Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[alice wellintown]

The political situation in Northern Ireland is explored in North and
FIELD WORK (1979), from the standpoint of Heaney's Catholic
background. However, Heaney has been consistent in his refusal to
reduce complex political and social issues to simple slogans. He has
also made explicit his desire not to be called a "British" poet: "Be
advised! My passport's green. / No glass of ours was ever raised! To
toast The Queen". In a lecture in 1995 Heaney explained that he wrote
about the color of the passport "to maintain the right to diversity
within the border".



FROM THE FRONTIER OF WRITING


The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration--

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.


Seamus Heaney



On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Keith <keithsz at mac.com> wrote:
> Would Nabokov have said he was 'an American writer?'
>
> "I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the
> air of the western states, are my links with Asiatic and Arctic
> Russia. Of course I owe too much to the Russian language and
> landscape to be emotionally involved in, say, American regional
> literature, or Indian dances, or pumpkin pie on a spiritual plane;
> but I do feel a suffusion of warm, lighthearted pride when when I
> show my green USA passport at European frontiers."
>
>   --Nabokov in Paris Review, 1967
>
> http://bit.ly/9nTLSh
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> “[...] one night, at a Russian restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm, he saw Mira
> again. They exchanged a few words, she smiled at him in the remembered
> fashion, from under her dark brows, with that bashful slyness of hers; and
> the contour of her prominent cheekbones, and the elongated eyes, and the
> slenderness of arm and ankle were unchanged, were immortal, and then she
> joined her husband who was getting his overcoat at the cloakroom, and that
> was all—-but the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline
> of verses you know you know but cannot recall.”
>      --Pnin, p. 134
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>