Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Ireland’s Poems of Place,” on the verse produced by an island of imagination, with Kacie Hittel, lecturer in English at Belmont University and scholar of contemporary Irish poetry.
[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]
Ireland is only roughly the size of South Carolina and has a population about equal to Tennessee’s, but it has long occupied a huge place in word literature, with renowned writers such as Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Shaw. Ireland’s creative output captures American imaginations all year, long before and after celebrations of Saint Patrick’s Day give rise to talk of ties to Irish immigrants.
Gain a much richer understanding of Ireland—as both a rich landscape that evokes romanticized ideal and as a real place with a complex history and rapidly changing society—by looking at it through the lens of poetry dealing with its status as an island.
We’ll start by discussing how Ireland’s literary culture grew out of its robust folkloric tradition and then venturing to “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the well-known poem that W.B. Yeats wrote in London in 1888. Part of his efforts to establish Ireland’s literature as distinct from England’s through the revival of literary interest in Celtic folklore and myths, it describes an island constructed entirely in the speaker’s imagination. It stands as an example of how we often envision places not as they are, but as we want them to be, making it a great jumping-off point for an examination of contemporary poems focused on Ireland’s reality.
From there we’ll look at Seamus Heaney’s short poem “The Disappearing Island,” which subtly makes a profound political point by referencing the myth of the Atlantic island Hy-Brasil, said to appear out of the midst only once every seven years and to be unreachable even then. Heaney evokes this mythical island to investigate how we might respond to our own, real places, and to suggest that sometimes the ground beneath us must be shaken so we can rethink where we are and where we want to go.
Among the many other poems we’ll examine: “The Lost Land,” by Eavan Boland, who had been excluded from literary and political life as a woman and describes Ireland as an island she can never fully access. Poems by Moya Cannon that draw attention to Ireland’s environment and rich natural history. Vona Groarke’s “Pier,” which describes cannonballing into the sea off the town of Spiddal’s pier and brings to mind the joy of jumping into something new.