FERRYING POETS AROUND OHIO: Moving an Audience for Seamus Heaney

Compared to the Milosz reading, my memory of the details during Seamus Heaney's visit to Cleveland State in March 1979 remain spotty. 

That is, Bob McDonough thinks it was March of 1979, and I am dependent on Bob for much of this memoir because while he ferried, I ran around checking on the spaces he was ferrying Heaney to. But whatever the date, we definitely remember the reading.

But as with Milosz, before the reading, there was dinner. And there wasn't time to get him to the Flats. He  was on one of those crushing tours of many readings in many cities in not many days in order, he told us, to earn money for his dream car. A BMW I thought. Bob remembers a Porsche. Details. 

So The Parthenon it would be. That cavernous place in the 1500 block of Euclid whose huge brown slabs of rotating gyro meat greeted you when you came in the door, whose moussaka was both flakey and heavy, and its prices really quite light. We reserved a big table, and Bob brought Heaney there from his hotel very soon after he arrived in town. He was wearing jeans, a blue work shirt, and a sports coat and would be wearing it to the reading because, he noted with chagrin, his suitcase hadn't arrived. Many photos from those days always show him in a suit and tie. The later ones, post-Nobel, have him in the casual dress of that night. Most of us had had a fair amount of retsina and roditis even by the time the saganaki arrived, and we were so used to having it, no one thought to warn Heaney, who suddenly saw flames shoot up and shouts, and he leaped in his seat. He laughed afterwards and pronounced the cheese quite good.

During the meal, some nervous presenters asked him how did he pronounce his name. (Today, you can hear it pronounced online by an American, a Brit, and an Irish woman here, but back then, better to wait and get it from the Irishman's mouth.) He said that his family had pronounced it "Hane-ee," but the nuns had insisted on "Hee-nee," and the latter seemed to have stuck. He had one more nun story before the evening was over, too.

I headed over a few minutes early to the room where the reading was to be held.

Alberta Turner, who had made the arrangements previously, was gone that semester. Heaney's PR person had taken care of the press releases but mostly got the word out through the local Irish-American media of radio and newsletters and churches. Anything to get beyond the newspapers, which seemed to eschew any mention of poetry. (Cy Dostal always said it due to their complicity in d a levy's death. Before my time, so I don't know, but you could not get a notice in about a poetry reading if Shakespeare had been giving it.) The previous spring, only 17 people had shown up to hear Adrienne Rich in an auditorium that seated 200 people. We had huddled in the front, and she had been gracious, saying how fortunate Cleveland was to have the Big Mama Troupe. And it was a weekday. Still.

The Heaney reading was on a Friday night, so there was that. No classes then, not English classes, so you couldn't herd students in. But several of us had taught some of Heaney's poems in our comp classes, and let me tell you, you give working class kids Heaney's poem, "Digging," to read, and they will want to show up to see this guy. I recognized a fair number of my students already in the room, which was-- uh oh, wait a minute-- the room was overflowing already. People lined up all around the perimeter and stuffing themselves in through the door. Early still. 

And then, the hysteria of the moment totally blocks my memory. Who was called and how, I can't recall, but I am pretty sure that Leonard Trawick, the person any of us would want in crisis to be there, was indeed there and found a big room, and then several campus security guards materialized, an announcement was made, and the whole audience got up and paraded-- and I mean, it was indeed a parade-- to a much bigger hall we could all fit into, all 200 or so.

Heaney was introduced by Cleveland State history professor Tom Campbell, whose two hour introductory lecture on Irish history that I once heard has stayed with me for life.  And then Heaney read, fully and generously. He read the title poem from his 1966 book, Death of a Naturalist. Bob has reminded me of the story Heaney told about it: Many years after its publication, he was invited to an Irish Catholic school where the children were to honor him by reciting the poem in chorus. He thought ahead to the last lines where the frogs of the poem "sat/ Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting." Were the nuns really going to let the children say the word "farting"? He couldn't imagine it, and yet, there it came, and all the children chanted, "Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads darting." He was still enjoying that teeny bit of bowdlerization. And much to my great pleasure, from that same book, he read "Digging," the poem of his I most often shared with classes, an anthem for a working class kid who hopes to write.

He also read from Field Work, which had just come out, and from it, he read "The Skunk," surely the only successful poem in English literature that lovingly compares a wife to a skunk. One of my favorite love poems. Or lust poems. Anyhow, a fav.

I don't remember the reception, but Bob does, and remembers that one of the dear horrid cantankerous poetasters who were always showing up at readings and workshops to demand attention and who the CSU Poetry Center usually welcomed graciously, pressed a poem on Heaney, who took it with a smile. 

Bob remembers the next morning that Heaney looked pretty tired, but smiled brightly when Bob picked him up to take him to the airport. As he dropped Heaney off to catch his flight, Heaney turned and said, "Well, I am off to simulate new life!" 

He went off and breathed life into the poetry of the English language, and I used to bump into him in Logan Airport 2000-2002, when he was teaching at Harvard and flying home to Dublin, and I was living between Boston and Findlay, Ohio and our flights left from the same tiny airport terminal. By then, he had won the Nobel Prize, and he didn't need to be reminded of the time he read in a work shirt because his luggage didn't show up. However, that's how I like to remember him,  jumping up as waiters shouted, "Opa!" and laughing over darting frogs.