MPR’s John Rabe interviews Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney speaks about the importance of radio in his life. Heaney also reads numerous poems.

Heaney is preparing to appear at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis to read and explain his poetry.

Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in 1939 but currently lives in Dublin, has written a dozen books of poetry and three of criticism, and held the chair of professor of poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) Yeah, it was a big box set called a cause or cos Sor and on one side. It's got a rectangle of about 2 feet 6 by 18 inches divided into and one side was the dial which lit up and it had a hand that swung around from position at the bottom of its swept right around 180 degrees. I was in the right hand side of the runt of the thing on the left hand side was this large kind of Bays covered circle with the speaker in behind the base it held a commanding position in the kitchen. This was a farmers rural Farmhouse small room and the radio itself was up on a little shelf in the corner. We entered history and ignorance under the wireless Shelf. Epi a saying the writers of the range here is the news said the absolute speaker. Between him and us a great Gulf was fixed where pronunciation rained. Tyrannically the aerial wire swept from a tree top down in through a hole bored in the window frame when it moved in Wind the sway of language and it's furthering 's is swept and swayed in us like Nets in water or the abstract lonely curve of distant trains as we entered history and ignorance. And of course there was a commanding position but even more so in those days that was the commanding utterance of the speaker. I mean the BBC had people who sounded like tyrants when they spoke there was a certain majesty and mystery with the whole thing, especially the news
(00:01:51) from BBC and Radio Erin
(00:01:53) ready weird and also ready when was then stationed? Well, they the wavelength was called athlone. And the I think we listened to my senses as a youngster was of hearing certainly the news and the Northern Ireland news by BBC and I Associated radio Aaron with the voice of Football commentators. All Gaelic games were broadcast from Croke Park and there was a Mythic commentator called Michael hair whose voice could can create excitement about if he was describing somebody. Packing eggs, he could admit it. I kind of collect an accident.
(00:02:35) I'm asking you this because you make a point of saying that it's important to read poetry aloud. You make a point of talking about listening to the radio and I'm never quite sure exactly what it is about radio and it's the way it broadcasts the spoken word. That is so
(00:02:51) affecting. Well, I think I think it has to do with the entry achieved by voice and soand the Timbre of a voice the nation of a voice is actually one of the deepest signatures of of verity I think or or the opposite that you can get and I know from my own history of listening that listening to poetry physically listening hearing it on the radio actually in the case of some post by Thomas Hardy when I was at school, they would BBC used to broadcast schools programs. And once again, they were English actors with pretty common. Voice but even so even given that slight Oddity of English upper class pronunciation these these poems came right into memory. Maybe it's also timing early on but I always associate a good radio with a prepared listening in oneself, you know, the room is maybe late at night. One of the other times as well as childhood that I remember for particularly with really was when I was living in County Wicklow. I resigned my job my wife myself and small kids went to live in the country and the early 70s and after the radio station closed down in Britain and Ireland the station's cut off around midnight and there's a terrific Stillness in the house, but just before that would be music programs and so on and those moments are they enter the Deeper Self, you know memories. So I mean I think in that sense Listening and poetry listening and whatever place you're your Deeper Self is compounded mean they all merge together. They're
(00:04:42) one of the main points of your Nobel acceptance speech was that poetry can help illuminate the good aspects of local history practices traditions and so on that can play a role in bringing about a good result from a bad situation. For instance. You say the Soviet Union was partially eroded by the Persistence of Russian. In local culture. Can you explain how this phenomenon works and then I'll ask you about whether it's working in Northern Ireland.
(00:05:08) I think it it is like a musical tuning actually. It's one of the oldest images for order in the world is the Musical one who made The Music of the Spheres is there and discordance is one of the deepest images for for civic and domestic. You know disturbance. So I meant what I think poetry is musical in that sense in that one can hear our right to fiying note in it and can it Tunes things to a new register or to a true register and that's what a lot of a lot of the poet's in the Soviet Union in the 30s, especially Mostly in the 40s we're doing they weren't particularly dissidents. So to speak the the ideological content and the political the explicit political content of their work wasn't really what was in question. What was in question was the refusal to surrender their deep listening to what was true in themselves. And what was true in the culture of memory. They refused the the inadequacy of the public language they refused. The the thinness and untrustworthiness of the nurture in the official culture. They insisted on speaking on a way of seeing and a way of saying on a way of sounding that were reminded people of something previous in themselves. Oh dream of red plush and a city Coleman As Time fast forwards and a different Laurie groans into shot up Broad Street with a payload that will blow the bus station to Dust & Ashes After that happened I division of my mother a Revenant on the bench where I would meet her in not cool floored waiting room and micro felt her shopping bags full up with shovel dashes. Death walked out Pastor like a dust faced Coleman refolding body bags plying his load empty upon empty in a flurry of moats and engine revs.
(00:07:30) Is this working today to at least help resolve the conflict in Northern
(00:07:36) Ireland. Oh, I don't know but that I mean when you say help resolve the conflict that's kind of Round Table. Let's get down and efficiently iron this out put it doesn't work like that at all. I mean poetry is to do with the Sense of trust that an individual Consciousness can muster in Northern Ireland specifically for the last 25 years. There has been an extraordinary flowering of poetry and Poets. They are actually destabilizing as we would say. No, they language, you know, they they are opening up the language for experiment and they are and making what was rigid and and antithetical Protestant Catholic, you know higher landing and making this more fluid. They are are in a sense rehearsing the possibility of a new race public Avenue public thing. Ben. Carson is a poem but called the HMS Belfast but Sailors getting drunk and people on the HMS Belfast our products and Cat Estates and in that kind of Mary linguistic way what is being Done is the envisaging of an opener Society. It's not a solution. It's not a political solution when it has to be done by politicians, but poetry prepares the Consciousness, I think rather than rather than the Constitution.