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From Jeffrey Side, 2009-04-03

Response to Ira Lightman’s Response to my article ‘The Dissembling Poet Seamus Heaney and the Avant-garde’

Jeffrey Side’s response (April 3, 2009)

Ira, I have taken a few points you raise and put them in quotation marks to distinguish them from my responses.

“I felt if anything that Heaney’s early work is connotative”:

I never said Heaney’s work was not connotative, but that his critical writings and aesthetic is weighted against a use of connotation that is not strictly controlled. Language will always be connotative whether one likes it or not; the question is whether a poet uses language to make it more or less so, intentionally. I think Ashbery tends towards the former and Heaney the latter. It takes great talent to do both, so, yes, Heaney is talented. I did not intend to suggest he was not, it’s just that this sort of talent (more usually seen in fiction writing), for me at any rate, is misapplied when in the service of poetry.

“Heaney has a good eye, certainly, for what Robert McKee calls (talking of story) knowing a world so as not to write clichéd plot development, clichéd action, clichéd denouement.”:

Granted, but so have many novelists. My point being, that Heaney’s story telling and cliché avoidance skills are readily apparent, but this does not make necessarily for poetry. It can have poetic elements, of course, as do many novels, but it is not poetry, in any crystallised sense. However, I have to admit, I love cliché; Bob Dylan uses them all the time resulting in unintentional metonyms. To me a poem has failed if cliché is too ruthlessly expurgated form it.

“I see Jeff Side’s article as a revulsion from writing accessibly, so that we can see the whole and nothing but the whole. And he is wedded to novelty and a certain queerness.”:

I am all for accessibility. Who can be more accessible than Dylan? Wanting a poetry that is not Heaneyeque does not mean I advocate abstruse poetry, merely because it is not mainstream. My measure has always been Dylan and the other richly connotative songwriters such as Leonard Cohen et al.

“His writing comes from great disappointment that the mode and bulk of Heaney’s writing doesn’t make Heaney the prophet. There should be a prophet of what Side hopes for.”:

I am not disappointed that Heaney is not a prophet. I think we have a few to choose from already in poetry: Blake and Ashbery, just to mention two, and in song-poetry: Dylan and Cohen, again, to mention but two.

“Perloff and Side can misread the nuanced emotional specifics, the “I see what you mean” tenderness one needs in conversation, when reflecting back “this is what I hear you saying.”:

It is difficult to include this element in polemical academic writing. I hope you have not found my informal emails to you guilty of this. If so, I apologise.

“Otherwise reaching out to cliché is casuistic politics, something I personally like, and I think Bob Dylan does, but I see Perloff and Side don’t.”

You need to explain this to me, Ira.

“I think Side doesn’t read Heaney’s borrowed quotation about Auden and ‘the normal’ very probingly.”

If Heaney does intend to mean by “normal” what you assume he means then I take my comments back. However, I think he simply means by the word a) an expression of a heterosexual sensibility and b) a poetic sensibility grounded in commonplace experiences. In the absence of a conformation from him as to what he means either way by “normal”, it merely comes down to interpretation, which we are both guilty of this instance.

I can’t really respond to the rest of your piece as it is a valid expression of your poetic taste. Each to his own, I suppose.


Ira Lightman’s response (April 4, 2009)

Jeff, these are all good points. Your one about liking Dylan (which I knew) and therefore not being against accessibility, is well taken. Can you provide an example, though, of an accessible poet whom you like? Blake isn’t throughout, as Dylan is. Cliche as casuistic politics, which is muckier and less groovy than the way I think you see Dylan doing it, I have discussed in responding to Aidan. I only agree that Heaney has a ‘use of connotation that is strictly controlled’ insofar as he is, it seems to me, trying to write sing-song luxuriant lyric poems (that for me often bore as poems). I don’t get what’s wrong with novelist poetry, Pound wouldn’t be against it. I don’t think queer = abstruse, and did not think you did. I think you’re wrong that Heaney’s some kind of Daily Mail reading advocate of their kind of “normality”.

