Word: sh
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...SH: If it can. It can’t change the world, but within the poem, things should be re-tuned at least. Maybe eventually, gradually, poems enter the consciousness of individuals, and then of a culture, and then has a general effect. But it’s on sensibility rather than politics...
...SH: I’m part of the culture, and I’m part of the problem...
...SH: Everybody in Northern Ireland is infected—well, you’re either one tribe or the other, one guy or the other guy. Your calling as a humanist, as an intelligent creature, is to outstrip the conditions which you are landed with, to get some vision of a cultivated, tolerant, civic society. No matter how well-disposed you are, no matter how personally irreproachable your political or religious attitudes, you dwell in a place which is troubled. You’re answerable to that, especially when violence erupts, and lives are being lost, and lives are being...
...SH: I like to quote the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz: “What is poetry that does not save nations or people?” Most poets don’t really think about that. In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. So there was that feeling of responsibility...
...SH: I think they’re all unique. We have the beginnings of structure, of institution, which would allow the divisions to play out politically. But what is being played out in the institution is quite a dangerous energy on the streets. What you want, if possible, is some institutional shape that allows dangerous voltage to enter and work and drive the institution. It doesn’t mean that sectarianism or opposition has gone away in Northern Ireland; it means that there’s a kind of future-seeking possibility in the institution...