One-on-One Charles
Bennett
He put on
his glasses. They were half-frame reading glasses, over which he gazed,
suddenly fearsome. His whole frame centred and grounded itself, and the gravitas
of his gaze made the warm afternoon sticky. I prickled with sweat.
For a while he praised the weak
poems I showed him. And then, with a disconcerting stare from over the rim of
those glasses, his eyes directly challenging mine with kindly authority, he pointed
at one particular spot in the poem and asked, with a growl of enquiry, āAnd
what about this bit, here?ā.
In was my first and last one-to-one
with Seamus. His office at Harvard (near where I had left my hire-car illegally
parked on a leafy Cambridge avenue) was quiet. Not that I was a student of his,
far from it. This was a personal favour ā and all because Joseph Brodsky had
introduced me by saying āWell, this is Charles: and he doesnāt write bad poetry
all the timeā. No. Just most of it.
Of course I knew about the weak
spot in the poem ā had known it all along, had hoped he wouldnāt notice. And so
I learnt two things: firstly to trust my judgement and rectify whatever I felt
wasnāt working in my poetry from then on. And secondly to remember that if the
poem didnāt have full confidence in its ability, if it was embarrassed about itself,
then the reader would pick up on this either consciously or otherwise. They
would feel the poem was weak even if they couldnāt, as Seamus had done, put
their finger on my problem.
What we have lost with the death of Seamus
Heaney is this level of insight and acuity: the mastery as well as the mystery
of poetry craftsmanship. But the work remains. And once the dust has settled, once
his reputation has been valued and discussed, the work will always be with us:
valuable and careful, the poems looking at us over the top of their reading glasses
in warm but wise scrutiny.
Dr Charles
Bennett is Associate Professor of Poetry & Creative Writing at the
University of Northampton.
Comments