Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. Codjoe is the 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award. [Author photo by Jamie Harmon. “The Deer” first appeared in the New York Review of Books.]
In the hotel lobby, leaning against a marble column from when the Romans ruled, I sip my vodka as gunfire night and day ricochets in celebration
punctuating someone's wedding or a moment in someone's mood in which blowing off a clip into the air fights off boredom:
in this cellphone video that's more slashes of light, jiggle and jag than a stable point of view, I watch them drag him from muck out
of a culvert, his kufi knocked askew, heavy body thrown across a Toyota battle wagon where an electrical engineer turned militia man,
who reminds me of my father, mild, unshowy, studiously polite, doesn't smile, frown, as he watches himself slapping, in the footage that he's
showing me, the Brother Leader, great Murshid, the Guide—doesn't comment, doesn't shy away from my oh so fine-tuned sensitivities
quivering on the brink, maybe a little drunk, my cloak of objectivity already tattering into rags—his lumps, welts not quite bleeding—unable to look away,
am I hoping to see blood? It isn't every day that a dictator writhes under your heel—the one powerful enough to say Those who do not love me do not deserve to live—
as if he himself were the soul in the body politic and we were just an afterthought, accessory to his glory, the merest janitors to his trash, or maybe
just the trash itself, all of us human trash waiting to be burned. But now, it's our turn, and we've got him where we want him—
his livid puffy face, its blankness unto death like slopped over paint running down the can— his nose by now smashed in so his mouth
hangs open to the blahness of desert hardpan cliffs shadowing tank tracks back into the Nafusa Mountains where just an hour ago we were driving and he was worrying
about load-shedding and high-voltage grids, the tragedy of no infrastructure—while I was daydreaming of vodka and peeling happy hour shrimp
glinting like armor plate—finally, I've seen enough; but as I turn to give him back his phone he's moved down the bar and seems, head bowed, to be
peering into his drink with that intimate anticipation that could signal a joke or a prayer speeding to its punchline, only it's the new kind
of humor, the new kind of prayer, in which the jokes aren't funny and prayers don't deliver, and whether you're praying or laughing, it's all on you.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry including winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf Press, 2018), Station Zed (Graywolf Press, 2015), and Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011). His most recent book of essays, TheLand Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees (Graywolf Press, 2018) recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, NEA grant recipient, and winner of numerous awards including the Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, John Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, The Common and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY. [Author photo by Annette Hornischer.]
Karla Cordero is a Chicana poet, educator, and a 2021 California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow. Her poetry collection, How To Pull Apart The Earth, is a San Diego Book Award winner and finalist for the International Latino Book Awards. Karla’s work has appeared on NPR, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, The Oprah Magazine, PANK, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4 LatiNext Anthology, among other publications. She is the Executive Director for the non-profit art organization Glassless Minds and Professor at MiraCosta College and San Diego City College. Follow her @karlaflaka13 on Instagram or visit her website.
Ray Gonzalez is the author of 16 books of poetry, including Suggest Paradise (University of New Mexico Press). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Cindy Hochman is the president of “100 Proof” Copyediting Services and the editor-in-chief of the online poetry journal First Literary Review-East. She has been on the book review staff of Pedestal Magazine, and has written reviews for American Book Review, Clockwise Cat, Home Planet News, great weather for MEDIA, and others. (And she reviewed the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry for Coldfront Magazine eons ago.) Her previous chapbooks are Wednesday’s Child (Bear House Press), The Carcinogenic Bride (Thin Air Media), Habeas Corpus (Glass Lyre Press), and The Number 5 Is Always Suspect (Presa Press), a collaborative chapbook with poet/collagist Bob Heman. Her latest chapbook is Telling You Everything (Unleash Press). Cindy lives, loves, reads, writes, edits, meditates, learns tai chi, studies Russian, and agonizes over politics in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Portrait of Seamus Heany by Edward McGuire, 1974, oil on canvas. Ulster Museum
Before I ever met Seamus Heaney in person, he sent me a little poetic greeting. Out drinking in Dublin on 16 Sept.1980 with friends, one of whom was also a friend of mine, he was encouraged by her to write something to me. This was the result, which, needless to say, I still treasure:
I did finally meet him a year or so later and, like multitudes of others, I was impressed by his warmth, unpretentiousness, and genial disposition. I had already been deeply impressed by his poems. His death, ten years ago today, was a terrible loss. To mark the sad occasion, here is a wonderful piece from Arrowsmith by the poet/scholar Thomas O’Grady on Seamus’s great poem, “The Given Note.”
