Seamus Heaney Donates His Papers and Gets Recommended by Bill Clinton

FSG poet Seamus Heaney is popping up in the press. The Nobel Laureate has donated a collection of his papers, including his drafts and working notebooks, to the National Library of Ireland.

"The focus, really, is going to be on the working writer and how he produced his poems so it's really all about the written word. . . Given the move to electronic records, it may be one of the last paper archives of a major writer to become available."

Read the full article on BBC News here.

 

And Heaney's The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes was recommended by Bill Clinton as a must-read of the year on NBC's Today Show, in a segment with Mindy Kaling of The Office fame.

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Seamus Heaney Reads "Death of a Naturalist"

The Nobel laureate recently read "Death of a Naturalist" for PBS NewsHour.

The titular poem first appeared in Death of a Naturalist, collected later in Poems, 1965-1975.

NEW YORK EVENT: Seamus Heaney at the 92nd Street Y

This Monday the beloved poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney will be in New York at the 92^nd Street Y Poetry Center. Heaney will be introduced by Asturo Riley and discuss his most recent collection, Human Chain.

Full event details and tickets available here

Jonathan Galassi on Poetry Month and the Year Ahead

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

Poetry Month so soon? Here it is, catching me up in the midst again, as we always are. We’ve been producing a lot around here, and I think the array is both broad and deep. Our new books this spring include Carl Phillips’s Double Shadow, Yusef Komunyakaa’s The Chameleon Couch, the Selected Poems of Robert Pinsky, and Les Murray’s collection Taller When Prone, as well as Murray’s poem-rich memoir of overcoming depression, Killing the Black Dog. FSG is participating in Eric Fischl’s heroic America Now and Here project by publishing the fascinating collaborative poem Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes. Charles Wright’s Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems is out next week; Adam Zagajewski’s Unseen Hand, in Clare Cavanagh’s brilliant translation, will be out in June; and the big, fat FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, edited by Ilan Stavans, is on the shelf next to new editions of Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems and Prose that we published for the centenary of her birth last February, along with Joelle Biele’s delicious, revelatory Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence.

Seamus Heaney on Czeslaw Milosz

This afternoon I came across a Guardian piece worth sharing. Seamus Heaney considers the life and work of Czeslaw Milosz on the eve of his June 30th centenary: 

What distinguishes Miłosz as a poet is the abundance and spontaneity of the work, his at-homeness in so many different genres and landscapes, his desire for belief and his equally acute scepticism. Chiefly, however, what irradiates the poetry and compels the reader is a quality of wisdom. Everything is carried and feels guaranteed by the voice. Even in translation, even when he writes in a didactic vein, there is a feeling of phonetic undertow, that the poem is a trawl, not just talk.

You can read the full article here. 

And from our archives, Gjertrud Schnackenberg reads Milosz's "If There Is No God" and "Encounter."

 

"Encounter"

 

"If There Is No God"

 

Seamus Heaney Wins "Irish Times" Poetry Award

Congratulations to Seamus Heaney, who just won the Irish Times Poetry Award for Human Chain (2010). Heaney also won the award in 2006 for District and Circle, his previous collection. You can read the full article here, and read selections from Human Chain on Scribd.

Human Chain: Poems by Seamus Heaney (Excerpt)

A Wealth of Poetry on Scribd

I confess to being late to the party on Scribd.com. At first I thought it was a repository for journalists' primary sources (court documents, transcripts, etc.). Then a friend mentioned the site featured thousands of unpublished works of fiction, with several writers critiquing each other's work. It's both of these things, and, due to myriad other uses I have yet to discover, Scribd's blossomed into a very large community of readers.

So we're pleased to announce our partnership with them, starting with a selection of recent work by Les Murray, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Christian Wiman and others. We'll be adding more poetry throughout April, so please check back often.

-Ryan

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Tonight there's two great events to choose from in New York City. We couldn't decide which to attend, so we flipped a coin. (It came up tails!)

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney at Hunter College
The Hunter College Distinguished Writers Series

6:30 pm, Hunter College Assembly Hall, North Building 1st Floor
69th St., between Park Ave & Lexington Ave.

Event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.

A Celebration of James Schuyler's Other Flowers at the Poetry Project
Featuring Other Flowers editors Simon Pettet and James Meetze, as well as an incredible lineup of readers: Anselm Berrigan, Tom Carey, John Coletti, Bill Corbett, Elaine Equi, Jonathan Galassi, Vincent Katz, Eileen Myles, Charles North, Arlo Quint, Stacy Szymaszek, Susie Timmons, Geoffrey Young and Anne Waldman.

8pm, at St. Marks Church
131 E. 10th Street

Details

Seamus Heaney Reading in New York City

We're very excited about this: for the first time since 2006, Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney will be reading and answering questions in New York City.

The Hunter College Distinguished Writers Series
Wednesday, April 21, 2010; 6:30 pm
Hunter College Assembly Hall, North Building 1st Floor
69th St., between Park Ave & Lexington Ave.

Event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.

