Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A poet acclaimed as the best Irish poet since Yeats and the finest in English today; winner of literary prizes and Oxford Professor of Poetry.
On the island
Eight records
String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130Favourite
part of Beethoven's Quartet No. thirteen, opus a hundred and thirty, in B flat major, played by the Albenberg Quartet
Joe Heaney singing An Bunan Bui, a song about the Yellow Bitton.
Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford
an anthem by Thomas Tallis, O Lord, give Thy Holy Spirit, sung by the choir of Maudlin College, Oxford, directed by John Harper
a speech record… the voice of Jackie McGarren, an actor… Samuel Beckett loved Jackie's voice also… from a record… Takima and he speaks a piece of Malone Dies, uh, Beckett's novel.
Nocturne No. 1 in E-flat major
John Fields knocked on number one in E-flat major, played by Veronica McSweeney.
Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 'The Trout'
Alban Berg Quartet and Elisabeth Leonskaja
Schubert's Trout Quintet played by the Albenberg Quartet and the pianist was Elizabeth Leonskaya.
Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms
John McCormick singing Believe Me if all those endearing young charms.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:04How much did it matter to you being elected to [the Oxford Professorship of Poetry]?
Well, it began to matter more to me after the, so to speak, result was declared. Beforehand I kept it at a distance within myself. I mean I I took it all very playfully… it's impossible not to respond. to the the great arch that stretches back. And not to respond to the sensible case in Oxford itself… It is a fact that a great institution with a great history. The university first of all and then the the um professorship does give you a sense of being responsible to something more than yourself, right?
Presenter asks
5:13Were you a born poet? Is there such a thing?
Well, uh most children probably have the solitude and… Distance and fear of the world, which we associate with the truly imaginative being… The onset of capacity and the onset of capability… Banishes the the poet. So I think that there are many born poets and that's… spacious, uh little fearful part of yourself. That's where the poetical being resides.
Presenter asks
11:23You said that as a child you were 'in between' [the two communities of Northern Ireland]. Do you think balance is achievable?
Well, in my experience… It is possible. Certainly at the uh micro level of of a small community. I do believe it is achievable. And… I have always been I mean constantly… Surprised, uh, I mean, I don't want to sound naive, of course, I know there's I know the bitterness inside out, I know it very well. But… Disappointed, I suppose, that uh there's not more uh trust around. I think that's the real problem in the North of Ireland, that the conditions of uh distrust and uh the experience of betrayal and the experience of disappointment on each side makes everybody so wary of making any generous gesture… that the innate generosity of spirit which is in… Many, many people… is hampered and their public rhetoric becomes more careful than their… private yearnings. And I think that's a sorrow, you know.
The keepsakes
The book
James Joyce
I would love to take Joyce's Ulysses because apart from the exquisite joys of the language itself, the way in which the English language is opened like an accordion or a pack of cards in the hands of a magician, the other great thing about Ulysses is it's it's an absolute documentary soundtrack of the volubility rascality and uh humour and vindictiveness of of Dublin.
The luxury
Well, I'm thinking of bringing a pair of Doc Martin's boots. My son Michael bought me a pair and uh my children enjoy seeing me parading in them. I think it'd be very good for walking over Rocks in this faintly northerly island, and also for kicking rocks and trees in moments of exasperation.
Presenter asks
14:03What person or what point or what experience unblocked the poetic dam?
Well, it was after I left Queen's University and I was teaching in Belfast and I began to read contemporary… Irish and British poetry. And I read Patrick Kavanaugh's poetry… And at the same time… I encountered the poetry of Ted Hughes, which was immensely exciting to me, and it opened a channel into not just into memory, but into language… I always remember opening the book called L'Opercal in the Belfast Public Library and said View of a Pig and said the pig lay in a burrow dead. I thought nobody knew about that except myself… So there was that uh sudden access of, as the Californians would say, permission… And uh and so the th the the ability to write set in and and it's been there ever since.
Presenter asks
22:35You've refused to champion the Republican cause, and been criticised for it. Why?
I haven't uh been a spokesman for, I think, any cause, and any time I have spoken, I have spoken usually impatiently. And uh out of genuine personal unease and a desire to clear my own slate… in order not to deceive… Either the British or the Irish… I don't think I have a a program. I have a a set of dispositions and affections. And I I desire, as far as possible, to conduct myself uh honestly.
Presenter asks
24:56You left Belfast in 1972 for a cottage in County Wicklow. You were criticised for turning your back on the north. What do you say?
Well, I guess I'm I'm not sure. I mean… The fact of that move from Belfast to Wicklow was it was indeed accidental. We didn't begin the enterprise by saying now we will leave Ulster. There was a a happy uh chance when a woman wrote to us from Canada… And she said, I have this cottage in Wicklow. I heard on the grapevine you were looking for one. So we went there at Easter 72… And you've said since that it brought you closer to your family? [GUEST: ] Well, indeed, that's true. And I I I think of that time as um… As a time of listening to radio and uh behind closed doors, so to speak, stealing a march… out on the edge and feeling sort of… almost invulnerable because we were so frugal and close to the ground.
“I had my own mother, of course, who bore me. But uh … My father's sister, Mary, was in situ in the house when my mother came to live there, when she buried my father. And I suppose it says a lot about uh my aunt, the father's sister, that she and my mother worked out.”
“The life of poetry… as at its most vital is a life of fear, I think… and uh panic that that that will leave. So that's there's great desperate joy each time it uh comes up and you feel vindicated.”
“I think the most important thing to me now, truly, is that the thing be right in itself. It is a matter of form. How do we know something's finished? It's that mysterious tilt… uh of a thing towards being its complete self. It's to give it its whole itness.”
“I would have said, you know, a year ago, WB Yates, Because uh … I think Yeats's poetry. Can take the brunt of many things… public atrocity. Yeats's uh moves through uh a very tragic time in Ireland and writes poems which stand up to… the occasion… they are poems where the the man's inner energy uh takes the measure of the outer circumstances and … wins a kind of uh freedom against it. He's not oppressed. But then I began to react just very recently against HP just precisely because of his almost absolute control.”