RN Documentary: Seamus Heaney: Bogging In Again
From: Radio Netherlands Worldwide
Series: RN Documentaries
Length: 29:30
Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
Since then his lines have been quoted by world leaders, his new translation of "Beowulf" has become a best-seller, and he has praised rapper Eminem for encouraging interest in poetry among young people.
But in his latest collection, District & Circle, Heaney returns to some of the darkest images of his work in the 1970s...when the violence in Northern Ireland was still his main preoccupation.
Perro de Jong talked to the poet at the 2006 Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. About the perils of discarding history too soon...and the need to go back to the "first life" of memory and place when the world makes you feel "simply lost?
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Piece Description
Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Since then his lines have been quoted by world leaders, his new translation of "Beowulf" has become a best-seller, and he has praised rapper Eminem for encouraging interest in poetry among young people. But in his latest collection, District & Circle, Heaney returns to some of the darkest images of his work in the 1970s...when the violence in Northern Ireland was still his main preoccupation. Perro de Jong talked to the poet at the 2006 Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. About the perils of discarding history too soon...and the need to go back to the "first life" of memory and place when the world makes you feel "simply lost?
Transcript
"Bogging In Again":
Seamus Heaney
[reading 1]
Into your virtual city I'll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost.
[intro]
Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
Since then his lines have been quoted by world leaders, his new translation of "Beowulf" has become a best-seller, and he has praised rapper Eminem for encouraging interest in poetry among young people.
But in his latest collection, District & Circle, Heaney returns to some of the darkest images of his work in the 1970s...when the violence in Northern Ireland was still his main preoccupation.
Perro de Jong talked to the poet at the 2006 Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. About the perils of discarding history too soon......
Read the full transcript
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Posted on February 10, 2007 at 07:11 AM | Permalink
Review of RN Documentary: Seamus Heaney: Bogging In Again
You can't go too far wrong with this material: Seamus Heaney's closely-mic'd voice in conversation--a voice that takes hold of words with an unusually strong grip before letting them go. Seamus Heaney reading his own achingly beautiful, soul-disturbing poems in a reverberating hall in Rotterdam. Stir in atmospheric music and intelligent narration by the interviewer. I suppose you could go wrong with any material, but the folks at Radio Netherlands, as usual, get it right.
This is not just any old piece about any old poet. Heaney's talk and his poetry are not *about* poetry but about the world--the world of spit and dust and cast iron but also of falling Twin Towers and our "virtual city." One of the most important poets of our time, an Irishman who came of age writing about the Troubles as "time out of joint" in his own small country, now reflects on a whole world out of joint. A world of "deep, deep, deep unease" where "war is waged almost casually."