Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[Joseph Tracy]

Excellent Seamus Heany Poem and  a true giant of contemporary  
literature. Along with his poetry I highly recommend his translation  
from the Irish of the medieval Irish poem Sweeny Astray.


On Feb 14, 2010, at 9:26 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>