Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, speaks at Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for the annual Global Voices Lecture series. Heaney reads numerous poems during speech.

Heaney is the first Irish poet to win the Nobel prize since William Butler Yeats in 1923.

Tarnscript:

(00:00:04) Play tonight with a low and 40 to 45 high tomorrow 60 to 65. And good afternoon. It's 12 o'clock in midday continues here on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary eichten. Thanks for joining us and we hope you'll be able to stick around over the noon hour today first. We have some news headlines. And then right after the news headlines. We're going to hear some poetry Seamus Heaney the Irish poet the Nobel Prize winner spoke at the Guthrie this week and we're going to hear what he had to say. He spent much of his time actually reading his poetry and You'll find it entertaining informative enlightening. We'll get to it right after news headlines. We can look for a cloudy Sky chilly temperatures this afternoon across Minnesota highs today mid 50s to the low 60s clearing tonight. Some scattered Frost is possible in northern Minnesota tonight with lows from the 30s in the north mid 40s in the South Sunny to partly sunny skies are forecast for Minnesota tomorrow little warmer tomorrow highs upper 50s to the middle 60s. Radio news in Washington. I'm core of a Coleman the Pentagon is denying a report that Iraq fired three missiles at us or Allied warplanes today Iraqi State television says three surface-to-air missiles were fired at hostile targets today and the targets were forced to flee a pentagon spokesman says there are no reports of any missile firings the French government, which is generally descended from recent US policy on Iraq expressed deep concern today about the rising. Tension in that country and the movement of new American planes into the area David culhane reports from Paris. The foreign Ministry said it was already in touch with the United States and then France believes there should be full consultation before any further action is taken in response to the firing of an Iraqi missile at to American jets and official spokesman said that the United States Britain turkey and France should decide together on a response. Those were the nation's that originally established. Tablished an air cover over portions of Iraq to protect Kurdish and Shiite minorities for national public radio. This is David. Kahane in Paris while the United States deploys more warplanes to Kuwait both Iraq, and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the Clinton Administration Iraq says the deployment is an act of War Arizona Senator. John McCain says, the Clinton administration's policy is actually strengthened the hand of Saddam Hussein and fragmented the Gulf War. Alishan House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich says the White House has displayed a lack of leadership and made the United States look like a bully hurricane Hortense with Winds of up to 115 miles per hour is a very dangerous storm. It is responsible for at least 15 deaths in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic Ed Thompson reports hurricanes are ranked in four categories according to wind speed or tense has been upgraded to Category 3 and is likely to get stronger the storm. Has made landfall yesterday in the Turks and Caicos Islands were knocked out all power and Communications reports from the Turks and Caicos have been sketchy. But the Caribbean news agency says there was no loss of life and no disaster in the chain of six small Islands largely because of good hurricane preparedness or chances about 800 miles south southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It is traveling over the open Atlantic which could spare the Bahamas forecasters. See Hortense might bring large swells and heavy rain to the South Eastern us and a couple of days. And there is a chance it will pose a threat to the Northeast and New England by Sunday for National Public Radio. I'm Ed Thompson reporting the National Hurricane Center says Hortense is less than 800 miles south southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 32 and a half points at 50 787 trading is moderate. The NASDAQ is up more than eight points at 1162. This is NPR. Good afternoon. I'm Aaron Bardo with news from Minnesota Public Radio minnesota-based UnitedHealthcare stands to gain from prudential's loss of its contract to provide insurance for the American Association of retired persons. AARP has won a commitment from United Healthcare to provide Medicare supplement and Hospital Indemnity insurance. AARP is replacing Prudential as the provider of its Health Care insurance contract at the end of 1997. The Rochester diversity council is hosting in a series of workshops today and tomorrow aimed at breaking down stereotypes diversity council President. George Thompson says Rochester residents often make assumptions about other cultures based on their first impression of a handful of people just because a person Dre dresses away or wears a hat backward or that does not necessary doesn't really tell you anything about the the character didn't tell you what the values are. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to challenge people to look. Little deeper we have to just challenge those stereotypes that are out there Thompson says while stereotypes and racism have always existed in Rochester the recent increase in Immigration to this city has sparked an even greater need for communication among different ethnic groups. President Clinton leads Republican candidate Bob Dole in Minnesota by a wide. Margin the Star Tribune WCCO TV, Minnesota poll showed 59 percent of minnesotans favor Clinton and 31 percent favored Ole. Ross Perot received six percent the state forecast this afternoon, mostly cloudy and cold highs in the middle 50s to lower 60s and for the Twin Cities, mostly cloudy and cool with the high around 60 Friday partly cloudy with a high of 63 around the region in st. Cloud. It's cloudy and 56 partly sunny and 54 in Duluth in Rochester is cloudy and 56 and in the Twin Cities cloudy and 58. That's news for Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta. Karen 6 minutes now past twelve o'clock and welcome back to midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary eichten Seamus. Haney says the best way to read poetry is to read poetry out loud. And today we're going to hear him read his poetry Seamus Heaney won the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature the first Irish poet to win the prize since William Butler Butler Yeats and a leader what's been described as the Renaissance of Irish literature? He's written. Six books currently lives in Dublin, but he spends part of each year here in America teaching at Harvard this week Seamus Heaney was in the Twin Cities to deliver the Guthrie theaters annual Global voices lecture. He began by talking about how he was influenced by Tyrone Guthrie and how that led to his acceptance of the invitation to speak here in the Twin Cities.
(00:07:03) Truly. The Guthrie collection did have a deep-seated meaning for me Tyrone Guthrie came to Queens University when I was an To graduate there and spoke about Shakespeare and raise the temperature immediately. He talked about the academic response to Shakespeare, which he called whether deliberately I'm not sure I'm not whether deliberately or not. I'm not sure he was a man of enormous personal style and confidence. So his pronunciation was also personal. He called the academics the academics and I assume that may have been to a rhyme with the Olympics, but I wasn't sure. But it was a memorable event. He just rode in with all the confidence of of the totally gifted in the totally committed selfless and possessed by his subject. He also had been the chancellor of Queens University in the 60s after a long succession of dukes and Earls and persons without much interest in the Arts or anything beyond their he came he came and changed the temperature James change the energy And I also had the Good Fortune to visit him once in his home. So it is it is an important moment here. I also accepted because they almost called a book of mine. Once the globe in the window. I had some Global associations back there in the beginning. I want to read some poems on going to say some things about about what lies behind them and in general try to fulfill some of the expectations raised by the subtitle of the series Forum on Art and life. I guess if I had been choosing a title of my own for what I'll be doing. I might have called it ripples or Tensions or buy a title, which the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh used for one of his essays. He called the SE by the resonant title The Parish on the universe and it was Governor's reminder to himself and to all of us that in life and in art we have to combine two kinds of Truth. First of all a truth to the intimate recognition the creaturely ignition the recognition that our affections experience and our affections require and secondly the truth to a larger perspective that our intelligence can construct for us. Robert Browning called the two points the Kindred points of heaven and home. So I think that the parish in the universe that that does awakened something in us something of of the aspiration and Nostalgia that cuts across each cuts across each other in our in our being which is indeed at the center of the play, Philadelphia. right cam The creaturely foundation of our life is not to be denied but nor is it to be entirely reposed in because the cultural projections that can give order to our Consciousness are equally a human responsibility and every Porter from Homer to Dante from sappho to Basho. So to speak from hesiod to Emily Dickinson, every port is suspended between these cardinal points of Asian and nobody exemplifies this better than the poet who has rarely been shouldn't in reference to ancient Greece is the poet hesiod mean if Homer is the hearts of ancient Greece poetry has the orders they ever so to speak. Homer was the port of war and adventure and of wanderings and so on but hesiod was the port of Altar and field he was the farmer poet and his two works is to famous works represent those two poles. I've been mentioning one of them is called works and days and the other is called the theogony or the Theo genus and the works and days is Poem that is very much on the earth and they theogony is very much a poem that is in the heavens works and days is about the Rhythm and the doings and requirements of the farming year. And the theogony is about the gods and their world and their Works about the plow in the ground as it were and deploy in the stars do so to speak about the cloud and the cloud so I think a global voice Voice if it's anything must broadcast on those two wave lines. It must be Earth and it must be skyed to some extent. So I