Michael Shearman at the Dublin Review of Books:
‘Perhaps it’s meditation by another name, but at this stage it’s become a necessity’, said Seamus Heaney about his ‘habit of deep preparation’ for poetry readings. Regardless of their size or significance, he would spend at least two or three hours considering what to read.
It means that each reading attains a sense of its own occasion. You may be speaking the same poems, but they are part of something intended, they aren’t just inclusions in some accidental or incoherent bundle of things. It means you can give out and keep to yourself at the same time.
Heaney alludes here to WB Yeats, who wrote, ‘Even when the poet seems most himself … he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an ideal, something intended, complete.’ This idea was important to Heaney. Elsewhere he defined poetic ‘technique’ as that which effects this transformation, ‘that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form’. If you work your experience into a finished form, you can share it without embarrassment, even if it is very intimate. You can give out while keeping to yourself, seem most yourself while being something else. ‘The truth of it comes home to you,’ said Heaney, ‘when you happen to be served with the untransformed material.
more here.
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