Joanne:

Hello, IÕm Joanne Diaz. a poet and English professor at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Abram:

And IÕm Abram Van Engen, an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Joanne: 

This is Poetry For All, the podcast where we look at one poem each episode and think a bit about what it does and how it works. 

Abram: 

This podcast is for those who already love poetry and for those who know very little about it. We hope itÕll be useful for teachers and students, but also for anyone whoÕs ever been curious about poems.

Joanne:

This podcast will read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time.

Abram: 

And we thought weÕd start this whole series going with a few poems about poetry itself, whatÕs called Òars poetica.Ó The first one we have is by the great poet Seamus Heaney called ÒDigging.Ó Joanne, would you be willing to read that for us?

Joanne:

Sure. ÒDiggingÓ [to read the poem, click on this link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47555/digging ]

Abram:

Thank you. So what do you notice in this poem when you start to take a look at it?

Joanne:

Even before I look at the sense or the narrative of the poem, one of the very first things I notice is its sounds. So IÕm noticing that Heaney is really interested in assonance, which, when I say assonance, I just mean that heÕs thinking about sounds in the middle of words, usually the vowel sounds that correspond with each other, and heÕs doing that throughout the poem in really interesting ways. So, just as an example, even in the first two lines of the poem ÒBetween my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Ó ÒThumb.Ó Òsnug,Ó and ÒgunÓ are already aligning with each other in ways that call attention to themselves, and that makes me curious about what he wants them to do in the poem.

Abram:

Yeah, thatÕs great, and one of the things I noticed, too, just when you look at those two lines up front like that and think about the assonance there, everything seems to fit, like everything has its place, which is partially the theme going through the poem, like the spade fits his father but this pen fits his hand and so on, and yet it adds the shock value of that last word in that first stanza, Ògun,Ó because it also fits its place but it's such a shocking word to be kind of cozily fit into place here. We have a snug thing and everything sort of finding its place and the thing that finds its place is a gun. So he shocks you with that opening two lines and, in part, through the sound of it. 

Joanne:

And he returns to it with some really nice repetition at the end of the poem, right? And I know weÕre going to talk about the middle of the poem, but at the very end of the poem, thereÕs a repetition there. He says, ÒBetween my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests / IÕll dig with itÓ and that really interests me because you think if you see that gun in the first part of the poem, maybe itÕs going to go off by the end of the poem like Chekhov said, right?

Abram:

Right, right.

Joanne:

But it doesnÕt go off. He transforms it. He transforms it into a tool, into an instrument that he can use for his writing and I find that very compelling. So, when you see him do this transformation in the poem, what do you notice?

Abram:

So I think one of the things that's going on is, because of that repetition, heÕs begging you to notice the process of change, the transformation of a gun, a tool of violence, into a tool of digging. And what enables that sort of transformation to happen is a reimagination of how he fits with his father and his grandfather. So his father and grandfather were manual laborers who did a lot of digging. And the question is, by writing, is he breaking the tradition or is he, in a sense, continuing the tradition? And he begins to understand that heÕs actually continuing the tradition of his family if he can reimagine his father and his grandfather as basically artists of a sort. They were artists of digging. The manual labor they enacted had a kind of artistry to it, and as he begins to get into how exactly they went about their digging, he begins to see that it was with a kind of skill and precision that is the same kind of labor called for in poetry. So he begins to draw connections between himself and his own parents and grandparents. 

Joanne: 

I love what youÕre saying because, when you think about even in stanza three, he is describing the potato drills, which are these furrows for seeding potatoes, right? And heÕs looking at the precision with which his father is planting and attending to the potatoes, heÕs looking at the precision of what his grandfather was capable of doing. If you look at the sixth stanza, he straightened up to drink the milk that was given to him Òthen fell to right away / Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods / Over his shoulder, going down and down.Ó And so, what youÕre saying about the labor that these men did, as well as the precision that they used when they did their work, is very compelling for how Seamus Heaney is thinking about his poetry.

Abram:

Yeah, and even just thinking about it as ÒStooping in rhythm through potato drillsÓ, potato trails are evenly spaced in a field. HeÕs ÒStooping in rhythm,Ó you think about the lines on a page and poems and the kind of attention to rhythm that goes into poetry. So heÕs imagining his father as a kind of poet of potatoes in a certain sense. And by doing that, he can kind of reimagine his own craft as a continuation.

Joanne:

I think too that the sounds of the poem that I was talking about earlier, a lot of the sounds that are so compelling are monosyllabic. This is not a poem that uses big ornate words, big Latin words. These are the harder, percussive words of English, right? And it seems like that language that is close to the people, close to the Earth, itÕs the language that has informed him through his father and grandfather, and is the language he clearly wants to transfer onto the page. 