want to begin with a poem where the sky is under the earth a little bit. It's a poem about looking down into Wells and seeing the reflection of oneself. But also the sky down there and it it brings together my creaturely life as a pre reflective little Scotland creature behind the head. As in ditches in Country Dairy in the 1940s that pre cultural creature as it were and then somebody who learned that the muses had sung to hesiod on Mount Helicon and that Helicon was the mountain where the Springs of inspiration sacred to the muses were so this can of come Engels the autobiographical of County Derry with the the culturally rat. If I'd of ancient Greece or this big is called personal Helicon. As a child they couldn't keep me from Wells and all pumps with buckets and windlass has. I love the dark drop the Trap Sky the smells of waterweed fungus and dank Moss. One in a brick yard with a rotted board top. I savored the rich crash when a bucket plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you so no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry Stone ditch fructified like any aquarium when you dragged out long roots from the surf mulch a white-faced hovered over the bottom others had Echoes give back your own call with a clean new music in it and one was scarce them for their other Ferns and Tall foxgloves. A rat slapped across my reflection. Now to pry into routes to finger slime to stare big-eyed narcissus into some spring is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme to see myself to set the darkness echoing. That activity of just staring in a kind of an in tranced way of being held in suspense of being at rest as it were like like the rest in music or the rest between the tide filling in the tide are being that kind of state which is both passive and susceptible both active under tent of that's that's really that's really what we want. Chief I think either in the making of art or the receiving of it went the lens to hold open for a minute and the next performer want to read is about Consciousness being like a receptive little meniscus really taking its imagine from the point of view of the infant in the Cradle in a house a house where I grew up farmhouse in County Derry. In the early 1940s and the infant is there and there's a woman baking bread. It's a sunlit silent afternoon. It's a kind of afternoon as repeated day after day week after week month after month year after year to all of those afternoons or just the one It's called Moss born sunlight. Dutch interior painting trying to be a poem It's dedicated to my aunt to bake the bread Mary Heaney. I had two women in my life early on I was very lucky I had with my mother and my aunt both in the same room Twitter. There was a sunlit absence. The helmeted pump in the yard heated its iron water honeyed in the slung bucket and the sun stood like a griddle cooling against the wall of each Long Afternoon. So her hands scuffled over the backboard the reddening stove sent its plaque of Heat against her where she stood in a flurry apron by the window. No, she dusts the board with A. Goose's Wing no sets broad lapped with white and nails and measly new Shins. Here is a space again the scone rising to the tick of two clocks. And here is love like a tinsmith scoop sunk past its gleam in the meal bin. William Wordsworth in his old on intimations of immortality and early childhood Wordsworth is a great one for the imposing title or but he has his line heaven lies about us in our infancy. and it's wonderful to remember that infant comes from infants, which means unspeaking and they they in a sense Eden life of childhood is in someone to do with the in the unspoken associate in the the enclosure within Consciousness that hasn't started quite to express itself, but that that pre reflective life that Unspeaking store of ones being that original Center is something that we expect poetry somehow to to have have an anchor in or a line, too. And it's it's also out of that Center. I suppose that the purposeful articulating eagerness to get into history and into adult being comes I certainly a burger of begun to view my own life as a series of ripples outward from that little cradle spot. That's still Center that infants unspeaking creature. But I think if the speaker in oneself loses touch with the unspeaking then something goes wobbly. I have begun to think of poetry as a pulse coming out from that Center. But it also we mustn't forget has to be a message sent back in ripples are wonderful because they look. And are coming out from a center but equally they appear to be trembling in words to it. So I think in any artistic action, we want some sense of something having been reached out there coming back in and something coming out. Anyway, I want to read a poem which is in some way about those circles of being and it Hopes to probe in and probe out. The poem is a small autobiography. It's in three little chapters and it's about learning the world in terms of learning to read in terms of first of all learning to read Shadows on the wall when somebody makes the rabbits head for learning to read letters being taught letters. Learning to see the world in terms of those characters. In fact after I wrote this poem we discovered an Irish alphabet from Donny go Siobhan where the old the alphabet is written in terms of of the natural world like an L is a flail and see as the gallic the moon and some are maybe they Eleazar spouse sighs, but they in the 19th