Word: sh
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...SH: It’s a subject I usually don’t talk about. There’s not much to say about it. I was in Greece at the time, and I didn’t learn about it for two days. I was able to hide for a couple of days and get myself ready. I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary...
...SH: A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. You grew up vigilant because it’s a divided society. My poetry on the whole was earth-hugging, but then I began to look up rather than keep down. I think it had to do with a sense that the marvelous was as permissible as the matter-of-fact in poetry. That line is from a poem called “The Gravel Walks,” which is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you?...
...SH: I don’t know the answer to that, really. I don’t believe that sociological conditions produce the oddity of talent. Talent is unpredictable. But it does seem to flourish when societies are in search of definition...
...SH: The world I grew up in was actual, but it was also previous, in a sense medieval. Well for water, light the fire, go to Mass. My first life on that farm in County Derry was hermetically sealed. In my twenties, when I had gone to university, it was almost like opening something that had been sealed. It belonged to me, but in memory, it was already a dream place. That’s very useful to a writer—to have somewhere that has a sense of dream-reality to it. I like things that have both...
...SH: It’s different in that you have the given, a shape to work with. You don’t have to conjure the material ‘thingness’ of the poem. It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle than anything else. At the same time, all the definitions of translation that I really like is that it’s writing by proxy. You get the satisfaction of finishing something without the penalty of having to start...