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| Hastings Room--First Church Congregationalist--Series Curator: Michael Todd Steffen |
Welcome to The Hastings Room
for our second annual
Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading
And that moment when
the bird sings very close
To the music of what
happens… — “Song” S.H.
Wednesday 26 August 2015 at 7:00pm
First Church Congregationalist
11 Garden Street, near Harvard Square
Featuring Greg Delanty and Tomas
O’Leary
By
Michael Todd Steffen
I just
wanted to make a few comments about our event this Wednesday evening.
The
brief discussion at this year’s Memorial Reading will raise topics such as “crediting
poetry,” Heaney’s disposition to an art devoted to things as they are, ideas
about song and lyric as traditional poems, forms from the past addressing
things of our time, and so singing, in Heaney’s words, “close to the music of
what happens.” This makes lyrical poetry different from the news or “reality”
shows.
Why
state something so obvious? Because today via the Internet we are able to
access news, music, movies and programs, surfing the links, as well as poetry
pages, at the risk of giving them all the same sort of attention. In fact,
poetry, good lyrical poetry especially, asks of us more focused attention on
particular word choice, the arrangements of words and phrases, not just their
literal sense, but their multiple suggestions and allusions.
So to
content-read through one of Seamus Heaney’s poems, like “The Underground,” the
first poem in Station Island, would result in missing a lot of the poem’s
intentions. There is so much present that is not outwardly stated, the public
image of the couple in the modern city compared to Greek mythology, the
couple’s intimacy likened to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, the
exhilaration of memory, the pain of loss, the separated individual’s anxiety
yet also transformation, and so much more, all just suggested by the rhythms of
the language, the allusions to flowers, to Orpheus, and the emphases of words
and phrases.
This is
not a poem we’ll be discussing Wednesday evening. I just use it as an example,
because it has the astonishing resonance of a great lyrical poem. You don’t
have to work to memorize it. It settles in on its own. I read it for the first
time almost thirty years ago and though it is a poem of only 16 lines, it keeps
revealing new things to me.
Our
guest readers Wednesday, Tomas O’Leary of Cambridge and Greg Delanty, an
Irish-American citizen who is poet in residence at St. Michael’s in Vermont,
will be remembering Seamus Heaney. Greg and Tomas and their work are definitely
UP to the occasion. Greg knew Seamus personally. There are several photos of
them together here and there.
In his
widely anthologized career, Greg Delanty has won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry
Award, the Allan Dowling Poetry Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and he is a former
President of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers. Add to
that an Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award and an Irish Arts Council bursary,
and on and on. An entire issue of Agenda
(summer/autumn 2008) was devoted to celebrating Greg on his 50th
birthday, upon the rare achievement at that young age of releasing a Collected
edition.
Tomas
O’Leary is one of the most appreciated characters on the Boston Area poetry
scene, certainly in Cambridge and Somerville. Though Tomas was raised in
Somerville, his manner is all emerald and fifey, unaffectedly so. If they both
weren’t so well known, I’d try to introduce our Irish guest, Greg, as Tomas and
vice-versa, to see if anybody would catch us out.
As well
as a poet, Tomas is a translator, folk musician, artist and art therapist. He
has this broad approach and embrace of character sanely maintaining joker and
gentleman, much as Greg does. They each have the knack of being able to make
you feel good with an insult, and giving you second-thoughts at a compliment.
That is what we’ll be dealing with.
Both
poets have a new collection of poetry out. I’ll be talking about those books
Wednesday. The poets will be reading from them as well as from their previous
collections. It will be well worth everybody’s effort to come and help us
celebrate Seamus Heaney. He was one of the truly great poets of the language,
as well as such a kind person. Cambridge and Harvard got to know that, so it’s
right that we’re doing this at First Church.
Oh and:
Come early. Last year we were at standing room only. And nobody left early.
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