Seamus Heaney’s Kick In The Arse for Writers – Now Strike Your Note

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Now, Strike The Note!

As I work away at editing my manuscript  The Lucky Season, I am haunted by Seamus Heaney’s directives to writers. Like the one in the title of this post.  But the sentence before it is the killer for me.  You’ve listened long enough.  Only then does Heaney add: Now strike your note. Well I have lots of smashed thumbs that say I am trying. But I keep listening to other poets and other poems and compare my words to them and lose sight of my own note. Or don’t trust it!

I have found two poems of Heaney’s that remind me to be bold and trust my voice; that remind me to get on with it. And as he says in his poem from his Lightenings sequence: Do Not Water/ Into language. Do not waver in it. I will make that my mantra as I go back to editing this afternoon.

The first poem I want to share is from his poem sequence Lightenings. I have taken excerpts from the beginning and end of the poem. In this poem he conjurs up the spirit of James Joyce. A hard task master.

from Station Island

XII

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
a voice like a prosecutors or a singer’s,

cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basket

with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you must do must be done on your own

so get back in harness. The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a word-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in a sunspot of a breast,
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

let others wear the sackcloth ands ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.

……..

‘You lose more of yourself than you redeem
doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.
When they make a circle wide, it’s time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’

from Station Island, Faber and Faber Limited, 1984

Yes, I so appreciate the words attributes to Joyce including: You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note. But the ones that echo and re-echo for me are the ones coloured richly from Heaney’s many-coloured paint-pots of language. Especially these ones:

When they make a circle wide, it’s time to swim

out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,

elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.

Oh, to find those allurements,/ elver gleams in the dark of the whole sea.

The best known words from this poem are from its ending: Do not waver into language. Do not waver in it. Fair enough. But the poem read as whole has even more power grounded as it is by the rock-solid words from the inside of a well built house. Now that’s a goal: to write a poem as well built as that house and to drink long from its cup of tin.

from Squarings – I. Lightenings

ii

Roof it again, Batten down. Dig in.
Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,
A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.

Touch the cross-beam, drive iron in a wall,
hang a line to verify the plumb
From lintel, coping-stone and chimney breast.

Relocate the the bedrock in the threshold.
Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.
Make your study the unregarded floor.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it.

from Seeing Things, Faber and Faber 1991