Do you like American music?
We like all kinds of music.
                         The Violent Femmes  

—You must be a prizefighter.
—No, I'm a shamus.
                         The Big Sleep (1946)

When it came out about a year after his death, I loved the second Selected Heaney, the one spanning the years 1988-2013. Almost all of those later books, I read as they appeared, generally thinking that they were not as good as the earlier work, but that maybe I was wrong. Reading them together, you realize how wise Heaney was about separating himself from the influences of self-consciousness. You can talk about later Heaney and early Heaney, and the voice in the poems is utterly different. The second Heaney is a master of internal exile coming home. And he feels more improvisational, though that manner may be protective coloration for his genius.

In her essay on The Haw Lantern in Soul Says, a now “of its time” book of essays, Helen Vendler takes a poem in that collection as a sign of things to come beyond it, and she wonders what a poetry of airy listening would be like. It turns out to be earthy and resistant to rhetoric. Like the older William Carlos Williams, Heaney becomes pastoral and epic, at least through translation, but he also writes poems that are the opposite of self-impressed, weird and funky incantatory poems, and even poems with awful jokey sides to them as well, like “The Butts.”

At Fordham in 1990, where he was the first poet I ever heard, Heaney told the students that his mother had taught him to prefer a plain wooden spoon for a child's toy rather than a plastic beach shovel that would break, an image that I found haunting, and had nothing to compare it to at the time. It is not often you hear a metaphor, really, not even at a Jesuit school. The McGinley Lecture, I believe. Rivard compares him to Basho. In an Art of Poetry interview in The Paris Review, Heaney remembers Williams seeming to offer “a music that stopped exactly where the line stopped. No resonance, no back echo, no canorous note.” This seems like a good description of how Heaney's later tone sounds, but the explicators will not go hungry for want of subject matter. I think Heaney would have liked to go incognito in his raincoat like Williams or just among friends. He certainly didn't let anybody put him on a tee shirt. This is suggested by many retiring moments in his poems, even an early one, “Oracle.”

From early on, Heaney had a sense that a culture was something at least in part to fend off. The thing I want to think about—Heaney's relationship to American poetry—is difficult because Heaney, in his deepest resources when he speaks about what did and did not influence his art, is defensive. He protects his sources, or maybe he tried not to give them more thought than would have been useful for him. We see this when he complains, in The Government of the Tongue, about the “ironic younger poets of England and America.” For a long time, I tried to figure out who he was talking about. All I kept meeting were believers in witness, dogged grief, and traumatized survivors. Poetry lovers and poets are some of the most powerfully earnest people in the world. When Heaney does talk about American poets and poetry, he is mainly writing with affection for certain social connections, mentioning people he respects and loves, people who encouraged him by being excellent in themselves, and kind to him. He remembers givers; the mid-stride poet of The Haw Lantern has a pious side, and though by the time he wrote this book, he was spending more time in America, he seems less influenced by American poetry.

The American Heaney is here less. Teaching Heaney's second and third books in an introduction to poetry class over a number of semesters, reading his greatest stuff, namely the poems in North, along with The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright, where I did not expect to find connections to Heaney, and Theodore Roethke's The Lost Son and Other Poems, where I expected to find more than a love-mud feeling, but didn't really, it occurred to me that the Heaney here probably has a lot more in common with James Wright's damaged, associative, leaping, politically resonant pastorals that remain musical and even metrical while loosening music, than the American poets whom Heaney actually mentions, and that includes Frost and Roethke. After his second book of pronouncements about poetry and the poems in Field Work, another high water mark, Heaney was aiming at something as true and as responsible as the super nobility of the Polish poets in confronting evil with humility and a dazzling subtlety that made him feel like a stumbling school boy haunting the ruin of a Norman tower in “The Master,” a Sweeney-themed poem in Station Island, another all around clock-cleaner.