century in Ireland when they were learning the alphabet in the National schools. They learned the letters in terms of this world in terms of things of the world. And in this poem the first chapter of the autobiography the child is learning the world in that way the second chapter it gets a little bit more out of it and he's he's at Secondary School in the second chapter. He's learning Latin and he's learning Irish. He's learning that that the cultural heritage if you like mediates your experience, he learns that Dara is dairy, but he is A school in the dura is the Oakwood and the Durham column kill is the is the the Oakwood beloved by st. Columba and here it begins to realize that he's learned that the letters of the Irish alphabet are named after trees that D4 Dara is an Oakwood and be for bed is a birch and see four colors are Hazel and then he learns that these letters are associated with monastic tradition and so on Etc and the third section he has grown up. Become a speaker standing in as Shakespeare theater. This poem was first written for the Phi Beta Kappa exercises at Harvard and it's called it was the Phi Beta Kappa poem in 1984. So it's a poem traditionally the poem has to be associated with learning. So this was about learning the alphabet and but it does it does take in the globe the globe and the window of the school. The globe then understood as just another little floating sale in the whole galaxy the globe seen from outer space like an ovum under the under the microscope the largeness of the world reduced to to the smallest and largeness of the origins of life itself. So so the consciousness of the child is ever expanding their perspective is getting wider, but the little creature is still there they either Seeing eye on the first person singular Eye Of Consciousness are together right through it. Anyway alphabets it is. This is where the globe occurs the phrase. Eyeshadow his father mix with joined hands and thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall, like a rabbit's head. He understands he will understand more when he goes to school there. He draws smoke with chalk the whole first week. Then draws the forked stick that they call a why This is writing. a swans neck and swans back make the to he can see now as well as say two Rafters and a crosstie on the Slate are the letter some call AA some call a there are charts. There are headlines. There is a right way to hold the pen and the wrong way. First it is copying out and then English Mark correct with a little leaning hole. smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush A globe in the window tilts like a colored. Oh declension sighing on are like a Hosanna as column after a stratified column book one of Elemental Latina marbled and Military rose up in him for he was fostered nicked in a stricter School named for the patron saint of the Oakwood her classes switched to the peeling of a bell and he left the Latin forum for the shade of new calligraphy that felt like home the letters of this alphabet Were Trees the capitals orchards in full bloom the lines of script like Breyers coiled In Ditches here in her snouted garment and bare feet all ringlets it in assonance and would notes the poet's dream stole over him like sunlight and passed into the tenebrous thickets. He learns this other writing. He is the Scribe who drove a team of quills on his White Field round his cell door the Blackbirds darked and dab then self-denial fasting the pure. hold by rules that hardened the farther. They reached North he bends to his desk and begins. Again. Christ sickle has been in the undergrowth the script grows bear and Merovingian. the globe has spun He stands in a wooden old. He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves. Time has bulldozed the school and school window Baylor's drop Bales like printouts worse took cheeves made lambdas on the stubble once at Harvest and the Delta phase of each potato pit was patted straight and molded against Frost. All gone with the Omega that kept watch above each door the good luck horseshoe. Yet shape-note language absolute on air as Constantine Sky lettered In hoc signo can still command him or The Necromancer who would hang from the Dome ceiling of his house a figure of the world with colors in it, so that the figure of the universe and not just single things would meet his sight when he walked abroad. That's from a small window the astronaut sees all that. He has sprung from the Risen aqueous singular loosened. Oh like a magnified and buoyant ovum or like my own wide pre reflective stare all agog at the plasterer on his ladder skimming her Gable and writing are named there with his trouble Point letter by strange letter. The Russian put hose of mandelstam once talked about something which he called Nostalgia Nostalgia for World culture. It's a very large but very suggestive phrase. It suggests on the one hand that we do have a desire to widen the Ripple, but that we also have a need for at homeless. We yearn for the boundless of the nests of the universe universe, but we want the parish. Of the local as well. We want I suppose poetry and we want our being somehow to have. Some access in some measure of the intellectual perhentians that are possible. We wanted to live in the imagined life, but we wanted to also have access to the endured life. I want to read a poem called a sofa in the 40s, which I wrote The Fairly recently, which is really about the Being being being able to bring