To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney, RTÉ presents a series of essential recordings from the archives.
Seamus Heaney was among 12 Irish writers chosen by an eclectic panel who put forward who they thought of those writing in the year 2000 (at the time of this radio series and accompanying book) would still be read a one hundred years hence.
This panel included critics, editors, an librarian, a schoolteacher, a university academic, an actor and a former government minister, all of them avid readers.
Chaired by Declan Kiberd, they debated their selection over a number of weeks before making their decisions.
This is Arts Show presenter Mike Murphy's pen picture of the day Seamus Heaney came into the RTÉ Radio Centre in Donnybrook to record his contribution to Reading The Future: 'Seamus Heaney has always been most generous with his time, making himself available for interviews during the twelve years of The Arts Show. As a result, we’ve been over a lot of this ground before. When he arrives, I ask him to try to ignore all the previous chats and not to feel he may be repeating himself. He wants me to articulate again the philosophy behind the series, and then, having listened carefully, allows that some writers may not care to be interviewed and such is their entitlement. Afterwards, he expresses the hope that the content of the interview is okay and obliges requests for photos and autographs'.
Mike Murphy began the interview by asking: "I would like to begin by asking you about where you are now at 61 years of age. Many poets have done their best work in say, the third phase of their writing life, which he ventured to say you’re in now. Do you feel a sense of freedom about your work at this stage?"
To which Heaney replied: "I was saying to somebody the other day that I’m at the cud-chewing stage, or you could put it more stylishly and say that I’m at the ruminant stage where you begin to get a new perspective. You see what has happened to yourself and you try to put some shape on it. I think I’m going back to the very beginnings of consciousness, almost, in my writing. One of the mysteries in our house and indeed in any house, was where babies came from. In our house they always came in Dr Kerlin’s bag, and I found myself writing a poem recently about Dr Kerlin’s bag".
Over an hour, Seamus Heaney generously responds to Murphy’s questions with considered open answers. Murphy’s final question was what would Heaney like readers in the year 2100 to receive from his work. To which Heaney responded:
"Well, what do we ourselves receive from achieved work? If I read Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop or Emily Dickenson, I say ‘yes’, and that sense of rightness is the minimum for continuity. The extra is ‘Thank God for that’, but ‘Yes’ is sufficient. And that comes from the shape of the thing in the language itself, a feeling of something coming home to you. That’s what I get from poetry.
"I remember when my father and mother came down to Dublin in the late 1970s or early 80s, just after we bought our house on Sandymount. My father went out walking on the strand, and he had an ash-plant with him, but of course he has no sense of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus walking into eternity across Sandymount Strand. Then after my father died, I remembered him like that, making a dotted line across the strand. Maybe that’s one way of answering what you’re asking me. In one hundred years’ time I would like a few dots to be on the strand, and in those dots would be a poem or two – something, as the poem says, that ‘the tide won’t wash away’. This is a short little poem, It’s just called ‘The Strand’".
And to end, he read the poem.