When you move from Heaney's first three books to North, there is a huge and somewhat anomalous shift in his technique. This shift is one of the great moments in twentieth century poetry, comparable to the leap made by Merwin—another no-show in Heaney's prose, but in fact an inescapable figure—for us, at least—while writing The Moving Target to the sorts of poetry that would lead him to The Lice, or when Wright, encouraged by Bly, ceased to be a fifties formalist. How does this happen? How do we go from “Follower” to “Punishment”? There is a sonnet that forms a tribute to Billie Holiday to answer a ghoulish cover version of the Dubliners' bloody and macho rebel song, “Will You Come to the Bower?” I would say that American poetry has quite a lot to do with it. Heaney actually wrote lyrics for a song that the Dubliners did not record. They were one of the bands that Shane McGowan from the Pogues found punky in his diaspora public housing hells in his teenage London. There is great footage of the Pogues and the Dubliners joining forces to do the moonshine song “Mountain Dew” on television, and both bands having a ball. It's nothing like the embarrassed Ramones playing with Sha-Na-Na, except in optics.

In Stepping Stones and other places as well, Heaney attributes this amazing development—the jump to North and away from the less dramatic poetic climate of Belfast—to a few things in his living circumstances. One was chain-smoking like W.H. Auden up in his thatch. One was a move to a year teaching at Berkeley, his first move out of the north. At Berkeley, Heaney purchased large stacks of used American poetry books and heard a number of anti-war readings, where the passionate moral certainty of Snyder and Bly reminded him of moralistic Protestant ministers. This is one of those moments when Heaney freely owns that he has a version of a European Catholic moral nature. He feels morally compromised by and complicit in whatever ails the world. Here and elsewhere, he speaks of American poetry as something that was not very easy for him to hear and grasp as poetry and which he admired in strikingly hard-won but somewhat limited ways. He also says, surprisingly, that he got a stronger grasp on Yeats there. I wonder if that means “Lapis Lazuli” sounded better in California. Yeats is a big leaper. And then there was his move to Wicklow, closer to the serenity of his imagined childhood. Heaney points out that he was moving in certain directions that he took in North before he came to America.

In other words, Heaney didn't need to go to Berkeley to write “Bogland.” If there is an American influence here, it is the Lowells' sort of social poetry mixed with soft-downward-sigh personal sensation and journalistic details. But he may have needed to go to Berkeley, and to hear the crazy runs and jumps of Bay Area poets and voices, to write “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces,” a poem of Irish jazz, one that embraces the conditions of its own making, in the manner of much American poetry, music, and visual art. To see what I mean, take both poems down off the shelf and read them aloud to yourself, and please, American poetry lovers, even if you have a degree in Irish Studies from Boston College, no fake Irish accents. The dead can hear you. Don't embarrass yourself in front of them. You will feel the Lowell of Life Studies and For the Union Dead and Near the Ocean in the elegant “Bogland.” But when you get to “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” and past the giant Irish nose “sniffing” down the Liffey—a nice Monty Python cut-out animation there—you will find that this poem of “trial pieces,/ the craft's mystery/ improvised on bone” is not just about the Viking side of Irishness. It is also about jive-talking in general. The poem sounds even better, and more like itself, if you drop the numbers and read through the section breaks. Heaney even gets some Sinatra in there:

[DO NOT TRY TO SOUND IRISH]

Come fly with me,
come sniff the wind
with the expertise
of the Vikings—

neighborly, scoretaking
killers, haggers,
and haggler, gombeen-men,
hoarders of grudges and gain.

With a butcher's aplomb
they spread out your lungs
and made you warm wings
for your shoulders.

Old fathers, be with us.
Old cunning assessors
of feuds and of sites
for ambush or town.

[SECTION BREAK, DO NOT SAY 6]

“Did you ever hear tell,”
said Jimmy Farrell
‘of the skulls they have
in the city of Dublin?