together what you didn't know then with what you know now so to speak it's about first of all is about playing trains on a big Stern sofa in a farmhouse in the 1940s. It's about being hermetically sealed in that childhood world, but then it is about Looking Back Now from with what one knows about what was going on outside that farmers in Europe in the 1940s when the train was such a Sinister and demonic instrument of the Holocaust went home nation were being transported by train to 2. Comes the pub in other words does try to hoop together. What will know is no with what one experience then and to make some holding pattern out of it. But the it's all this is implicit in it. the atrocities of the War aren't mentioned. They're just they're just the menacing Outer Outer ring within which this happens. a sofa in the 40s all of us on the sofa in a line kneeling behind each other Elders don't to youngest elbows going like pistons for this was a train and between the jam wall and the bedroom door our speed and distance where inestimable first we shunted then we whistled then somebody collected the invisible for tickets and very Gravely punched it as courage after courage under us move faster to cook the sofa legs went Giddy and the unreachable ones far out on the kitchen floor began to wave. Ghost train death Gondola the curve curved ends black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it made it seem the sofa had achieved flotation. It's casters on tiptoe. It's braid and fluent backboard give it airs a superannuated pageantry when the visitors endured it straight back to when it stood off on its own remoteness when the insufficient toys appeared on Earth on Christmas. Meetings at held out as itself potentially heaven-bound Earthbound for sure among the things that might add up or let you down. We entered history and ignorance under the wireless Shelf. Yippee, IA sighing the writers of the range they are is the news said the absolute speaker between him and us a great Gulf was fixed her pronunciation rain too radically. The aerial wire swept from a tree top down through a hole bored in the window frame when it moved in Wind the sway of language and it's furthering 's skin wept and suede in us like Nets in water or the abstract lonely curve of distant trains as we entered history and ignorance. We occupied our seats with all our might fit for the uncomfortableness constancy was its own reward already out in front on the big upholstered arm. Somebody crane to the side driver or fireman wiping his dry bro with the air of one who would run the gauntlet. We were the last thing on his mind. It seemed we sense the tunnel coming up where we pour through like unlit carriages through fields at Right our only job to sit Eyes straight ahead and be transported and make engine noise. History did enter that same Kitchen in the form of an hour. You see policeman taking Tilly's returns from the farmers. They are you see in the 1940s 50s 60s and again known different way where an armed police force their work in a paramilitary force. They were there as a reminder to the a nice analyst Catholic minority of which our house was One symptom a reminder that that else Was not in control of the nation's minority but that it was controlled by the unionist majority with its British affiliations. So there was always something charged about the visit of the policeman no matter how routine and domestic and indeed affable. The person was as he was this manner of member Constable Crawford a man of some civility, but he was girdled and and surrounded by by the Insignia and the aura of danger and and when he came into the house the atmosphere changed he was taking tillage returns just a little census statistics of what was in the what was what were in the fields what were in the buyers the stock and thing my father was quite casual about reporting the statistics on I was always full of anxiety when he some faint inaccuracy would occur at that. God where for it no you but anyway this poem this poem just goes back to that moment. It's called a constable calls. His bicycle stood by the window sill the rubber cone of a mud splasher skirting the front mudguard. It's fat black handle grips Heating in sunlight the Spud of the Dynamo gleaming and cocked back the pedal Treads hanging relieved of the boot of the law. His cap was upside down on the floor next to his chair the line of its pressure ran like a bevel in a slightly sweating hair. He had unstrap the heavy Ledger and my father was making tillage returns in acres rudes and purchase. arithmetic and fear I sat staring at the polished holster with its button flap the bread cord looped into the revolver. But any other root crops mangoes meristems and he like that. No. But was there not a line of turnips with the seed run out in the potato field? I assume small guilt and sat Imagining the black hole in the barracks. He stood up shifted the button case further round on his belt close the domesday book fitted his cap back with two hands and looked at me as he said. Goodbye. A shadow bobbed in the window. He was snapping the carrier spring Over The Ledger. his boot pushed off the bicycle ticked take take Well, I think that the way in which lyric poetry certainly Works in relation to the global realities is the way they tick tick tick of the three speed bike words and memory. The way in which the Ripple works when the train runs past the house where I grew up there's a trend went past the hoser. The