While we're on the subject, here are a few poems read by the man himself:

"Keeping Going"

"Tears" 

"The Strand"

Henri Cole on the Moment of Reckoning

On March 9, 2010, FSG published Henri Cole's Pierce the Skin, a collection of poems selected from his body of 25 years' work. Henri tells us a bit about the difficult process of choosing the poems that appear in the collection.

Last month I published my selected poems, Pierce the Skin, containing sixty-six poems from the past twenty-five years. While putting it together, I used the selected poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney as my models.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Selected Poems was published in England in 1967, and until a friend gave me a copy two Christmases ago, I didn’t know it existed.  At just over a hundred pages, it is a model of self-restraint.  Though some of my favorite poems from her first three books – “The Weed,” “Love Lies Sleeping,” “The Unbeliever,” “Chemin de Fer,” and “Anaphora” – are not included, I found this unexpectedly liberating. Time would correct things, it seemed to say, if I made my own mistakes. 

Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems, 1966-1987 (which I bought when I was a young man) showed me the way to excerpt from long lyric sequences, letting parts represent the whole, as ash in an urn can represent the body. So with these two books on my desk, I was strict with myself while excerpting my own six books. The manuscript I submitted was only about 125 pages.

The fact that neither Bishop nor Heaney included new poems in their books seemed to support my choice to hold back new work for my next collection, which I hope to turn in soon. If I’d included a handful of new poems, I feared they might never belong anywhere, like geese left behind on the pond after the seasonal migration.

I think publishing a Selected Poems can be a moment of reckoning. I hope readers will see that I’m here to stay. My book is dedicated to Jonathan Galassi, my editor, because I feel he’s kept me on the map of American poetry, in whatever classroom or skyscraper it hangs. 

– Henri Cole, April 5, 2010

Seamus Heaney's 'Digging'

A new statue has been erected in Seamus Heaney's former town of Bellaghy in honor of his poem Digging. There's photos and the full story here--my favorite part is that the statue was started by being formed out of peat.

A couple years back we recorded Seamus Heaney reading Ted Hughes' The Thought Fox--you can (and should!) listen to it here.

The Best Of Last Year

In case anyone is joining us fresh, I thought it might be helpful to list my five favorite posts from last year.

1) Henri Cole schooled us on exactly how Elizabeth Bishop should be read.
He wasn't the only one to offer audio of a Bishop poem--be sure to also check out Thom Gunn's reading of Varick Street and Robert Pinsky reading At the Fishhouses.

2) Seamus Heaney read poetry by Ted Hughes.
Trying to put this into context for one of my friends, I was actually heard to say 'This is like getting to hear The Rolling Stones covering James Brown.' (I'll trust that everyone here knows what I meant.)

3) Associate publisher of FSG Linda Rosenberg weighed in on two of my favorite poets: Thom Gunn and August Kleinzahler. Her words on re-issuing The Man With The Night Sweats:

...it's our hope that our volumes—most with new introductions by poets of today—will make it easier for new readers and old to find their way into these extraordinary books. Due to the unique power of the form, most of these works seem to acquire an even greater resonance as time passes. It may just be that the impact of deeply felt, finely wrought language is even more intense in a less literate age.

4) Frederick Seidel in what looks like a most enjoyable night on the town.
The reading of 'The Owl You Heard' isn't too shabby, but the thought of running into Seidel in a photo booth is what makes me smile.

5) The first-ever FSG vs Knopf literary smackdown
Quickmuse.com came to town to pit Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon against Knopf's Brad Leithauser in a spur of the moment poem-composing competition. Debut poet Eliza Griswold opened the event.

After the jump, one more bonus moment!

“The Window Is Starless Still”

Time to launch into what I’ve taken to calling ‘the crown jewel’ of this poetry blog: new recordings from FSG’s poets!

A little background: all of our poets were invited to select one poem of their own and one from a backlist FSG poet, and then to come into the studio to record both, with a few words of introduction for each poem. And that’s all the direction they had—which has made for some really raucous and enjoyable recordings, all of which I'll be posting in the next month. I like listening to see if I can discern links between the two poems. Sometimes it’s immediately apparent, and sometimes it takes a bit more digging to discover.

I wanted to kick these off with a bang, so I thought we’d begin with Seamus Heaney reading 'The Thought-Fox' by Ted Hughes (which is the source for this post's title) and his own poem, 'Postscript.' Seamus Heaney, of course, can probably be most accurately described as the U2 of the poetry world—with nearly every prize under his belt that you can collect, including the Nobel, he’s become a literary juggernaut while remaining a critical darling (although, luckily, his taste in glasses is much better than Bono's).

I’ll let Heaney describe these poems to you in his own words. Enjoy! Follow the directions in the post below if you'd like to subscribe to our podcasts, or click on the button to the right to subscribe via iTunes. And if you find yourself wanting to buy copies of Heaney's latest book, District and Circle, or Hughes' massive and wonderful Collected Poems, places to buy are linked here.

Seamus Heaney reading 'The Thought-Fox' and 'Postscript':