The Poet & the Fiddler: A Musing on Seamus Heaney
by Thomas O’Grady
This morning, I cued up the first cut of The Poet & the Piper, an album released on CD by Claddagh Records in 2003 that featured a conversation—poetic and musical—between Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and eminent uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn (a founding member of the legendary Irish folk and traditional supergroup Planxty). Comprising readings of 17 poems by Heaney interspersed with instrumental complements on the pipes or on tin whistle by O’Flynn, the album in its entirety makes for pleasurable listening. But with the tenth anniversary of Heaney’s sudden and all-too-early death looming on August 30th, I wanted to pay particular attention to that first cut, his reading of “The Given Note,” a poem published in his second volume, Door Into the Dark, in 1969. Specifically, I wanted to see if, hearing him read it and O’Flynn respond to it (the only direct segue on the album), I could glean why, of all the possibilities in his vast body of work, that slight and relatively early lyric was chosen to be the sole poem read at his funeral mass, held in Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook on Dublin’s south side on September 2nd of 2013.
Obviously, countless other Heaney poems might have been appropriate for the occasion—many of them much better known. His signature poem “Digging,” for example, with its predictivemetaphor: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Or “The Harvest Bow,” with its elegantly burnished lines and its finely slant-rhymed stanzas. Or “The Skylight” from his sonnet sequence “Glanmore Revisited”: “when the slates came off, extravagant / Sky entered and held surprise wide open.” Or the wonderful imagining of—and in—“St Kevin and the Blackbird,” which Heaney draws attention to in his Nobel address “Crediting Poetry.” Or “Postscript,” which, recalling a windy drive in the west of Ireland, invites the reader to be pervious to the “big soft buffetings” that can “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”Or perhaps “The Gravel Walks,” whose closing stanza yields the phrase that would be inscribed on the poet’s permanent gravestone two years after his interment in St. Mary’s cemetery in Bellaghy in south County Derry: “walk on air against your better judgement.”
But who am I to second-guess either the great man or his family? Presumably, given that Heaney had experienced some serious health issues several years before his death, he had shared with his loved ones some wishes regarding his eventual funeral.
In any case, “The Given Note” is an intriguing choice for several reasons. One is that its setting on the Blasket Islands, an archipelago off the coast of County Kerry in the far southwest, is pretty much the furthest point in Ireland from Heaney’s home county of Derry in Northern Ireland, an area which he wrote richly into his poems from the very start of his career until the very end. It is also far removed in a different way: unlike the great majority of Heaney’s poems, “The Given Note” is based not on personal experience or observation but on a secondhand (or thirdhand) anecdote. In that regard, even as an ars poetica, which it ultimately is, it differs conspicuously from his similarly-themed poems that are contemporaneous with it yet whose metaphors of poetic creativity are grounded in the immediacy of his intimately “known world” of Irish farm life: “Churning Day,” “The Diviner,” “Personal Helicon,” “The Forge,” “Thatcher,” and others.
The anecdote at the heart of the poem is intriguing in its own right. One version of the story has it that at some point in time—probably before the government-assisted permanent evacuation of the Blaskets, completed in 1954—a fiddler from one of the islands heard a haunting melody while out fishing on the ocean and by playing along with it managed to capture its essence. In another version, an elderly couple heard the melody and memorized it. Latter-day speculation allows that the mysterious music may have come from humpback whales migrating to their breeding waters. Regardless, in Heaney’s poem a fiddler “brought back the whole thing”. . . a plaintive air in loose 3/4 time that came to be known as “Port nabPucaí” (“Music of the Fairies”). While in some tellings the fiddler is identified as one Muiris Ó Dálaigh, the earliest known taping of the tune dates to 1968, a field recording made of Seán Cheist Ó Catháin, who was born on An Blascaod Mór, the Great Blasket.