Ripple came across the drinking water in the bucket at that point. It works the way in which the first big soft spit of rain comes along and touches you in the cheek and the storms coming and I think that in that way. In the same way as you know, the Ripple is not the Train the tick is not the time bomb. They spit of rain isn't the storm. The poem is not the world either. Nevertheless it is up to the world. It's a measure for it. So I just like to read a little couple of sentences that I read to the Swedish Academy last December in this lecture called credit accrediting poetry. A credit poetry ultimately because it can make an order true to the impact of external reality and sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being. Just as the ripples that rippled in and out across the water and that Scoleri 50 years ago. An order where we cannot last grew up to that which we stored up as we grew an order which satisfies all that is appended of in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry in other words both for being itself and for being a help for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the Mind Center and its circumference. Next poem is an attempt to do that kind of thing, too. Grew up to that which we stored up as we grew so this book speak it it's addressed to my brother. It begins with him as a child playing not trains this time, but playing at being a Scottish bagpiper wearing a white wash brush tied around them here and carrying a kitchen chair of a shirt over his shoulder. That ends up with him as an adult living in a small community in during the utterly divisive impact of political violence sustaining Community because that is the way people live in during the reality of division living it out keeping going which is the title of the poem. The poem drifts around among two or three points memories of whitewashing the house itself memories were whitewashed wall in our village. We're also defense a man who was a part-time member of the Ulster Defence regiment was shot one morning as he waited to go to work waited for his lived memories of childhood of old women who had the status of Boozer which is scaring me to death memories of that sense of oh man that a very young child can have a sense of the possible dangers of the world when you don't actually have content for your dread as a youngster, but you know that it's there and of course experience gradually supplies you with the content. Anyway, I read that phrase I talked about. I hope that the poem lives up to what I meant when I said 40 was an order where we can at last grew up to that which we stored up as we as we grew. Keeping going. It's a little bit longer. It's directed to the brother himself. We know has a farm. There's a mention of his attorneys is little little petit mal turns every now and again, Anyway, keeping going the piper coming from far away. Is you with a white wash brush for a Spartan wobbling around you a kitchen chair upside down on your shoulder your right arm, pretending to talk the bike beneath your elbow your Popeyes and big cheeks nearly bursting with laughter. But keeping the Drone going on interminably between catches of breath. The white wash brush an old Blanche skirted thing on the back of the buyer door biding its time until spring errors spell lime in a work bucket and a pot stick to mix it in with water. Those smells brought tears to the eyes. We inhaled the kind of Greenie burning and thought of brimstone. But the slop of the actual job of brushing walls the watery grave being lashed on in Broad swatches then drying out whiter and whiter all of that worked like magic. Where had we come from? What was this Kingdom? We had been restored to. Our shadows moved on the wall and at our border glittered the full length of the house a black divided like a freshly opened pungent wreaking Trench. Pissed at the Gable the dead will congregate but separately the women after dark. Hunkering there to moment before bedtime. The only time the soul was let alone the only time that face and body calmed in the eye of Heaven. Buttermilk and urine the pantry the hose beasts the listening bedroom. We were all together there in a four-time in a knowledge that might not translate Beyond those wind heave Midnight's we still cannot be sure happened or not. It smelled of Hill Fort clay and cattle dung. When The Thorn Tree was cut down you broke your arm. I shared The Dread when a strange bird perched for days on the buyer roof. That's seen with Macbeth helpless and desperate in his nightmare when he meets the high Gods again and sees the operations in the pot. I felt at home with that one. Alright Hearth steam manipulation the Smoky hair curtain in her cheek Don't Go Near Bad Boys in that college that you're born for. Do you hear me? Do you hear me speaking to you? Don't forget. And then the pot stick quickening the gruel the steam Crown swirled everything intimate and fierce waved brightening for a moment then going dull and fatal and away. Gray matter like gruel flecked with blood in sputters on the whitewash a clean spot where his head had been other stain subsumed in the parched wall. He lent his back against that morning like any other morning part-time reservist toting his lunch box. The car came slow down Castle Street made the halt across the diamond slowed again and stop level with him. Although it was not his lift. And then he saw an ordinary face for what it was and a gun in his own face. His right leg