Poetry, according to Heaney, is capable of acknowledging and transforming even the most deplorable reality
BERTOLT BRECHT wrote the brief poem Motto about Germany in the late 1930s:
“In the dark times/
Will there also be singing?/
Yes, there will also be singing/
About the dark times.”
In this country, a man who loved poetry was honoured this week. Michael Diskin, who died earlier this month, had, said Paul Durcan, turned Galway’s Town Hall Theatre into “the finest and best poetry reading venue in Ireland”.
Durcan was speaking in the theatre at the opening event of this year’s Cúirt literary festival, his joint reading with Rita Anne Higgins.
Poetry itself was honoured, in another great venue where Diskin had also served, when Seamus Heaney gave a wonderfully erudite and light-hearted lecture at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.
Listening to poetry read aloud was, Heaney said, a ceremony which celebrates “one of poetry’s great powers, its ability to open and widen consciousness”.
He quoted Socrates to make the point that poetry is memorable, and that it is important to remember and not to rely upon being reminded.
“The world wide web is surely the ultimate elixir of reminding, one that offers us all the appearance of wisdom at the click of a mouse,” he said. “But generally it’s a come and go operation, a one-night information stand, as it were.”
Poetry, Heaney said, is capable of both acknowledging and transforming even the most deplorable reality.
Deplorable reality we have aplenty these days. Can we bear much more of it?
Lately I found myself thinking that I could not remember living through a worse time in this country. Then I caught myself on, remembering Belfast in the 1980s. Darker times by far.
Durcan is one of the great performers of his own poems – Heaney has referred to his “copious bitter sweet clowning”.
I remember a reading he gave at Queen’s University in October 1982. Some of the poems were sombre, but others were brilliantly funny. He had his audience helpless with laughter, emerging afterwards into the Belfast night full of joy.
Already that month six people had been murdered in the North, one of them a young student shot just a few streets away from the university. There would be another murder within hours of the reading, and five more before the end of the month.
Poetry couldn’t stop the Troubles, but it was a balm in Gilead for those who survived the killings, and we were so, so grateful.
Belfast surgeons became world leaders in restoring shattered kneecaps. Poets like Heaney and Michael Longley became masters of the elegy.
Nothing captures the Rev Ian Paisley better than the line from WR Rodgers: “there but for the grace of God goes God.” (As far as I know no one has yet written a poem about the later Paisley, the guffawing old man on the Ikea sofa with Martin McGuinness. I wish they would).
It isn’t all good. Rita Anne Higgins proved that poetry is bad for your feet. She teetered on to the stage at the town hall in skyscraper heels that looked amazing with her sexy purple dress, and exited hardly able to walk. She also remarked towards the end of her reading that her make up was slipping off.
None of it mattered. The late Peter Porter described her best, roaming the land “a quite untameable poet . . . fomenting rebellion” with her “unstaunchable energy”, her celebration of all that is “warm and unrespectable about Irish life”.
Her poem The Darkness is an amazing rant which skewers all that’s currently wrong with the country, from MRSA to back on the dole queues to Namaphobia: “It was a new four letter word/
starts with an F and ends with a T/financially untouchable funt/
you funting funt, or you dirty rotten funting funt” .
She also read her angry lament, The Builder’s Mess, about the travesty of the ghost estates, and a poem containing the brilliant put down for one who has got above himself: “he knows no artichokes”.
No one delivers scorn like Rita Anne Higgins.
Durcan looked forlorn in a large jumper, the colour of a day-old chick, but opened with a wonderfully savage riposte to celebrity culture, a poem which purports to include the opening lines of an Amanda Brunker novel.
In his The Recession he noted that the bank robbers in the Celtic Tiger era were not “the gentlemen with the sawn off shot guns” but the “double vent bonus boys” who “brought a reign of terror into the lives/Of the innocent, the elegant, the confused, the polite”.
Yes, there is singing in Ireland about the dark times, and how glad we should be of it. We need our poems, as Heaney said, to “brace the spirit.”
William Carlos Williams put it well:
“It is difficult/
To get the news from poems/
Yet men die miserably every day/For lack/
of what is found there.”