Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus HeaneyRead
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
Interpretation
The quote praises Tom Sleigh's poetry for its deep emotional honesty and lyrical quality.
Seamus Heaney's quote highlights Tom Sleigh's approach to poetry, emphasizing the hard work and foundation behind his creations. He admires how Sleigh's poetry engages with complex emotions without avoiding difficult themes, resulting in a rich and cathartic lyrical experience that resonates with readers.
In practice
In a literary discussion about emotional depth in poetry.
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.
Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.
I think it's important to earn your fan base and not just try to immediately advance to the top. If you ride to the top quickly, you're liable to fall as quickly. Take your time. It's a long journey ahead of you as an artist. There's nowhere that you're supposed to be other than right now living inside of your art.
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