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President Sanford Ungar welcomes the audience
left to right: President Sanford Ungar, Beth Ungar, M.D., founding Kratz Center Donor Eleanor Kratz Denoon, Ashby Denoon, Seamus Heaney
Heaney with Chester Wickwire
...with unidentified but clearly enthusiastic fan. |
Seamus Heaney at Goucher College
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Elizabeth Spires introduces Seamus Heaney:
On behalf of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing, it's my privilege to
introduce Seamus Heaney and welcome him to Goucher. Mr. Heaney is the author of 22 books of poetry, criticism,
and translations, most recently ELECTRIC LIGHT, a collection of poems, and the
just-published FINDERS KEEPERS, a selection of essays written over the past 30
years. From the very beginning of
his distinguished and enormously productive career, his poetry has received a
cascade of well-deserved honors, culminating in the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1995. With his translation of Beowulf,
published two years ago, Mr. Heaney found himself--- perhaps to his surprise ---
on many international bestseller lists and shortlisted, along with the third
Harry Potter novel, for England's largest literary prize, the Whitbread Book of
the Year. Beowulf won.
A little about Seamus Heaney: he was born in Northern Ireland in 1939,
the eldest of nine children, to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm,
Mossbawn, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast in County Derry.
I mention this fact because that region has been, and continues to be,
the "enabling source" for much of Heaney's poetry.
In his Nobel lecture, "Crediting Poetry," he writes: "I
wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reality, and rejoiced most when
the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in
for or stood up for or stood its ground against."
At a certain point, living with his wife and children in Belfast in the
1960s, in the midst of growing sectarian violence, the voice of conscience and
the voice of pure poetry faced off. The
choice was, as this reader imagines it, to remain within the pure confines of
the personal lyric, or to engage in a more public poem that acknowledged the
repression and violence happening around him.
For a lesser poet, it would have been an either/or dilemna, but Mr.
Heaney devised a way to remain true to his lyric voice and to the highest
standards of his art while writing some of the most powerful political poems of
our time.
And then, to continue the story, he went in mid-career, figuratively
speaking, on a pilgrimage. I'm
referring to his penitential sequence "Station Island," in which he
writes hopefully of "the need and chance to salvage everything, to
reenvisage the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift mistakenly abased."
In STATION ISLAND, Heaney, the poet pilgrim, thrillingly describes a
return to the source of spiritual grace and poetic inspiration in the following
way:
How well I know the fountain, filling, running,
although it is the night.
That eternal fountain, hidden away,
I know its haven and its secrecy
although it is the night.
But not its source because it does not have one,
which is all sources' source and origin
although it is the night.
No other thing can be so beautiful.
Here the earth and heaven drink their fill
although it is the night.
So pellucid it never can be muddied,
and I know that all light radiates from it
although it is the night.
I know no sounding line can find its bottom,
nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom
although it is the night.
........................................
Hear it calling out to every creature.
And they drink these waters, although it is dark here,
because it is the night.
I am repining for this living fountain.
Within this bread of life I see it plain
although it is the night.
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goucher college creative writing program |
