Short and sweet is the way to go
so lets have a think
about what to succintly say
keeping the message
love, peace, just wanna not
run out of space.
Hi Wordnerds.
As I write this it occurs to me that you may never read it, as the original post has slipped off the opening portal of the Irish Poetry hall of bores who duel on Le Gardien.
A net-pal - Wordnerd7 - expanding their intellect in one of Southern California's educational groves pointed out on the Guardian Books blog that - going by the URL addresses - it seems many Irish contributors to that august web-site aren't that fussed on Seamus Heaney and dismiss him as unimportant.
And the sunny Californian is right. Many self confessed Irish literate know alls are indifferent to the Mossbawn Magus, I suspect, because of the pronounced green gene of island jealousy, seeking to diminish his gift by claiming it's all hype.
It's like U2. Everywhere in the world they are tops and Bono often mistaken for the messiah residing in their local myth, his tearful fans collapsing as the shaded one shimmies onstage in crepe lifts to transport us to the rarest height of musical abandonment.
Yet ask the avergae rocker in Whelans pub in Dublin (muso central) about him and they proffer forth dreary dissections intending to prove Bono and the boys are actually less talented than their own band, the Spacial Faces.
With four in the group, led by an identikit simpering man with the personality of ten day old mince - whose sole musical claim is a sub standard Liam Gallagher hairdo - this make believe gang self-delude and show great un-intelligence, as to top Bono they would have to have a number one album by the age of twenty two or so.
This shows a deluded detachment and paints their line of belief to be below the threshold of reality.
Most poets in Ireland believe they will never reach the height of eloquence that the Anahorish warbler's ascended to, and they signal their limit by publicly trying to argue - behind the annonymity of net-names like "kfc," "AlarmingLondon" and the like, that a man with clearly greater talent is somehow less linguistically able than they are.
The true test would if they went head to head with him in what in Irish is translated to "call and return," an extemporised poetic form, similar to two rappers battling it out, whose literary formatt is what we do here online.
Knowing the chance of Heaney responding to their public utterance about him is zero, they babble in numbers and mistake the weight of opinion for a truth, all nodding in agreement and taking succour, safe in the group delusion that their most important living poet is crap.
Heaney is the islands first "native" voice whose reputation has transcended that of the Anglo-Irish pre-cursors This bunch held imperial and warped ideas about the civilising of the natives for so long, they almost succeeded, but Heaney stopped all that and is a reflection of how deep and spiritual the island's genuine poetic is, and how different from the various shades of ideas within - some good intended - racist toffs who took it upon themselves to appropriate the island and steer her inhabitants in sufferage for so long their offspring tried to forget what the original reason for being there was, and ingratiate themselves by tilting a downward nod and acknowledging the humanity their recent forebears chose to ignore and slaughter.
Heaney does not seek to lay out a grand masterplan of how to "rule" the peasants, like Yeats, but for the first time in Hiberno-English poetic history, the long, long process of Ireland re-claiming her voice was effected, free of the planter mind-set seeking to speak for Her, the island goddess of memory.
