I. One of the central challenges I’ve found myself facing writing poetry(? — still can’t quite say it without the question mark at the end) has been rather like one of the central challenges I think I face out in the world: I’m a fount of useless bits of knowledge that make up the entirety of the non sequitur-driven internal monologue that accompanies me and I have to remind myself that the rest of the world isn’t right there with me. I tend to do the same thing when I write and it’s very hard for me to assess whether I’m being over-the-top obscure and allusive or whether I’m being fair in asking my readers to trust me and to look it up for themselves if they want to know more. Reading some of Heaney’s earlier poetry (North, from 1975, this week, e.g.) is proving to be one model for how to do that in a very controlled way.
II. I had planned to start with Heaney’s Beowulf and some more Beowulves but I found myself getting stuck in the interstice between his and Maria Dhavana Headley’s translations, treating his as the original.