On Being

Last week’s posts were pretty negative (credit card problems, eye makeup rant, bonfire rant). I am not a full-time curmudgeon. And I do get out of the house to do interesting things occasionally.

Like Thursday night I went to the Mac Theatre to see Krista Tippett, of the PBS show On Being, interview Irish Poet Laureate Michael Longley. It was fascinating. I literally hung on every word. When it becomes available on PBS, I encourage anyone to listen to it. It is so interesting to hear poets talk about words and structure and muses and what inspires them. Longley is known partly as a poet of the Troubles and he spoke at length about the responsibility of the poet in times of conflict. He said he and his more-famous colleague Seamus Heaney were very careful in their depictions of the Troubles, not wanting to be “impertinent” in their work. Either due to insensitivity to the victims of the Troubles or to the sense that they were exploiting the Troubles for their own reputation. Or presumptuous in their search for solutions.

He read his poem Ceasefire and explained its origins. A local storeowner had been standing on a curb with his daughter in Lisburn when a bomb went off, killing her, maiming him. He was quoted in the papers as having forgiven the bombers. Longley wrote his poem as an imagined avenue to peace, using a scene from the Iliad when King Priam described the price he paid to reclaim his son’s mutilated corpse. Longley said when the poem came out, several people came up to him and said “I am not ready to forgive.” Here we are in 2016 and the hatred between the remnants of each side is every bit as potent as at the height of the Troubles. But poets can dream, can’t they?
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