Abram:

Well and even if you just pick out these words, right? ÒNick,Ó Òslice,Ó Òsquelch,Ó Òslap.Ó HeÕs playing with the sound of these words and, in a certain sense, enacting the sounds. The other thing that heÕs doing, I mean, you started with the assonance of ÒthumbÓ and ÒsnugÓ and Ògun,Ó he links himself to the way the spade fits his father, using the same sound again. So you can link sounds across a poem as well. ÒThe coarse boot nestled on the lug.Ó Well, ÒlugÓ fits with ÒsnugÓ and ÒgunÓ and Òthumb.Ó And so, the spade fits his father the way the pen fits his own hand and thereÕs that connection there through the very sounds that heÕs playing with in this poem.

Joanne:

ThatÕs really nice, so that, not only is the substance of the poem an extended metaphor in which thereÕs a connection forged between the hard manual labor of planting and cultivating potatoes and creating poetry. So that may seem like potatoes and poetry have nothing in common, but in the world of this poem, they do. But not only is the substance of the poem an extended metaphor, but youÕre suggesting that the sounds that he learned as a child, the rhythms, the precision, are what are informing his poem. And thatÕs really nice because that means that the insight of this poem, or at least one of them, is that words, like potatoes, need to be cultivated, right? They need to be sewn, they need to be laid down with precision, they need to be worked on again and again so that the labor of tending to these potatoes all of the sudden feels very much like the labor of writing a poem.

Abram:

Yeah, and the other thing to think about is, what is the digging for, what is being produced in each generation with this digging? So, with his father, itÕs potatoes, and you can think of that more generally as a kind of food or nourishment for people. ThereÕs a point to this digging. With his grandfather, itÕs turf, which is a kind of fuel. So theyÕre digging up the sod for fuel. And, if you think about the reasons for the digging and how it actually helped the community through, basically, nourishment and fuel, thatÕs another way to think about the transformation that goes on. Thinking of poetry as a kind of violence, with the gun in his hand, to thinking about how he might actually begin to help others through his poetry, to participate in his community the way his father and his grandfather did. 

Joanne:

What you say is so powerful because there are several moments in the poem where you feel like the poem might be a failure. And I donÕt mean that the poem is bad, I mean that he seems to be acknowledging that he is deficient in some way, that he canÕt match these men who have come before him. Like when he says ÒBy God, the old man could handle a spade.Ó That phrase Òby GodÓ is so memorable in part because heÕs saying Òwow, that is an amazing thing that he could doÓ and heÕs sort of suggesting that he could never do that. And then later in the poem, he says ÒBut IÕve no spade to follow men like them.Ó HeÕs acknowledging very honestly that heÕs nothing compared to them, and in doing that, heÕs really putting pressure on an idea that I think a lot of poets struggle with, which is what is the use of poetry? If you are planting and harvesting potatoes, you are feeding people in a very basic and foundational way that is essential for survival. Is poetry essential for survival? I feel like that could be a question that undergirds this poem in a kind of subtle and not-so-subtle way and he hopes that heÕs up to the task. 

Abram:

Yeah, I really like that. And just to dwell on a particular moment, because I love this little moment in the poem, if you think about poetry, nothing is gratuitous, nothing is wasted, no words are out of place. You can always ask yourself Òwhy is this word here? Why is this particular detail included?Ó In particular, there are moments in poems that often draw our attention to them that sort of ask us, beg us to think about why itÕs there, and for me, that happens in that stanza where he carries a bottle of milk to his grandfather, ÒCorked sloppily with paper.Ó What is the point of this detail in this poem? But if you think about it, the only use of paper was to cork bottle of milk for his grandfather. It served this very utilitarian purpose, and now, as heÕs reimagining himself in line with his father and his grandfather, that paper becomes the turf that heÕs going to dig, it takes on this whole other purpose from corking milk for his grandfather out there on TonerÕs bog, to becoming the bog itself or the turf itself that heÕs going to be digging with his poetry.

Joanne:

ThatÕs wonderful and even as I hear you talking, that's the transformation thatÕs at work in poetry. ThatÕs the extended metaphor again and again in this poem, so that it answers his question, which is, yes, of course poetry can do something, it can be of use. It is allowing us to meditate on this line of men in his family, who frankly, probably would never have written their own stories down. But here he is doing that work digging Òdown and downÓ as he says, right?

Abram:

Yeah. So should I read it?

Joanne:

I would love to hear this poem again.

Abram: ÒDiggingÓ [to read the poem, click on this link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47555/digging ]

Joanne:

ThatÕs so great, wow, thank you. 

Abram:

Thank you. Thank you all for listening to this first episode and join us for many more to come.