Following my surprising foray into poetry? as a pandemic project, I applied for and was accepted into a yearlong program at Brooklyn Poets — lots of writing, lots of reading, lots of critique, lots of class. One of the elements of the program is that each participant chooses a poet to do a yearlong deep-dive read. Because I’m particularly interested in translation and reworking medieval texts, I’ve chosen Seamus Heaney. I feel a little intimidated about having to be intelligent about the work of a poet that is totally out of my context, as if I should be able to jump in and be brilliant just because I already know how to read text; but if I can screw up my courage, I’ll try to blog my way through reading Heaney’s oeuvre.
I’ve kept the secondary literature to a minimum, partly so that I’m approaching the poetry without it being filtered through others’ readings first, and partly, honestly, just because there are still only 24 hours in a day and I have an academic book, a trade book, and a translation that I’m also supposed to be working on, plus all the other stuff… But in any case, what I’m reading this year is after the jump: