A.K. Mayhew: P.S. (Finding Balance)

I have an embarrassing thing to admit. Luckily for you lovely readers, I don’t have as much shame on the internet as I probably should, so I’ll admit it anyway.

I didn’t know who Seamus Heaney was until about a month ago.

Scandalous, RIGHT?

When looking over the available English courses at University College Dublin for this fall, I was looking specifically for ones that were Ireland-focused, and, ideally, about contemporary writing rather than Yeats or Synge. Two semesters of British Literature surveys have kind of burned me out on 18^th and 19^th century writing, as wonderful as it is.

That’s when I saw it: “Seamus Heaney and Modern Irish Poetry.”

“Ashley,” I whispered over to my co-intern, both of us hunched over Macs in the intern corner. “This is probably a really dumb question, but who is Seamus Heaney?”

“Oh,” she said, totally in her groove getting an MFA in poetry and all, “He’s this really good Irish poet. He’s a big deal, like, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature awhile ago.”

[Embarrassing moment for me… check.]

“Oh,” I said. “Is his stuff fairly accessible? I’ve really never taken a class just on poetry.”

“Yeah, he’s not too bad.”

I ended up enrolling in the class, though I was tempted for awhile by “Contemporary Irish Writing,” but that one was full anyway. I wasn’t sure what to expect, really knowing nothing about good ol’ Seamus except that he is a genius and this really big deal. And Irish, of course.

The first day of class, my mind was blown. My professor is this incredible, older woman who speaks with a slight stutter, who describes Heaney’s poems in language that is almost as poetic as his own poems. Our one required text is Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996. The very last poem of the collection is from his book The Spirit Level, published 1996, title “Postscript.”  None of us had our books yet; the professor held her hardcover copy up and read it aloud to us right before the class ended:

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(“Postscript”)

What I like most about this poem is its title, and its placement in the collection. Heaney has written since, obviously, and I’m not sure of the placement of this poem in The Spirit Level. It places it in a different perspective than if it were in the middle of the piece, the same way the title implies it is at the end of a letter, a note: postscript. P.S. Before I forget, I have one last piece of wisdom to impart upon you. The picture is stellar: foam, glitter, wild, movement on one side, with the rough and still slate lake and rough swans on the other; and you’re in the middle, moving through, not stopping nor slowing, blowing your heart open.

This poem comes from what I’ve been taught is Heaney’s kind of “third” stage of writing. There’s the first stage, when he’s just slowing coming into his own and entering the literary scene; the second one, where he became much more grounded and political, addressing the violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s; and this third one, in which he tries to move away from the ground to the light. At least, that’s how it’s been put several times by critics and by my dear professor. He’s reaching for transcendence and poetic freedom, struggling to find the balance between answering to the world and to politics as Ireland’s national poet, as he did in the 1970s, while also answering to art.

Where is that balance? When voices are reaching out to you for spiritual guidance, for answers, for representations of their own fears, tragedies, and victories, when do you turn away and turn to the light?

I have no answer. I’m simply in awe of him no matter what he does, essentially. Anyone who follows me on Twitter (the whole 180+ of you and dwindling every day) has probably noticed all the Seamus Heaney praising that I do every Monday, the day when I do my homework for the class.

But, of course, we’re not all Seamus Heaney. Surprise! Do writers who are lesser-known that Heaney have to find their balance as well? What about the writers who have never been published or only once or twice, those high schools students dabbling on their brand-new MacBooks, those young professionals who write in the middle of the night after a day of meetings, those MFA students? I think I’m about to quote my elementary school religion class, which is worrisome, but there’s the concept that if God gave you a gift, you’re supposed to use it for the good of the greater society. Even if you’re not religious, which I actually am not, I think this idea comes pretty naturally to anyone who has a conscious. If you’re not totally selfish, then you can’t help but wonder how you can use your “calling” to help others—literally, emotionally, politically. Being the change you want to see in the world, the only way you really can.

But then there’s art—the song that is singing in face of the sorrow. Can art ever truly take off and be somewhere in the air, above the heads of the people, art for art’s sake? Art for truth’s sake?

Even when Heaney transitioned from his very earthy and grounded political work to that which is ethereal, his poetry continues to ask this question. Being the genius he is, Heaney appears to realize that you can never wholly separate the two extremes. Eventually, you always end up where you began.

Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare

All agog at the plasterer on his ladder

Skimming our gable and writing our name there

With his trowel point, letter by strange letter

( “Alphabet”)

I think I agree.