And so on. Later, the poem gets even better. Imagine some old raggedy character saying as they shove her into the squad car, “My words lick around/ cobbled quays, go hunting/ lightly as pampooties/ over the skull-capped ground, Sweetie.” Sweetie is not in the poem, but I think you should know that it is. When I was in Ireland a few years ago, I made sure to visit some of these trial pieces in the Viking Room at the Irish National Museum. There they were amid cases of rusty swords and dioramas of Viking Dublin: such small, out-of-the way, and unlikely objects upon which to spring such great poetry, little pieces of New Bedford Whaling Museum scrimshaw upstairs from the ancient gold of the jewelry and the Cross of Cong. Apparently, he had seen a larger selection of them, but truly, on the basis of this selection, Heaney was always the master of the wooden spoon. See Heaney coming here, smacking on his black cat bone, picking up on some other parts of modernism. Our own engagement with our entire lives should be as good.

I lived in Ireland for a year when I was a grade school kid. I'm second generation and Catholic, but with a Presbyterian Antrim grandfather who converted. My late mother wasn't Irish. She just wanted to be. When she was still in her early thirties, she even dyed her hair red to match her five freckled babies. Hybrid comes easy to me, but I know that I write with a dented helmet of American-ness around my head. We lived south of Dublin, towards Wicklow, where Heaney lived in the country, and now there is a Texaco Station where there used to be a suburban cow pasture down the block from our old house. The Irish National Museum has its own bog people now, or at least parts of them, on display. If you visit Ceide Fields on the cliffs in north Mayo, there is a movie in the visitors' center that begins with Heaney reading a poem about the place from North. While Yeats owns the Irish myths, Heaney, a great observer, accompanies the postmodern archeologist. No doubt a lot of Irish people would roll their eyes at this as “a bunch of bleeding stones, big bleeding deal,” as my friend, a cable-television installer from Limerick puts it. Wedge tombs were not a thing in the seventies.

Thanks to the EU, you can buy kielbasa and Polish sardines and instant white borscht in old County Mayo market towns my grandmother knew. Poland and Ireland are near of kin. I saw that, and I still felt at home. My wife's hometown. New Britain, Connecticut. Broad Street. Polish Hill. Pittsburgh. Worcester. The world. I like these short Irish guys who marry tall Polish women. You can meet these couples in airports.

All that aside, I once had a dream after hearing Heaney give a lecture during the second Bush administration. He was sitting on some logs in a state park, and he had a crushed Mountain Dew can coming out of his forehead and some cob webs, like his head was turning into some kind of log as well, partially eaten away by termites. That's what it was like to think about Heaney during the second Iraq War. I think he really was disgusted with us. It made me feel sadder than few dreams I have ever had. Look what you're doing to me. And to everybody. You terrible people. All you want to hear about is frogspawn. My God, I thought, Seamus Heaney maybe hates us. On some level, Iowa is his idea of snowstorms from hell. Why would Heaney write about a snowstorm in Iowa? Part of the answer is simple. Bush. We sort of elected him.

During the second Bush administration and the Clinton years, the European godfather of younger American poetry was the Slovenian poet, Tomaž Šalamun. Unhampered by excessive fame or any noisy interest in his own country here, he saw America and younger American poetry as soil well-prepared for his own adventurous streak by Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. Here is the poem “manhattan” from A Ballad for Metka Krašovec, written perhaps in 1980 but not making itself felt until we needed to be reminded of it—

I'm crucified
Between continents.
Between loves.
My nests are in the air.
They burn with a gentle flame.
A white sail hides me from
photographers, Hudson River.
The water is deeper here.
The sky a darker gray.
On the horizon
two blunt pencils.
Dug in,
I won't be coming home.

                           (trans. by Michael Biggins)

The perverse image of the crucifix here is also love with open arms. When he goes to see Woody Allen's Manhattan, he jumps up in his seat and applauds all the disreputable freedom, stays, and then he watches the movie twice. No need to justify any kind of humanness, certainly not decadence, for Šalamun.

