‘A song that reminds you of somewhere’
A very superficial one today, but nonetheless a very intense memory. The song is ‘Black Velvet’ by Alannah Miles, and it reminds me with extraordinary, prismatic clarity of walking along the High Street in Oxford towards the Examination Schools one day many years ago, to hear Seamus Heaney’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry.
It seems apt to choose it as today is Seamus Heaney’s birthday. He was an extraordinary Professor of Poetry. I still remember him stomping into that wood-panelled room full of begowned lecturers and students, tall, broad, solid, with all that unkempt white hair; slightly nervous-looking but utterly imposing in a green and grey tweed suit and DM boots. Every inch the Irishman, the countryman - learned words in an academic room, amid academic dress and dustiness, but with the accents of home hundreds of miles away… and the unpretentious dress of home as well. It felt really incredible to be sitting there listening to him: one of those moments of the hairs prickling on the back of your neck - of feeling the need to pinch yourself to check it was really happening.
His lectures, or those I was lucky enough to attend at least, were always absorbing and interesting, and most incredible (and terrifying!) of all was when he did open house sessions in the concrete buildings of the English Faculty, which meant that undergraduate or graduate students could face their fears and book themselves a one-to-one poetry tutorial with The Great Man. I did this, in a rush of unaccustomed confidence, and then lost a week’s worth of sleep in abject terror at the prospect. I took along my hopelessly pretentious student poetry and a few story openings, and we talked for what turned out to be an astonishingly relaxed half hour about writing, poetry, reading (he made a few recommendations I’ve ever since enjoyed: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Basho…) and Northern Ireland. He remembered my Dad from school… remembered meeting me at a poetry reading with him once a few years before… we talked about the Northern Irish vernacular in poetry, the creation of authentic regional voice, and I asked him questions about critical interpretation and literary theory. It was incredible, really… thinking back, occasionally telling students about it now, years on, I can barely believe it happened. But it did. And the song I’ve mentioned started it all, in a way, because as I arrived at the Examination Schools for that first lecture, on that hot May afternoon, I remember an open-topped car carrying three very glamorous girls and one very self-satisfied young man (not students, I think: more the yuppy types of the time) drove past, close by, with ‘Black Velvet’ playing at top volume. The cobbled kerbs seemed almost to shake. I remember looking at the car - a black, pristine, soft-topped BMW, all cream leather upholstery and blonde passengers - and thinking about the contrast between how they were spending that early summer afternoon and how I was, and smiling to myself at how they seemed to have it all so much more right than I did, as I scrambled into a gown and braced myself for the stuffiness of the room, praying for an open window.
And now, every time I hear that song, I’m back on that street, half-nervous, half-excited, half-incredulous that I’m going to hear one of the greatest living poets, half-incredulous that the man who deserves this title is a farmer’s son from Co. Derry.
What was it that Heaney said in one of my favourite lines from his poems?
‘Lost, unhappy and at home’?
I wasn’t lost - I wasn’t unhappy - but somehow that song reminds me that I was at home and not at home, and that hearing the Co. Derry voice of ‘Famous Seamus’ that sunny afternoon made me feel all at once very much at home in that lecture room… and very far from home as well.
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