was hooked back his Sole and heel against the wall his right knee propped up steady. So he never moved just pushed with all his might against himself then fell past the tard strip feeding the gutter with his copious blood. My dear brother you have good stamina. You stay own where it happens your big tractor pulls up with the diamond you wave at people your shirt and laughs above the revs. You keep old roads open by driving on the new ones. You called the white you called the piper Spartans whitewash brushes and then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen, but you cannot make the Dead Walk or right wrong. I see you at the end of your tether sometimes in the milking parlor holding yourself up between two cars until your turn goes past then coming to in the smell of dung again and wondering is this all as it was in the beginning is no and shall be then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush up on the buyer door. And keeping going. I just about another five minutes and then we can have some questions and maybe answers and we'll see what happens. I thought of calling the whole book keeping going but I thought it'd be a pretty dreary title. You know, I would give it would give it a reviewer and undue Advantage you can you can imagine of you saying yeah. Yeah. Yeah. butter But keeping going in art and in life is what it's about getting started keeping going getting started again. That's it. So this is one of my favorite. Paris stories but a universal truth. It happened in the Parish of Glendalough near where I live in Wicklow where where I lived for four years and we can go famous story and Irish Legend would send Kevin and the Blackbird. And then there was sent Kevin on the Blackbird. This saint is kneeling arm stretched out inside his cell but the sale is narrow. So one turned up Palm is out the window stiff as a Cross Beam when a black bird lands and lays in it and settles down to nest. Kevin feels the warm eggs the small breasts the tucked neat head and claws. I'm finding himself linked into the network of eternal life is moved to pity. Now he must hold his hand like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks until the young are hatched unfledged and flown. And since the whole things imagined anyhow, imagine being Kevin. Which is he self forgetful or in agony all the time from the neck or not done through is hurting forearms are his finger sleeping. Does he still feel his knees or has the shut? I had blank of under Earth crept up through him. Is there distance in his head? Alone and mirrored clear in loves Deep River to labor and not to seek reward. He prays. A prayer his body makes entirely for his forgotten self forgotten bird and on the riverbank forgotten the rivers name. Sometimes they loves Deep River Wells up and sometimes it's too late. When my mother died, I mean, I'm not suggesting that we didn't have a loving relationship. But my the poems I could have written a better when she was alive. I couldn't write until she was dead. So to speaker that's an Irish Bull of ever the world one. Anyway, I thought I'd read these two poles which are quite personal. just because because I like them. Just to Memories One about peeling potatoes and the other about folding sheets which are going to very intimate and dying art. When all the others were away at Mass, I was all hers as we peel potatoes. They broke the silence. Let fall one by one like solder weeping off the soldering iron. Cool Comfort set between us things to share gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little Pleasant splashes from each other's work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside when hammer and tongues of the prayers for the dying and some were responding in some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head her breath in mine are fluent dipping knives. Never closer the whole rest of our lives. The cool that came off sheets just off the line made me think that dump must still be in them. But when I took my corners of the linen and pulled against her first straight down the Hem and then diagonally then flapped and shook the fabric like a sail in a crosswind. They made a dried-out undulating Flack. So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand-to-hand for a split second as if nothing had happened for nothing had that had not always happened beforehand day by day just touch and go coming close again by holding back in moves for I was X and she was old inscribed in sheets sheets own from ripped out flour sacks. I just had to say this part with a poem which is a much more public I read it here because it was written to be spoken from the stage it was an extra chorus it was quite a bold activity I translated the play by Sophocles and added a couple of courses about time anyway It was this we've been translated and this is Sophocles play philoctetes or falak. Today's some people call it. It's one of those one of those problematical pronunciations Sophocles obviously hadn't got the advice I once got from my publisher. I was going to call a book by the word Po lder and I wasn't sure if I was pulled or polder and Charles Monteith he worked for And favorite said well, I do think it's not a very good idea to call a book by a name people aren't quite sure how to pronounce. Sophocles probably knew how to pronounce it or writer they locked it is I call it anyway. anyway This was written as I say as spring of 1990 was performed by field a theater company in