Close and Slow

A Weekly Appreciation of Poetry Pt.5

The passing of Michael Longley continues to cast a long shadow over the world of poetry. Over the next while readers should expect to see some periodic articles on The Sounding Board, reflecting on his body of work and his legacy. This is once again reflected in this week’s ‘Close and Slow’ where our focus will be on a new poem from Ian Duhig. The poem, part of his new collection, An Arbitrary Lightbulb¹, is entitled ‘Michael Longley Reads ‘Harmonica’’ and seems like a good fit as this post directly follows from the weekend of Longley’s funeral in Belfast.

In previous posts in this series, I have encouraged poetry readers to follow a four-step pattern for appreciating poems. Those steps are:

1. Listen to the voice of the poem

2. Put form first

3. Identify clear themes

4. Piece it all together

I encourage readers to allow Duhig’s beautiful piece to pass through each part of this process, even though I won’t be outlining each of these steps in this article. For an example of how to do this (using another poem) please see here.

In this week’s post, I want simply to highlight some key decisions that Duhig has made in composing this poem, explain some of the references it carries, and conclude by bringing something of the emotional weight of the poem home.

Encountering Found Things

The first thing we need to note about Duhig’s piece is that it arguably falls into the category of a ‘found poem’. Found poems take lines from the work of other poets and either rearrange them (often as a collage), develop them, or take them as a jumping-off point for other ideas and concepts. There are two direct quotes from Longley’s poem, ‘Harmonica’, one in stanza two (‘My Dad like old Anaximenes breathes in and out’) and stanza four (‘an orchestra of harmonicas’). Identifying the ‘foundness’ of a poem is important in any reading, and this factor will have a governing effect on our interpretation of it.

Identifying the cast of characters

Our age is one of skim reading and doom scrolling, of squeezing the juice of meaning out of all media as quickly as we can. Poetry is a great antidote to this, demanding as it does that we slow down our senses and our intellect long enough to take in what is being communicated. This is particularly evident in poems that make references to historical events, contemporary figures or the history of literature. Unless we are willing to audit the things that we don’t understand and apply ourselves to some light research, the poem will at best be restricted to a merely sensory or sonic experience.

In this poem, there are five main characters or reference points:

Michael Longley: whose reading of his poem ‘Harmonica’ gives rise to Ian Duhig’s own reflections. Michael Longley was one of the outstanding poets of his generation, whose recent death has greatly affected the poetry community in Ireland and much further afield. Duhig enjoyed a long connection with Michael Longley, and Longley, in turn, greatly admired Duhig’s work. Speaking with Declan Ryan in December 2024, Longley stated:

I'm a bit leery about creative writing, you know, creative courses. I mean, it's a big thing. I've done a number of Arvon courses, and to be quite honest with you, there was only one poet I discovered, and it was Ian Duhig, who I think is rather brilliant.²

Anaximenes: for those of us who did not enjoy a classical education, references to Greek philosophers can be a rock on which our reading of poetry perishes. When we encounter a name like Anaximenes we can either give up on reading the poem in question, plough on pretending that we are more educated than we are, or eat humble pie and look up what the reference means. I would always urge this final option, as it allows the poem to mean what it means, and also gives us an opportunity to learn something new!

Giannis Stamatellos informs us that,

Anaximenes (fl. c. 545 BCE) was a pupil of Anaximander. He is the third and the last of the Milesian philosophers. Only a few sources concerning his life and activities survive. He wrote a book in prose, probably within the same framework of natural philosophy as that of Anaximander, but in ‘simple’ language, as the report goes (A1). Anaximenes was interested in cosmology and meteorology, and some of his ideas in these areas survive.³

Cosmology is the area of thought that concerns itself with the origin of things, particularly the universe, and Anaximene’s ideas have a particular bearing on Longley and Duhig’s work:

Anaximenes maintained that the source of all things is not indefinite and unlimited, but air: a definite but infinite material stuff. The air is the source of life that encloses the cosmos and the first principle responsible for the maintenance of all living organisms (B2). Everything is produced through quantitative differences of the air.⁴

We will come back to the significance of Anaximenes later in this article.

Longley’s father and the soldiers of WWI: Longley’s original poem, which Duhig responds to, is a moving capture of the poet’s veteran father and memories of war. Longley’s father is an active participant in the original ‘Harmonica’ poem and is a key reference point in the poem we are considering in this post. Along with Longley’s father, there marches a band of soldiers, under the flags of both Germany and Britain.

Ian Duhig: there is a self-referential element to this poem, in which Duhig places himself in a relationship to Longley, and the characters of the original ‘Harmonica’ poem. This, unsurprisingly, is a key to understanding the whole poem.

