Making Sense of a Life (2010) [video]

Poet Seamus Heaney:

> So I think the difference in in a poem or a work of literary art, as I would say, story, now, is that it isn't for the moment utilitarian communication. It is, in a sense, some kind of housing of a moment, a snapshot of consciousness that can be looked upon by other persons. People.

> I always like to make a play on two words which sound the same. There's h-e-a-r-d, heard, and there's h-e-r-d, herd, and i think that in writing poetry, especially in times of crisis, political crisis, we've got to beware of h-e-r-d feelings as opposed to h-e-a-r-d.

> The writer is there to be h-e-a-r-d singularly, not to be part of the tribe. Although at moments of crisis this is a very fine and important distinction, actually. And it's one that in the States I noticed in the sixties and seventies when I was here.

> During the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland we had very strong sense of the afro-american the black civil rights movement here. And I had very strong sympathy with the black American poets here, whose first person singular — I — was under pressure always to become first person plural — we — and so that is always a question that arises: Your relationship to your group. Whether you should be standing off from them, or being their conscience as James Joyce would say, or being their voice.

> There are different requirements at different times.

> I really began writing poetry in earnest in my early twenties and at that point I suppose what I was trying to do and probably have been trying to do since is to integrate our first life, which was far from books, far from literature. Which was in a far off time, really, because the…anthropologically speaking, I suppose, even though chronologically I grew up in the 20th century. But it was a 20th century that had wrote really in the medieval, I mean, I was in countryside where we still, you know, plowed with horses, lit the fire in the morning, you know, carried water from wells, and so on…So in quick, in a very quick time, all that changed, in a common life in Northern Ireland, and in my own personal life.

> So what the poetry is trying to do is to make sense of a life in that time, and in that time, of course, included not only my own autobiographical experience but it included the political history of Northern Ireland which was a kind of a riven, a riven and a large subject, so I had to deal with that, too.