Entering the soundscape

Encountering Poetry Pt.1

Over the next few posts I will be sharing some of my early experiences with English literature and the mark that they have left on me ever since - drawing a simple reflection from each encounter.

Poetry came to me in the most unlikely place and caught me unawares. Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, culture and literature were not high on my agenda, nor that of my family. This may have sprung from my particular Protestant cultural heritage but I tend to believe that it was more a symptom of a superficial age where acquisition and technological innovation were easy obsessions for children and adults alike. My grandparents were working class people and my immediate family were making the slow climb away from these roots via the medium of constant work as an assumed norm. In such a climate, poetry seldom featured - apart from in ballad form or in the hilarious colloquialisms of Crawford Howard. Although a voracious reader and a constant writer from as far back as I can remember, ‘serious’ poetry was invisible to me as something anyone would read.

Into this vacant space came English classes in the all boys high school I attended (Gransha Boys High or GBH for short). The school was a raucous place, given to occasional violence, but with a wealth of wonderful teachers who made it their vocation to invest in the lives of the young men who came into their classrooms (although they never would have articulated their work in this way). Social deprivation and literary impoverishment were commonplace among the body of pupils but contrary to some of the common stereotypes around working class life, culture could feature prominently on the agenda. One teacher brought in a Colin Middleton piece on one occasion to share with his class, another was able to elicit very credible pieces of creative writing from a mixed ability group, and yet another arranged a startlingly powerful visit from the (then very young) novelist Glenn Patterson.

On one particular day our English teacher, Mr Martin, read to us from Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist. A range of poems were covered but my memory is particularly harnessed to ‘Digging’. Everything about the moment this poem was read remains vividly etched into my mind. It was a wet Tuesday afternoon, the single pane windows were matted with thick condensation; the room was muggy with damp air and the musk of cheap deodorant; the coarse polyester of my Gransha jumper chaffed my cuffs and my collar. Mr Martin’s reading of Heaney was a kind of epiphany for me, in spite of the serrated sensory edge that the room presented. The words were read unaffectedly but not dismissively, and the emotional weight of ‘Digging’ settled somewhere in me (my soul? my psyche?) and has never left. In that moment I subconsciously grasped that words could formulate something just as tangible as the tactile world that the classroom represented.

Coming from a slightly fundamentalist-leaning Christian background, I was accustomed to the elevated language of the Authorised Version of the Bible and could likely have quoted sections of it at will. Heaney’s words didn’t occupy that extra-terrestrial literary space, however. Instead, they seemed plain but somehow meaning-laden, an unencumbered vernacular that unaffectedly breathed something new and compelling.. Mr Martin’s classroom on that afternoon became a place of awakening for me, and ‘Digging’ a kind of manifesto for the power of the pen and its place in a world alive with manual work.

Looking back over those years, I have come to grasp just how important the teaching of literature is, especially in contexts where culture and the arts are not prominent. Mr Martin may have given a commentary on Death of a Naturalist but I don't remember it. What I do remember is a language reverenced, and a poem read in undeniably good faith. Heaney is now standard fare for most secondary age pupils but the need for teachers who in some irreducible way believe in literature as means of light and a form of life in itself has never been greater. Words are the currency of Snapchat and constant WhatsApps for many young people, their world is alive with visual stimuli and affective demands - but a word feelingly read still can have the power to penetrate the murk and funk of our reductive culture and land with life-changing power.

I pay tribute here to Mr Martin, and to all those in the education profession who continue to bear an unpretentious standard for great artistic work in whatever medium. My background, my generation, my educational exposure all made modern Irish poetry an unlikely thing to reach me - but reach me it did, and made itself permanently at home.