Fragments
Allie Eagle
Salvation as “rescue”.
Fantail = harbinger of death in Maori. For Allie it becomes symbolic of the “death of self”.
This was a great joint-presentation by Allie and Jo. Osborne. Lots of images projected onto the screen, and a great biographical sketch of some of the relevant highlights.
I had a great one-on-one conversation with Allie that was of real value at a more personal level. The starting point being on her latest art works Not the Male Gaze.
John Dennison – “The Interesting case of [Seamus] Heaney, the Critic, and the Incarnation”.
The (critical) focus was on John Desmond’s book Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light (Studies in Christianity and Literature) – Pub. 2009. Desmond too quick to align Heaney’s poetry to a notion of Heaney as “Christian”.
“In Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light, John F. Desmond turns his brilliance away
from Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy to Seamus Heaney, Simone Weil, and their literary nexus, Czeslaw Milosz. Against the flattening forces of gravity in our times, Desmond turns to Heaney to find Weil's metaxu, the realm between immanence and transcendence, the glimpsed but evanescent world, that stands always in the quotidian world, but that more than ever needs the poet's voice and vision to make it known and experienced. Desmond's readings of Heaney's poetic oeuvre are marked with awe and humility, and they are themselves the force of light brought to awareness in love. --Edward J. Dupuy, Dean of Graduate Studies Savannah College of Art and Design.”
The incarnation is a “divine counter-balance”; it offers equilibrium, tilting us toward “new creation”; toward God.
Reference to Heaney’s book The Redress of Poetry:
“These [Oxford] lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry's special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He proceeds to explore how this 'redress' manifests itself in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', 'The Midnight Court' by the eighteenth-century Irish poet Brian Merriman, John Clare's vernacular writing and Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. Several twentieth-century poets are also discussed - W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop and others - and the whole book constitutes a vivid proof of the claim that 'poetry is strong enough to help'.”
The collection of prose essays / lectures (1978 – 1987) by Heaney, The Government of the Tongue was referenced, specifically the lecture of the same name.
Poetry is set in opposition; it is an answer to the world; a world that has lost its way in so many respects.
“…A poem floats adjacent to, parallel to the historical moment. What happens when we board the poem depends upon the kind of relation it displays toward our historical life…”
The poem is a space outside of time. The writing of the poem is break with the usual, with the ordinary and the everyday, but it is not an absconding from it (cf. Heaney The Government of the Tongue).
Simone Weil’s book Gravity and Grace mentioned (cf. John Desmond’s book, above).
When the whole universe weighs upon us there is no other counter-weight possible but God’s self.
Heaney’s interview A Soul on a Washing Line mentioned (in Stepping Stones).
"The Dry Salvages", the third poem of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets was mentioned in relation to the incarnation.
“The poet creates the ultimate fiction” – Wallace Stevens.
Part 1 of this series here. Part 2. And, part 3.
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