Remembering Séamus Heaney at UC Berkeley

Tribute to Séamus Heaney at UC Berkeley. Featured readers were UC professors (Heaney taught at Berkekey) Robert Hass, Robert Tracy, Peter Dale Scott, Morton Paley, Geoffrey O'Brien, C.S Giscombe, Catherine Flynn, Eric Falci, James G Turner, plus many from the community including Vice Consul Kevin Byrne, Neil O'Neill, Leslie Cody, Shay Black, and myself.

Someone read Digging, another read Oysters (two of my favorites—nearly committed to memory. The Burren is another.) Several read selections from Station Island: IV was brutal, Dantesque, about The Troubles. Neil read Sloe Gin.

We told Seamus stories, the poet's job was to explore the marginalia of life, and since I'd studied medieval Irish mss at UC, I read The Glosses. Three poems of kites, it became a theme. Someone read from Heaney's Beowulf, then Dante, another read pithy literary criticism notes.

And stories, yes, the stories. There's no such thing as a short whiskey or a short poetry reading. Bob Hass recounted what Heaney told him: "Sex is in its infancy in Ireland." Our homework was to read Heaney's Irish erotic poem, The Skunk, of course.
 
Among the storytellers were my favorite seanchaí professor and Joyce scholar, first translator of Osip Mandelstam, Bob Tracy who testified at Lenny Bruce's obscenity trial. I think he testified at Joyce's too.

Fellow Marin poet and longtime friend, Bob Hass read from The Apple Trees of Olema—my home stomping ground. At an Occupy Cal demonstration at UC Berkeley, Hass was hit in the ribs by a police officer with a baton. His wife Brenda Hillman was shoved to the ground. There's a YouTube video of it. Bob got back. He wrote about it in a New York Times opinion piece, "Poet-Bashing Police." 11//19/2011.

Both Bob Hass and Geoffrey O'Brien took part in Occupy Cal. O'Brien spoke out to a police officer who was hitting a Berkeley student because he would not break his link in a human chain. The police officer then hit O'Brien in the ribs, a reaction he would later call "brutal."  

So many new faces (at least to me). Lovely man, Peter Dale Scott. Some may know his Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror.  And Eric Falci, C.S Giscombe whose work has appeared in Callaloo, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, New American Writing, o.blek, Obsidian, River Styx, Situation and Samizdat.  

Irish VIce Consul, Kevin Byrne

Our new Irish Vice Consul, Kevin Byrne, a Dublin man. His first event in America? A Séamus Heaney tribute. Seamus Heaney would've enjoyed it.
 
The Maude Fife Room temperature was 110°—due to an electrical eruption this AM at UC Berkeley, nobody could figure out how to turn off the heat. It was a real Dante's Inferno—so we held the memorial tribute to Seamus Heaney in the hallway at Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley—t'was like a longship cathedral of poetry. Perhaps it was the feast Hall, Herorot. Beowulf was invoked in both languages. Dante too. It was a real poetry roast. Heaney would've like that.

It was so hot even in the hall, we shed what clothes we could, my silk scarf became an impromptu podium cloth. By the time the reading began, there were chairs all the way to the far end of the hall.

At first they thought the electrical explosion was a bomb. Huge fireball. Someone stole copper wire from an underground utility station. The entire campus was w/o electricity for most of the day. Instead of cancelling classes, students took out their smartphones as a source of light, and carried on.

So the least we could do, was to carry on ourselves. Even with every window and door on the 3rd floor open, cross ventilation, the room was like an oven—a bit like standing in front of the glory hole of a big glass kiln.

An amazing turnout. Even if we were all nearly broiled in the process. It was hot as a crematorium. A smithy's forge. The Goibniu, Himself was in attendance. 

 Afterwards, we ate and drank and told stories—we spread a little joy. Bob Hass sad to take the leftover food from the reception, and as we walked down Telegraph, so many homeless. So we gave a shoutout to Occupy Telegraph with a poet's funeral feast. And so we fed about 20 folks on the street. Poco a poco, that's how it's done. There's a poem embedded in this somewhere.

Ta to Bob Hass & Christopher Miller for an abfab event.

Fitting that my 10,000th tweet was in tribute to Seamus Heaney: for 10,000 birds have taken flight across the dark shoulder of the night.

Noli timere!  a Shéamus! Rest in peace.

At Lagunitas School

In this room was where the big kids sat, and across the hall was the principal's office: Mr. Fry. The office was where my skinned knees were bandaged, where I was sent down for being in trouble, and the WPA mural in the hall of the rich farmlands was the only thing that saved me.

I stared and stared at all that depth on the flat wall intrigued by the magic of paint and the outbuildings seemed so real. That wing is now a preschool. Where I did my first year of labor, my first grade class was in the old library building, a portable shed.