Derry field F. Which Brian Friel is a Founder member along with Steven Rae and It was just I don't think I'd have allowed myself the global voice. This is the first really Global voiced utterance that you're here tonight because the chorus in a Greek and a Greek drama as we know knows it all and I kind of is most a tactic and there's Oracle or and kind of effort. We're a bit later. It could write papal encyclicals straight away, you know with everything but so so this this this is that Kind of utterance. So at the center of this poem stands the actor at the first circumference is the political life of Northern Ireland in 1990. Pretty pretty low grade expectation at the second circumference was the what was happening in Europe under the final circumference was was the Greek vision of democracy and Justice envisage in the Parish of Athens, and I kind of available to the Universe of the human intelligence ever ever afterwards. Anyway, the chorus says human being suffer. They torture one another they get hurt and get hard no poem or play or sung can fully right a wrong inflicted and endured the innocent in jails beat on their bars together a hunger Strikers father stands in the graveyard dumb the police Widow unveils faints at the funeral home. history says don't hope on this side of the grave but then once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of Justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme so hope for a great sea change on the far side of Revenge believe that a farther Shore is reachable from here believe in miracles and cures and healing Wells call Miracle self-healing the utter self-revealing double-take of feeling if there's Fire on the Mountain or lightning and storm and a God speaks from the sky that means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth Cry of new life it started term it means once in a lifetime that Justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme Thank you very much
(00:56:57) Irish poet Seamus Heaney delivering the Guthrie theaters annual Global voices lecture. He spoke earlier this week at the Guthrie Amy won the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. If you missed part of Seamus, heaney's presentation will be re broadcasting his comments at nine o'clock tonight on Minnesota Public Radio. So you get a second chance to hear what he had to say. Seamus Heaney rebroadcast at nine o'clock tonight here on Minnesota Public Radio. We'd like to remind you that programming and Minnesota Public Radio is supported by the Pillsbury company Foundation caring for the community by giving kids a loving lift. That does it for our midday program today glad you could join us and we sure hope you'll be able to join us tomorrow. We're going to be broadcasting a new Minnesota Public Radio documentary tomorrow on Bosnia course, Bosnia is back in the news this weekend elections are being held in Bosnia that were called for elections that were called for in the Dayton peace agreement elections, which many people say are turning out to be a nothing but a sham there are some who say suggest the elections should not be held at all because many of the provisions called for in the Dayton peace agreement simply have not been met terms of allowing people to go back and forth to their homes and the rest that has the big news item of the day and on tomorrow, we're going to be broadcasting a new documentary that puts a human face on the problems that have occurred in Bosnia the war in Bosnia. It's called face of Mercy face of hate and it's a very personal story told by Michael Montgomery an American who for years covered the war for the London Daily Telegraph. He is still in Sarajevo this past summer. He went back to the area to try to find out what happened to a friend of his a friend who ended up fighting for the Bosnian Serb Army the friend ended up dead Michael Montgomery was trying to find out just just it occurred there were reports that perhaps he had been killed for protecting Muslims others suggested that he died because he was upset with what he had done during the war. It's an interesting fascinating story will be broadcasting that documentary and talking with Michael Montgomery from Sarajevo. Hope you can join us Gary eichten. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm Perry fanelli today in all things considered the Swedish royalties visit to Minnesota and the US Senate candidates discuss their views and federal tax cuts All Things Considered every day at 3 on KN o WF M 91.1 you're listening to Minnesota Public Radio we have a cloudy Sky 58 degrees at Cana wfm 91.1 Minneapolis st. Paul or Twin Cities weather forecast cloudy and cool through the afternoon it might hit 60 degrees clearing tonight with an overnight low 4245 little warmer tomorrow high 60 to 65 it's one o'clock From NPR news in Washington, I'm Marty Moscow and sitting in for Ray Suarez. And this is Talk of the Nation. The court has spoken for young women across the country who have aspirations to go to an institution like VMI or the Citadel. This means that they will be able to realize their dreams earlier this summer the Supreme Court ruled that the all-male states. Virginia Military Institute cannot keep qualified women out VMI has yet to make public its plans for the future but another military school The Citadel has decided to open its doors to women today on Talk of the Nation women and a military education is there still a place for a single-sex school give us a call