Eventually the anecdote (and presumably the tune itself) made its way to Heaney, and from the evidence of the resulting poem, it seems to have appealed to his interest in the wonder of the creative process, the question of how a work of art—in this instance a musical composition as a stand-in for a poem—comes into being:
So whether he calls it spirit music Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic. Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely, Rephrases itself into the air.
In that regard, is it just coincidence that the poem’s title—“The Given Note”—resonates with Heaney’s musings in “The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats,” a lecture he delivered in 1978 that engages with the “two kinds of poetic lines, les vers donnés and les vers calculés” identified by Paul Valéry. He remarks: “The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated.” Describing further how “the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his donné,” Heaney essentially admits to his own Wordsworthian tendency to surrender to “the given,” to allow himself “to be carried by its initial rhythmic suggestiveness, to become somnambulist after its invitations.” Its sonic texture comprising mostly slant-rhymes on the first and third lines of six tercets of variable line lengths, “The Given Note,” as read by Heaney on The Poet & the Piper, proceeds with the same rubato feeling that characterizes Liam O’Flynn’s playing of “Port na bPucaí” that follows it; indeed, metaphorically, the poem too “comes off the bow gravely, /Rephrases itself into the air.”
Yet, even while appreciating “The Given Note” as an ars poetica both thematically and stylistically, a reader might still be inclined to ponder its selection as the single poem read at Heaney’s funeral were it not for what seems, at first glance, to be Heaney’s exercising of poetic license by locating the fiddler not in a leather-hulled curragh in the North Atlantic, but indoors:
On the most westerly Blasket In a dry-stone hut He got this air out of the night.
Strange noises were heard By others who followed, bits of a tune Coming in on loud weather
Though nothing like melody. He blamed their fingers and ear As unpractised, their fiddling easy
For he had gone alone into the island And brought back the whole thing. The house throbbed like his full violin.
Some scholars have proposed that Heaney first heard the anecdote about the Blasket fiddler from renowned Irish composer and arranger Sean Ó Riada, whom he met in 1968 and for whom he wrote a poem in memoriam included in his volume Field Work (1979). Ó Riada, whose legacy includes the arranging of Irish traditional music for ensembles in the style made globally popular by The Chieftains, died young in 1971; but in 2014, Gael-Linn released a recording of his performing “Port na bPucaí” on solo piano, so the tune was clearly in his repertoire around the time that he and Heaney had some social interaction. In fact, Ó Riada may have heard that field recording made in 1968.So it is plausible that he was Heaney’s source.
One way or the other, whatever version of the anecdote he may have heard, “The Given Note” itself offers evidence that Heaney took the initiative to trace the story to its telling in linguist Robin Flower’s 1944 memoir The Western Island or the Great Blasket. Though locating the tale of the fiddler not on “the most westerly” of the Blaskets, which is Tearaght Island (An Tiaracht), but on Inishvickillane (Inis Mhic Uileáin), which Flower spells Inisicíleáin, his narrative nonetheless seems clearly to underpin Heaney’s poem:
In the old days, when this island was inhabited, a man sat alone one night in his house, soothing his loneliness with a fiddle. He was playing, no doubt, the favourite music of the country-side, jigs and reels and hornpipes, the hurrying tunes that would put light heels on the feet of the dead. But, as he played, he heard another music without, going over the roof in the air. It passed away to the cliffs and returned again, a wandering air wailing in repeated phrases, till at last it had become familiar in his mind, and he took up the fallen bow, and drawing it across the strings followed note by note the lamenting voices as they passed above him. Ever since, that tune, Port na bPúcaí, ‘the fairy music,’ has remained with his family, skilled musicians all, and, if you hear it played by a fiddler of that race, you will know the secret of Inisicíleáin.
But that is not all. Explaining that “the music that went over the house on the island that night was a lament for one of the fairy host that had died and was carried to this island for burial,” Flower concludes his account with an interpretation of the episode that certainly rings true to the enormous sense of loss experienced—and expressed literally worldwide—by Seamus Heaney’s legion of readers and admirers in the immediate wake of his death ten years ago: “That fairy music, played upon an island fiddle, is a lament for a whole world of imaginations banished irrevocably now, but still faintly visible in the afterglow of a sunken sun.” While that interpretation is neither explicit nor implicit in “The Given Note,” its mournful spirit would certainly have been in the air when the poem was read at Heaney’s funeral. And like the droning undertones of Liam O’Flynn’s uilleann pipes or the slow bowing of the countless fiddlers who have likewise been drawn to the mysterious calling of “Port na bPucaí,” it continues to reverberate a decade later.
