The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 1/18/08

[BlueIris]

"Bogland"

     for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening—
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind black butter

Melting and opening underfoot
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

—Seamus Heaney

[BlueIris]

1. Heaney, Nobel Laureate and one of the 20th century's great Irish poets, said this about "Bogland":

"I had been wishing to write a poem about bogland, chiefly because it is a landscape that has a strange assuaging effect on me, one with associations reaching back into early childhood. We used to hear about bog-butter, butter kept fresh for a great number of years under the peat. Then when I was at school the skeleton of an elk had been taken out of a bog nearby and a few of our neighbors had got their photographs in the paper, peering out across its antlers. So I began to get an idea of a bog as the memory of a landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it. In fact, if you go 'round the National Museum in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion of the most cherished material heritage of Ireland was 'found in a bog.'"

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear BlueIris!

Ah, very interesting!

Archeology in poem form...

A different sort of perspective...

I like it...

Thank you!

:hug:

[BlueIris]

3. Thanks! Heaney's "bog poems" are some of the best poems ever!

[BlueIris]

4. Kick.

[BlueIris]

5. Kick.

[BlueIris]

6. Kick.

[BlueIris]

7. A tasty poem about BOGS, anyone?

[BlueIris]

8. Kick, in case this was more of a Saturday poem than a Friday poem.

[RainDog]

9. I missed this one before

Have you read his translation of Beowulf?

Digging is probably my favorite poem of his.


Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

[BlueIris]

10. Yes, I have read the Beowulf translation. I even have a CD of him reading it.

[RainDog]

11. ooh, a cd would be much better.

did you read the new-er translations of gilgamesh and sir gawain and the green knight? (as in the last 7 yrs or so)

[BlueIris]

12. Gilgamesh, yes, Gawain, no.

I looooove me some Gilgamesh, tho.

[RainDog]

13. so how did you get so wise in the way of words, grasshopper?

I have to say it's so nice to see poetry on this board because I haven't kept up with the whole little mag./lit press journals world lately.

[BlueIris]

15. Uh, let's just say I picked something less-than-marketable to get a degree in.

[RainDog]

16. a friend of mine...

...who got a degree in studio art... said she got a degree in "I now have to attend grad school."

btw, the reason I've heard Kevin Young read and gotten him to autograph Jelly Roll and the reason I know (barely) Dean Young is because they both taught where I attended school. Dean's wife, Cornelia, was a teacher of mine. She was a D.H. Lawrence scholar before she published her first book of fiction. Cornelia's class was interesting because another student was the wife of Yusef Komunyakaa (they're divorced now). He was at the same school, before Kevin but during Dean. Komunyakaa left the year he won the Pulitzer.

[BlueIris]

18. As much as I would have liked to attend a different college at the time, (don't ask)

I'm happy I got to go to the place I went almost entirely because of the visiting scholars who dropped in and out during my undergraduate years, especially the poets. Yusef Komunyakaa is cool.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

14. This is the perfect poem for

the weather where I am today. It is a "boggy" kind of day. Thanks.

[BlueIris]

17. Awww. Sure.