The final name, S.T. Coleridge, is not so prominent in the poem, but the poetic inscription from his work, which references an Aeolian harp, is important to the theme as it unfolds.

Breathing life into poetry

The source for Duhig’s work lies in Michael Longley reading his own short poem, ‘Harmonica’. This is a piece which carries major pathos, entering the realm of Longley’s relationship with his father, his father’s relationship with the Great War, and the wider relationship of these things to the very essence of life. The poem bears reading and meditation:

The best interpreter of this poem is Longley himself, and we are privileged to have a good capture of where this poem came from and what it is communicating. The poem, Longley said,

Goes back to my school days, when I brought home a harmonica. And my dad picked it up and started to play it rather well.

Now I had never heard him play anything, but he played it rather well. And he told me that during the First World War in the trenches, there would be long silent periods when you weren't on a bombardment. The lads taught themselves to play the harmonica, and then they played those on their marches, little impromptu bands.

I wanted to write about that for years and years, and then I was reading a book on the ancient Greek philosophers, and there was Anaximenes, God rest his soul. Thank you, Anaximenes.

Anaximenes believed that air was the basis of all creation. And goodness, he breathed life into the poem.⁵

Taking this statement back into the poem illuminates it, and also provides us with a solid foundation for interpreting Duhig’s responsive piece. Central to the meaning of Longley’s poem is breath and life. His father’s breath, the breath of men long dead through battle, and the music that brought some relief to individuals in the most extreme circumstances, all find their terminus in the ‘reeds and holes’ of this simple musical instrument. Longley’s bringing the harmonica home is an act of life-giving itself, providing an access point to a grief too great for words. Anaximenes hypothesis on the nature of the created world, and the crucial role played by air and breath, is earthed in a deeply personal family memory of one of humanity’s worst periods in history.

An opened ear, a broken voice, and an offered harmony

It might be helpful at this point to remind ourselves again of Ian Duhig’s responsive poem,

In terms of understanding what is being communicated, it is vital to locate the poet in the poem. Duhig’s posture here is primarily that of a listener, a member of an audience receiving Longley’s breathed-out reading of the poem about his father. He thinks of his reading voice as a poet and is reminded of fairly scathing feedback once given to him that it sounded like a ‘broken harmonica’. Regardless of the capacity or comparative beauty of the poet’s own voice, it is one with the air that gave ‘Michael, his father, the men’ their lives and their ability to make music. Duhig shares this same air, it is what holds everything together, and it eventually elevates his thoughts to the destiny of those dead men and the purer air of their imagined song. The lines that express this are exquisite:

I hear one accompanying a heavenly choir

of Tommies and Fritzs, who sing ‘Stille Nacht, holy night’
together, beyond any language, their breath becoming
a pure air they follow into the music of eternal light.

Duhig is here taking Longley’s image and transfiguring it into a realm beyond, in lines that bear the full weight of Anaximenes’ thought and the sheer sublimity of all of life. These soldiers, on both sides of No Man’s Land, are carried on the song into a better and purer realm.

Where does this rapturous reception of Longley’s poem leave the poet as a hearer? The final stanza is self-effacing, candid, vulnerable and frankly beautiful. Duhig compares himself to a ‘corbie’, a Scots word for a crow, who is perched on a tree above the poem’s characters as they pass. Referencing the Aeolian harp that Coleridge’s poem is about, he imagines the air from these figures reaching the branches of the tree and making a music of their own. His harmony is that of silence, his posture that of a receiver, and his experience is that their lives passing below him are striking notes, albeit on broken limbs.

Poetry and life

All of this brings the poem right home to us. We are likewise readers and hearers, receivers of the breath of Longley’s poem, of the music of long-dead soldiers, and of Duhig’s own response to hearing this piece read by the poet. We, on this side of the page, are simultaneously outside of the poem but also drawn into the breath of life it brings to us - we are participants alongside the corvid poet with a broken voice, and beneficiaries of what Longley is sharing.

The poem thus dignifies poetry, but it also dignifies all of our connected lives, sharing as they do in the moment, in the music, in the very breath that is the making of things. Ian Duhig’s poem is clever without being smart, tender without being sentimental, and philosophically sophisticated while remaining immediate and accessible. These features typify the collection in which they appear, but they also vitally connect the work of words with the fabric of the world in which they appear.

1. More information about this wonderful collection can be found here.

2. From London Review Bookshop Podcast: Michael Longley & Declan Ryan: Ash Keys, 18 Dec 2024.

3. Stamatellos, Giannis. Introduction to Presocratics. 1st ed. 2012. Reprint, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

4. Ibid.

5. From London Review Bookshop Podcast: Michael Longley & Declan Ryan: Ash Keys, 18 Dec 2024.