Seamus Heaney and the mystery of poetry

I have written poetry all my life since early childhood. Poetry and music have run through my head almost hand in hand, musical notes and musical words. I played three musical instruments, piano, clarinet and guitar and I used to write songs and set them to music. I loved reading poetry aloud even as a child.

When I had finished my three weekly library books ( usually by the end of the weekend) I only had our set of Arthur Mee encyclopaedias to fall back on. But these are full of the most wonderful poetry dotted in between scientific discoveries, histories of kings and queens and how to build a boat out of matchsticks. The poetry in these volumes constitutes my earliest poetic influences and I still dip in and out of the heavy leather bound books today.

But from my late teens one of the greatest influences on my work has been Seamus Heaney. I loved the way he chose his words to be short, strong and wedded to the earth, the way he combined words into layer upon layer and the way he gave me a taste of the classics. I used to learn Heaney's poems off by heart and can still recite odd lines to this day, Some day I will go to Aarhus/ to see his peat- brown head - the opening to TheTollund Man, his famous metaphor on the killing fields of The Troubles in 1970s Northern Ireland.

I first heard Seamus Heaney read his poetry in 1972 in London University. He shared a platform with Ted Hughes. I remember a student calling out, 'What about the Irish Times?' I didn't understand what he meant but I knew that Heaney had been accused of ignoring the situation in Northern Ireland in his writing. In fact Heaney's work does reflect the troubles but hs view was that he was his own man and would write what he wanted to write.

In 2008 I was fortunate enough to meet the great poet himself. He was reading at the annual T.S. Eliot festival at Little Gidding, where Eliot set part of his famous sequence, 'The Wasteland.' There were only about a 100 people in a marquee in the ground of Ferrar House and Heaney was mingling and chatting to the audience. Taking a deep breath I walked up and said hello. He was absolutely charming and very easy to talk to. I said that he had been an inspiration to my writing since I was 18 and told him about my memory of him reading with Ted Hughes in the 1970s. He gave his famous warm smile and commented that the audience was probably hurling more insults at Hughes over the death of Sylvia Plath.

Later he signed my copy of Death of a Naturalist, his first collection which I have kept close by me for decades.

I always try to hear Heaney read in London once a year and last night I saw him read from his new collection, Human Chain, at the shortlisted readings for the T.S. Eliot prize. This is the first time I have seen a change in the man, a shake in his voice and in his hand. I feel very privileged to have seen him read again and wonder how many more opportunities we will have.

We are very lucky to live in his time. Seamus Heaney is one of the greatest living poets today in the English language and his words will last and last.
Heaney was asked in an interview a couple of years ago, "Where do your poems come from?"
"Ah, that's a mystery," he replied. "I just don't know."

Breaking the thread

by Miriam Halahmy

first published in Staple 71 2009

 The first girl not to sew, I was bewildered

by the geometry of pattern, fumbled

with bobbins, took all term to fit a zip.

My grandfather was a tailor,

foot jammed to the metal pedal,

black cloth skimming under a racing needle.

Grandma on the other side lined furs,

best outworker in the business,

in her seventies, she cursed the unforgiving skin.

So neat, you couldn’t tell the wrong side,

my mother won prizes for embroidery,

cut down army surplus for winter coats,

knitted pram suits for three children.

Nearly had time to start on grandchildren.

I followed thought like weave across a cloth

my needle flowing ink, cross stitching

into the warp of black on white.

Who inspires your writing?

Writers are Hunter-Gatherers

GATHERERS
A lot of writers talk about the gathering stage of writing. This stage can involve reading around the literature which relates to your novel, reading books by writers you admire and books on a similar genre and theme.
The gathering stage is also the time for research.
 I've recently been researching the little ships which left Hayling Island for Dunkirk, for my novel, HIDDEN, coming out next year. This photo shows me on the bridge of Count Dracula, moored at a boatyard on Hayling, which went to Dunkirk, May 31st 1940. She rescued over 700 men.

The gathering stage of writing for me also involves a lot of thinking, perhaps not even taking notes, just thinking and thinking myself into my characters and situation until I come to the point where I am ready to write.




HUNTERS
But recently it has occurred to me that there is a stage before the Gathering. That is the Hunter stage. History is a great passion of mine and I think that I would have been most at home at the end of the Ice-Age in the great days of the nomadic Hunter-Gatherers, who followed the herds of edible animals along the the edge of the Ice Sheet. Once they had tamed horses and could ride above the landscape their sense of freedom and engagement with their environment was probably the greatest in human history. It was also a time when I believe women would have had more freedom than later on when people settled in one place and were more easily controlled.

This is a close-up of the old flint beds in the chalk seams on Hayling. There were thriving Iron Age communities on the Island and a very important salt industry which eventually attracted the attention of the Romans.

If I had lived at that time I would have been a healer, studying the plants for medical properties. My mother was a nurse in the Navy in the Second World War and she taught me a lot about managing illness.
I think I would also have been an artist, painting my stories on animal skins and carving beads for jewellery.




And yes, all this is very fanciful, but then isn't that exactly the characteristic a writer needs? Here I am, living in 2010, in an equally rich and challenging environment and my calling is to be a writer of fiction and poetry.As I have been writing since childhood, my antennae are always up. I am always hunting through my world, for stories and words, landscapes and images and once I have settled on a new project - poem, short story, novel - only then does the gathering stage begin.

This is the stage of greatest focus. If I simply continue to hunt I will have a notebook full of What ifs? and no finished product. There is always another great story out there waiting to be written and my antennae are so sensitive, I see possible stories and poems everyday. But I have to take control, decide on my focus and start the long task of gathering before I begin the momentous work of actually writing and crafting my idea.

How do you hunt and gather? Share your ideas with us.