Shhh! I'm Reading.

New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.

I am very fond of Seamus Heaney. Especially his loose collection some refer to as the “bog people poems”. My honors seminar was on the human body as effigy in literature and “The Tollund Man” was a required read. It popped up again in a class on contemporary Irish poetry. But it has stayed with me for that particular quality of Heaney’s that John Banville identified as having a “rich and fecund sense”. That’s it exactly. Earthy, spare and unforgiving and full of buried things: memories, secrets and histories that can not be recovered. There is something quite deviant about Heaney’s poetry. It is as though we’re looking up the skirt of history. Going where we ought not at Heaney’s beckoning. The language is physical, immediate and the reader is afforded little breathing room from the poem’s subject. Often, the two seem to meld. Memory is not an impressionistic and gauzy vista but sweaty brow and dirty fingernail. His poems, this one especially, make me feel a little like a grave robber; a rather delicious sensation.

Poem 3: “The Tollund Man”

I

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

Hearing Heaney read this poem is a particular delight. You can do that over on Nova (here).

“The Tollund Man” is available in New Selected Poems: 1966-1987.

New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.

As a literature major, I read a lot of poetry at school. Some of it I loved and a lot of it I read solely to fulfill the draconian course requirements of my undergraduate program. It was of that sort that leant heavily toward Wordsworth and Coleridge and in which the Modernists, let alone contemporary poets, were relegated to a dusky corner of the department to be salvaged only by brave sessional instructors and renegade critical theory profs. After a year abroad at a progressive liberal arts college in the UK, where tenured prof’s taught courses on Baraka and Ginsberg, I returned home having had one of those cute college awakenings that are an essential part of forming your literary identity.

My fondness for poetry was rekindled but my English department wasn’t really down with Ferlinghetti or Kathleen Jamie or Carol Ann Duffy and so I had nowhere to really direct my reading energies. And so my love of poetry fizzled once more. One prof plotted Keats’ poems on a line graph where the X axis equalled style and the Y axis equalled expertise; it was as though he’d watched that scene in Dead Poets Society and completely missed the point (much as he was completely missing the point of reading Keats). Here’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard!

And then finally, in my last year at school I found a prof who was a total poetry badass. His lectures were like jazz riffs, he talked about the Ramones and the Sex Pistols as valid poetic forms and he awarded rare poetry collections for well written essays. I nerded out hard in that class and I credit my love of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon and Anne Carson and Simon Armitage to it.

A good number of people are happy enough to leave poetry behind once they leave school. An equal number have managed to avoid it entirely thus far in life. Poetry is not going to be the thing that saves the publishing business. I can empathize. Poetry is difficult to penetrate and conjures up schoolhouse associations of memorizing the first stanza of Paradise Lost (yep, I had to do that too…”Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree” still makes me twitch). There is rhyming sometimes which still seems kind of Dr. Seussy to my ears. I’d rather just read Dr. Suess. There usually isn’t a narrative and you have to read poems a few times before they unfurl their genius. It all seems like a lot of work. I will confess that a collection of poems isn’t the first thing I reach for when I need something new to read. My poetry shelves are dusty too. And that’s part of why I thought I’d start this weekly feature. To get my poems down off the shelf and rediscover them and to send me hunting for treasures. Maybe you’ll find there are little embers in you for poetry after all.

This first one is the one that started me thinking maybe poetry could be different. I love how human, how direct it is. How banal and yet discomfortingly psycho-sexual. 

Poem 1: Simon Armitage, “Very Simply Topping Up the Brake Fluid”

Yes, love, that’s why the warning light comes on. Don’t

panic. Fetch some universal brake fluid

and a five-eighths screwdriver from your toolkit

then prop the bonnet open. Go on, it won’t / 

eat you. Now, without slicing through the fan-belt

try and slide the sharp end of the screwdriver

under the lid and push the spade connector

through its bed, go on, that’s it. Now you’re all right / 

to unscrew, no, clockwise, you see it’s Russian

love, back to front, that’s it. You see, it’s empty.

Now, gently with your hand and I mean gently,

try and create a bit of space by pushing / 

the float-chamber sideways so there’s room to pour,

gently does it, that’s it. Try not to spill it, it’s

corrosive: rusts, you know, and fill it till it’s

level with the notch on the clutch reservoir. / 

Lovely. There’s some Swarfega in the office

if you want a wash and some soft roll above 

the cistern for, you know. Oh don’t mind him, love,

he doesn’t bite. Come here and sit down Prince. Prince! / 

Now, where’s that bloody alternator? Managed?

Oh any time, love. I’ll not charge you for that

because it’s nothing of a job. If you want

us again we’re in the book. Tell your husband.