Šalamun is one of those poets who remind you that your disreputable resources are not only your best ones, but also the ones that you have to burn, your language, love, and freedom. In all of the books of translations of his work, there are some mighty boring sections, but never a single moment that feels composed by the super ego to demonstrate righteousness, to display learning for the sake of learning, or to demonstrate skill without occasion. Like Simic, he was a great truant, an imaginative way out of social and familial dilemmas, responsibilities, bystanding, traditional versification, identity marketing, and the dulling influence of the clear narrative lines of some of his poetry. In addition to being brilliant and weird, Šalamun also had trauma caché, bonus alibi, the seriousness of the world he let in, an equally dark historical sense of Europe, but less, or almost none, of the guilt, and connections to the more glamorous worlds of visual art than Heaney's deep engagement with... folk music, oh no (“The Singer's House”). Heaney's reaction, if he had had one, may have been to say, “Phew. That's a few less books to sign. Get away from me, kids. You bother me.” And Helen Vendler didn't write about his work, and neither did Marjorie Perloff probably, an enormous plus for many lovers of the secret art. Cosmopolitan, an identity and an anti-identity at once, at home in the city and in the countryside, sexual, and privileging nothing, T.S. went elegantly back and forth between Europe and America, too, almost the dream of Bob Dylan, perfectly anonymous, perfectly strange and individual.

When I moved to Boston twenty years ago, not sure if I wanted to be very noble or not, and not aware of many poets who were mixing registers, but wanting to find them, Heaney had recently won the Nobel Prize. The way people liked Heaney seemed to be unhealthy for poets with a feeling for public intellectual life, somehow. There was too much love of virtue in it, a desire for the superego to do too much of the job. In graduate school, formal revivalists had an annoying love of Heaney, too, like bullies loving something good. They were anvil heads, too. The anvil is a Robert Graves image for meter in The Crowning Privilege, and when Heaney calls his critics “anvil-heads,” he is saying something about believers in formal rigidity.

For a lot of younger poets, maybe two or even three generations of American poets, Heaney has become hard to see—less necessary—for his academic admirers' enthusiasm, a canonical fate. That Walcott gets largely ignored by this small but always growing constituency seems even crazier when one actually reads The Schooner Flight (big enough for italics, if you ask me), Sea Grapes, and “The Light of the World.” The best time to read anybody is when his or her or their reputation is somewhat obscure, whether waxing or waning. It is getting possible to find ourselves in Heaney again. St. Seamus the Respectable and Correct was probably no fun for Seamus Heaney, the unselfconscious poet, even if he was glad that his version of Sophocles, and his poetry in general, helped inspire good things, like Bill Clinton helping the peace process or Joe Biden giving a better speech, good things personally, too, no doubt. By the way, in Stepping Stones, after hemming and hawing a bit about the Lewinsky scandal, Heaney concludes, “I supported Bill, and I support Hillary, too.”

My favorite Heaney remains the anti-Heaney in Heaney, or as I like to think of him, the Heaney in Plain Sight who jokes about fiddle-heads, and who makes jokes about the Pennines and dead moles, the bawdy translator of The Midnight Report, and oysters, and who felt like “an old pike all badged with sores/ wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.” I suppose this is another name for the counterweighting Shameless Heiney loved by all eternal students. As all great poems of shared life can be said to be co-authored, he also co-authored a great love poem, “The Skunk.”

As for my favorite Heaney poem, “The Harvest Bow” is written with silence for an Irish father in that common language, roots-y and rooted in raw love period, realistic and un-pretty, and beautiful, a poem that seems to combine all of the ways we love Seamus Heaney in one. It's a perfect magic spell, and Heaney was a mage at his best. I have no idea what it is like to read Osip Mandelstam in Russian, but our language has this consolation in it. The poem even has cockfighting and an outhouse in it, an old bed in the weeds. “The end of art is peace/ could be the motto of this frail device.” Maybe that could be implies the end of art is not just peace. Surely, it implies should be. A lot of art is dull, old Father Auden knew, and all poets dull when taken in excessive quantity. Bless page limits. In any case, the poetry is “burnished by its passing and still warm.” Now that he is completely beyond our fashions, we can find Heaney again, a different one who was always there, if we can hear tone, always a big if.