I think your emails are lovely, and that you treat me really respectfully and warmly, ditto with Marjorie; but I maintain my point that neither of you are fab at tenderness in your polemics (and I still love reading them). I don’t think I’m just talking about taste: you may have your own poets who you like thoroughly, and those you can only really like some of. My question is: do you? And do you like the ones you really like for their mode, or for their work, exceptions and all?

… a ‘use of connotation that is strictly controlled—I do think Heaney wants to be suggestive, and not just to a strict and limited set of connotations. I maintain I don’t find it interesting often, but I think the same mode would produce connotation not so strictly controlled, and still be good. But I regret implying you said that, I was picking up McKendrick taking a general drift of your piece as saying Heaney is not connotative, but I still see Heaney sitting there, wanting to write it all down, allude to the unsaid when saying the said, to say a lot. I don’t like the poems much, but I don’t see that as the fault of the mode.

Ron Silliman once said that the weakness of Finnegans Wake was that there wasn’t play of connotation, but that Joyce knew every connotation he intended. Which seemed a bizarre thing to say. The re-introduction of the intentional fallacy. I’m sure Joyce sometimes and often guffawed and said, ooh, nice extra pun, what a lucky confluence. Heaney does too, just doesn’t write as well… .


Jeffrey Side’s response (April 4, 2009)

Ira, here are my responses:

“Can you provide an example, though, of an accessible poet whom you like?”:

This is a difficult question because all poetry is accessible to me. If I don’t understand a poem I free associate from individual words and phrases until a meaning that is personal to me evolves. If you mean what poets do I like who limit connotation to allow for an obvious surface meaning, then, I would say none. For me, poetry has to have many levels.

“I don’t get what’s wrong with novelist poetry, Pound wouldn’t be against it.”:

Yes, Pound did advocate something akin to descriptive poetry at various points in his writings, but I am not holding him up as an ideal for connotative poetry.

“I don’t think queer = abstruse, and did not think you did.”:

I don’t, and don’t think I said so.

“I think you’re wrong that Heaney’s some kind of Daily Mail reading advocate of their kind of ‘normality’”.:

Did I say that? I used the word “commonplace”, in relation to his use of the quotidian aspects of existence, be it farm-life or some other intrinsically natural setting. His critical writings advocate this sort of poetry.

“I think your emails are lovely, and that you treat me really respectfully and warmly, ditto with Marjorie; but I maintain my point that neither of you are fab at tenderness in your polemics (and I still love reading them).”:

Thanks, but I have never really thought that tenderness was a requirement in polemics. Of course, one should always strive to avoid personal abuse, but it is often the case that when one is writing a polemical article the tone may seem abrasive, but that is the nature of the form.

“I don’t think I’m just talking about taste: you may have your own poets who you like thoroughly, and those you can only really like some of. My question is: do you? And do you like the ones you really like for their mode, or for their work, exceptions and all?”:

The only poets I like from the past 100 years are Eliot, Dylan and Ashbery (and Kerouac, in parts). I like them because they use language allusively. Other poets and songwriters do this also, but these four do it to my satisfaction.

“… a ‘use of connotation that is strictly controlled’—I do think Heaney wants to be suggestive, and not just to a strict and limited set of connotations. I maintain I don’t find it interesting often, but I think the same mode would produce connotation not so strictly controlled, and still be good. But I regret implying you said that, I was picking up McKendrick taking a general drift of your piece as saying Heaney is not connotative, but I still see Heaney sitting there, wanting to write it all down, allude to the unsaid when saying the said, to say a lot. I don’t like the poems much, but I don’t see that as the fault of the mode.”

All I can say is that, perhaps, I should send you a long chapter from my PhD thesis on Heaney and other descriptive poets from 1910 to 2000. It is very long, but it may give you a clearer picture of where Heaney stands.