I dropped out of kindergarten, bored by at all and the painful years I spent in the other wing: third, fifth, and seventh grades seem to stand out the most. How we hid under our desks practicing for nuclear war and the brilliant flash in the eastern sky towards the Nevada test sites.

I'm not the first writer who suffered in these halls. It's not their fault, sheer numbers. I was not a socialized animal. They say the wounds make an artist. Did classmate Linda Gregg suffer that? Or was she a golden child?

Poet Bob Hass, in his book, 20th-century Pleasures, refers to this place as the Whitehill School where he played baseball. My uncles and aunts studied in these same rooms. I remember a class photo of them out front and my uncle played baseball too. But he was too old to have played with Bob Hass. Hass often gets confused in his geography and has Papermill Creek emptying uphill into Nicasio.

He said that Robert Frost spent time in Nicasio, and my family well remembers Kenneth Rexroth in Devil's Gulch. I remember stopping by Marie Rexroth's house under the redwoods studying the small signed nailed to the telephone pole.

I remember all my teachers names, well nearly all of them. Mrs. Burge, second grade who died of a heart attack, wanted me to collect the starfish maple leaves in fall to press them between tissue. I never did, it but I still keep trying to to fulfill that promise.

Miss Lenz, a popular redheaded third-grade teacher, had a pet skunk, whose cold claws and coarse fur was a surprise. The twins Adrian and Adair Daley were in that class, they were hellish. Adrian, the feminine one, packed a pistol, and a temper, and Adair, the tomboy, could swing punches with the best of them.

That was they year I failed to learn math but I learned to read.

Billy Joe Bianchi who got pneumonia in second grade, got put back a grade, so he was only one year ahead of me. We went into his room and a teacher demonstrated how to make carrot juice. We all had samples.

He drank his juice and said it was good. I drank mine, the bitter skin from the horse carrots was so overpowering, I felt betrayed. I have an aversion to carrot juice to this day though it's never tasted as bad as it did that first time.

I can't remember two teachers, one in kindergarten was an elderly woman who played the piano, and my fourth grade teacher was Mrs. Smith? I remember it was a fourth/fifth grade split class. Wasn't Billy Joe in that class too?

My fifth grade teacher was Mrs. Hards and she certainly was well named. I remember the magic that came from a ruler and construction paper, we made cable cars. First practical application of math, or was that in Mrs. Smith's class?

Mrs. Hards commented it was hard to find something grade level that I hadn't already read. The school used the SRT reading skills collection. I was never interested in completing the chapter tests and I did them halfheartedly. I only wanted to read, read, read.

I read my way through third and fourth grade SRT booklets with a voracious hunger. I remember learning about bats and dolphins, the good stories in the science SRT section had me mesmerized.

Sixth grade was even harder, my uneven learning skills forever separated me from the rest of the class. I loved Miss Kolanoski, her love of music had me singing in the chorus, but but my inability to do task work was a challenge.

My math skills were practically nonexistent and it took me 20 years and an accident to discover there was a reason for all of this, dyslexia. I'm still overcoming the horror of it all.

Mrs. Brice in seventh grade, was borderline cruel, but I did like the fact that she read to us in the afternoons. The Phantom Tollbooth had me impatient for each afternoon to come quickly. The story was like the minus stew, it made you hungrier for more. Mrs. Brice also introduced Spanish into my life.

Eighth-grade was even worse with the effeminate frustrated majordomo in a fussy canary yellow vest, and carefully combed hair over his bald pate. Mr. Sliney, who probably had no business being a teacher, with his military background, broke rulers over the boys' hands. As far as I was concerned, school was a full-scale war.

It was then, I realized my reading ability was unusual, during science, we timed ourselves how many words we could read per minute and most kids were turning into respectable double-digit scores. But mine was something like 500. No one believed me, so they retested me, asking me regurgitate what I read which I couldn't do of course. If I could have done that I could've done the class work too.

Reconstructing material in an orderly fashion was well beyond my means, in retrospect. Or so it seemed. About that time we switched over to multiple classes and teachers. What a relief to be out from under Mr. Sliney's thumb, who of all people, had to teach us sex education. I remember his livid face and bulging eyes as he discussed the distasteful subject.

Mr. Plant who was my geeky science teacher was a love. Then there was Miss Smith who could kill you with her sour looks, luckily she left me alone when it came to art. Something she admitted she knew nothing about and she was my art teacher. When we did pastel she handed me Kleenex to blend the colors.

Harry Roche, the coach, was another matter altogether. His method of teaching was to yell louder if you didn't get it the first time. For once, being assertive, I made the mistake of saying, I don't understand— it was probably fractions—and he came undone. As did I. My mind rolled up shop for the rest of the year. I was done with learning. Done with them.