Originally published in Arrowsmith: https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/poet-fiddler
Thomas O’Grady was Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1984 to 2019. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.
Peter Bushyeager’s poetry appears in journals that include New American Writing, Hurricane Review, Local Knowledge, Sensitive Skin, Global Poemic, Boog City, and in his book Citadel Luncheonette. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.
Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Death Valley (October 2023), Milkfed, and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom: Selected Poems and Last Sext. She lives in LA. [Photo of the poet by Petra Collins.]
Jose Padua’s first book, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is out from the University of Arkansas Press. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in many publications. He has read his work at Lollapalooza, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Nuyorican Poets' Café, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Split This Rock festival, and many other venues. After spending the last twelve years in Washington DC and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he and his family have moved slightly north to Lancaster, PA. [Author photo by Maggie Padua, Oct. 2022; this poem originally appeared in Live Mag! #17]
Aza Pace’s poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse (now swamp pink), New Ohio Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas.
Thomas O’Grady is the author of two books of poems, What Really Matters and Delivering the News, both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the distinguished Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series. Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019 and a member of the Creative Writing faculty, he is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He divides his time between and among the banks of the mighty St. Joe River in South Bend, a converted rumrunners bunkhouse in Adamsville, Rhode Island, and the south shore of his native Prince Edward Island (Canada).
Phyllis Rosenzweig was a curator for many years at the Hirshhorn Museum. Her writing has appeared in several magazines and journals. Her publications include the chapbooks Seventeen Poems (O Press, 1975), Dogs (Edge Books, 1996), Reasonable Accommodation (Potes and Poets Press, 1997), and Girls (Primary Writing Books, 2011). From 1995 to 2008 she and Diane Ward co-published the poetry journal Primary Writing. She currently edits Primary Writing Books. She lives in Washington, D.C. [Author photo by Alan Wallach.]
Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019), and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as residencies from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review,POETRY, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. ["Eighth Grade" appears in The Southern Review, Winter 2023.]
Julien Strong (they/them) is the author of two books of poems, The Mouth of Earth (University of Nevada Press)and Tour of the Breath Gallery (Texas Tech University Press). Julien’s poetry has appeared in many journals, including The Nation, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily, River Styx, Southwest Review, and The Sun. They are also the author of two novels. An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Central Connecticut State University, they live in Hamden, CT. [Author photo by Cecilia Cangiano; "Height" appeared first in The Southern Review, Spring 2023.]
Danusha Laméris’s third book of poems, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of two other books: The Moons of August, winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, 2014,and Bonfire Opera (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award. She is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA program and lives in Santa Cruz, California. (Photo of author by Mark Stover. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2023.)
USS Cyclops. Its disappearance in March 1918 resulted in the single largest loss of life in the history of the United States Navy not related to combat.
A beautifully produced little book of collaborations (or what the authors call “twoness” poems) has just been published. Called We Eclipse into the Other Side, the book, by Miho Kinnas & Ethelbert Miller, is filled with gorgeous short poems marked by a potent synthesis of mystery and clarity, as in these two:
Cliff Fyman was born 3 March 1954 in old St. Vincent’s hospital. He was actually very nearly born in a taxi cab. He drove cab at night in New York City from 2012 to 2017. His first book of poems, Taxi Night, was published in 2021 by Long News Books.
Jennifer Givhanis a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. Jenn is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press), and the novels Trinity Sight, Jubilee, and River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Press). Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, and Salon and has won many national awards, including The Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.
Gregory Pardlo is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, and a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. His third poetry collection, Spectral Evidence, is forthcoming in 2024.
Tara Borin is a poet and writer living in the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City, Yukon. Their debut full-length poetry collection, The Pit, was published by Nightwood Editions in March 2021; their poetry has been anthologized in the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus in Conversation chapbook (LCP Press, 2022), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Best New Poets in Canada 2018 (Quattro Books), as well as published in various literary journals both online and in print. Tara is the 2022 winner of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Borealis Prize: Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
