Through shuffles of the impatient feet of students hanging around a locked conference room door at Joyner library, I eavesdrop. "I need the extra credit, and I'm going for it," says one lanky looking (what I assume) sophomore.  A girl with long hair says, "I've been trying to read this and it's torture.  If it's not gossip, it's not interesting to me."  Then it dawns on me, there are two groups here: those who have been crossing off the days to hear Dr. Daniel Tobin speak on Seamus Heaney's North and those who have been subtlely shoved to Joyner Library's 3rd floor on a chilly December night.  I lie somewhere in-between.

All that I know of Ireland could be contained in a short list -- U2, The Cranberries, Yeats, and a pint of Guinness, and of Heaney even less -- his translation of Beowulf.  But as that list of things Irish expands, I realize that soon North will be added to my mental list of "books to read before I die," or maybe even before I start next semester.

Tobin expresses Wallace Stevens's definition of modern poetry: "The poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice."  Tobin says, "It seems to me that Heaney's poems embody that particularly well.  It's not solely about the artifact of the poem; it's about the act of consciousness, the act of finding that will suffice."

And Heaney's work does "suffice."  Tobin recounts images of rape, sex, violence, and nightmarish figures, and I am sure the shuffling feet crowd is perking up.  Then Tobin makes the connection between Heaney's words and right now.  He proves that North passes the litmus test for lasting literature.  This is topical stuff.

"Rather than mystify violence, the book invites its readers to keep awake -- to become conscious of the brutal cycle that finds its source in the wellsprings of civilization.  The poems are artistically achieved very highly so, but he's also getting at something that I think is profoundly significant not only for that one particular locality; it's profoundly important for our contemporary world as well."  Tobin adds, "You know that violence has not left us in the world."

With the recent body count from home and abroad that's reported and commented upon hourly by CNN, this statement seems strikingly apropos.  And if "gossip" is what gets you going, then Heaney appears to be the National Enquirer of the past as well as the present.  Because after all, in an elemental sense, isn't literature just gossip?  "Hey you, let me tell you about what's happening in the world."  So now even shuffling feet with the long hair gets her fill.

And in reference to the violence, Tobin asks of Heaney, "Why go there?"  And in answer Tobin relates,  "I suggest that what he calls his 'quest for self definition,' which we are all after all of us at some level seeking to find who we are in the world, is taking him to just some very disturbing places as a poet.  So it's quite a very brave move on his part to dive into and wrestle with these fundamental conflicts that I hope you'll see is not just about Northern Ireland." Tobin then reiterates, "It's not just about Northern Ireland; it's about other kinds of violence and other kinds of brutality that should be relevant not just to people who just live in that locale."

In commenting on North, Tobin says, "If this is so then perhaps, memory also harbors the answer to ending the cycle of violence that not only plagued Heaney's homeland but that has plagued human history across times and cultures and continues to do over the years in places as diverse as Bosnia and Rwanda, Darfur, and Palestine."  I know that the geographical examples also fall well within our own borders.

As Tobin speaks of violence and the cycle that is "grist to an ancient mill" and of Heaney's "dark epiphany," I see the others who have come tonight. Those who, upon having words like "kenning" or "mythologized" thrown at them, experience a true Pavlovian moment.  They are almost salivating.  They are engaged heart, soul, and brain.  They, too, have been satisfied.”

Tobin states that Heaney is "plowing down into something primeval …  that the poet quickly uncovers violence at the heart of culture itself or, I should say, culture making itself as a sustained sequence that would expose the symbolic origins of violence, North suggests that there is hope in the act of naming the terror. By naming the terror, by exposing the violent origins of culture, the poet orders the disorder …"

The shuffling feet that have come with visions of extra credit "dancing in their heads" are silent during Tobin's presentation.  Perhaps, dumbfounded or perhaps a glorious northbound seepage is beginning -- past the thrill of their ipods or past the anticipation of their next text message.  Here's to all their literary V-8 moments and to my own.

***********************************************************************

Moses: What is it about Seamus Heaney that first interested you? 

Tobin: I read one of his poems in The New Yorker when I was an undergraduate, and I was captivated by it.  I just liked the sound of it.  I was enthralled by the way the words looked on the page in relation to each other and the sound.  So I got the allure of his music very early on.  And then after I graduated and for the summer I worked in poor areas of Dublin, I began to look at his poems.  I began reading more and more and more. It was a long gestation period for me getting to know his work and becoming more and more absorbed by it.  Then I actually took a class with him, eventually.  Now a long time ago, a poetry workshop.  And so consequently when I went on to a doctorate, and at the time there were not a lot of us out there, I thought this is something I could do and do rather well.

Moses: Advice to students coming to poetry for the first time?

Tobin: Find somebody you care about.  Find a poem that you are compelled by that has some deep relationship with what you want to do and how you want to be in the world.