Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
From Seamus Heaney
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Write whatever you like!
My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
10 perspectives
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1 perspectives