Remembering Michael Longley, Part 2
“I’ve long believed that if poetry were a wheel, the hub of it would be love poetry, and branching out from that center, the other concerns.”
“I’m not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it’s bad for your poetry to take steroids.”
“Every Monday morning I try to remember to say ‘Thank you, Lord. I’m not at the Senior Staff Meeting.’”
--Michael Longley
In the reading of “The Badger” linked to above – a video I’d opened at random, wanting to hear his voice – Michael Longley says in an off-the-cuff comment, “I believe a poet’s mind should be like Noah’s Ark, with space in it for all the beasts.” This thought’s welcome of all existence runs through his poems— in his words’ clarity, right-seeing, and right-naming; in their hallmark bass-note of abiding affection for people, animals, plants, objects, stories.
“If I knew where the poems came from, I’d go there,” he liked also to say.
The outpouring of tributes appearing since Michael’s death speak invariably of his eyes’ twinkling, of his abiding sense of mischief and humor. Imminent laughter seemed always close in him– a kind of wellspring largeness of view that could not help but rise from the earth where it did. It may be that awareness of life as commedia made possible his allowance of existence to be itself, just as it is, and found good; made possible his always-local signature wonder and his abiding joy in the small and large abundances of existence.
A savoring of the comic doesn’t preclude seriousness. Rather, in the poems, as in life, wit widens witnessing, allows the full taking-in of what happens to beings who live and die. Eyes twinkle when a person’s looking is angled in a way that returns more light.
Michael and I coincided three times and places over our lives. In 2007, we both took part in Dublin’s Dun Laoghire Poetry Festival. (This photo shows us there, with Chinese poet Bei Dao.)
In 2019, in Boston, we talked long and gladly at a pre-reception before I found myself, for a memorable moment, in his lap, as I stumbled taking my seat beside his at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Michael had been inducted as honorary member some years earlier; his wife Edna, astute and eloquent literary scholar and critic, and I had been elected that year.
And then, in 2022, we spent time together in Belfast, when I was the Seamus Heaney Visiting International Poet at Queen’s University. (This photo of Michael and Seamus, friends since their twenties, I took in 2007 at Seamus and Marie’s customary at-home champagne brunch for the poets, after the festival’s close.)
One pinnacle of the 2022 Belfast visit was a dinner at Michael and Edna’s home. It was the week of America’s Thanksgiving and Edna, having looked up a recipe, made for her guest a first-in-lifetime pumpkin pie; in Europe, pumpkins are eaten by livestock. Even the word “pie”—when Michael heard the dessert named, he asked quizzically, “We’re having ‘pie’ for pudding?” In the UK, “pudding” means “dessert,” in general, and our main course had been – an entirely delicious – “pie.” Around us, the kitchen walls were covered with family drawings. He and Edna — though both were steady writers — had only one computer between them, at which they took turns. Michael referred to it as “the machine.” Their lives were centered elsewhere.
We spoke of our shared interest in war poems, of poets we – almost, but not entirely – shared our estimations of, of writing prose about poetry, of our work habits, our teaching, our travels as poets, our lives. From time to time I’d say, “I’m outwearing my welcome, I should leave.” Each time they answered, “No! Stay till dawn!” Alcohol in various forms was – mildly – on offer through the evening.
When I finally left to walk the mile or so home, declining their suggestion of a taxi, they were concerned. They insisted I phone to let them know when I was back in my university-given apartment, and stayed up until I did. It felt a profoundly parental concern. Part of it, I did understand, was also the long habit of caution in Belfast, a carefulness their American guest was obviously unschooled in. They’d weighed my route, my looks (no purse or back pack, a traveler’s slightly silly-looking raincoat, a not-young woman on her own), done the calculation, and did not stop me.
We exchanged emails and books after I returned to California. Michael wrote in one note of his bafflement when reading some highly-praised recent U.S. collections, but also that he’d discovered an American poet new to him, the late Anne Porter, and wondered why she wasn’t more celebrated at home. Some emails held newly-written poems. Then came a year relentlessly demanding, and it wasn’t until over the holidays that I realized how long it had been since I’d either written or heard from Michael. The email I sent went for the first time unanswered.
Michael and Edna were both, when I saw them, moving slowly, carefully. Michael told me his days of getting on airplanes for long trips as a poet were over, though their last trip had been not long before, to Italy, where he’d received a major international prize, and a reading he gave at NYU in May 2024 shows that poetry travels returned. Physically frail though they appeared to be when I saw them, they seemed also entirely indominable in spirit, mind, and heart. “Stay till dawn!” Those who love the world greatly are not eager to leave it, even to sleep. I worried at the silence, but did not want to intrude. On January 24th, I learned the news of Michael’s death two days before.
I’ve been reading the reminiscences and praises since, and also turned again to the updated selected poems, Ash Keys, that appeared this past summer, from Jonathan Cape in the UK and Wake Forest University Press in the U.S. The title carries multiple readings. The primary one, the book’s jacket says, is the name of the winged, almost weightless, wind-traveling seeds of an ash tree, which Michael felt a fitting image for the life of his poems. I could see with a search online that he’d been able to do various readings when it came out, and was gladdened.
Michael Longley received over his lifetime every honor the poetry world had on offer. In the UK, the Queen’s Gold Medal in Poetry, the T.S. Eliot Award, the Whitbread, numerous others. He was appointed Commander of the British Empire and served as the Ireland Professor of Poetry. Earlier in his life, he’d worked for twenty years directing the Arts Council in Northern Ireland. Earlier yet, he wrote a review of Seamus Heaney’s first book of poems. Michael, Seamus, Derek Mahon, and the slightly younger Ciaron Carson and Paul Muldoon, were lauded as the makers of a renaissance in Northern Irish poetry. Michael received the PEN Pinter Prize, Canada’s Griffin International Poetry Prize, Japan’s inaugural Yakamochi Medal, Italy’s Feltrinelli Prize. In 2015, he was given by the mayor his city’s highest honor, “the Freedom of Belfast.” Now honorary, it once brought its recipients the right to graze their sheep anywhere in the city, and, customarily also, free drinks from any pub they might enter.
One poem included in Ash Keys, originally from Michael’s 2022 full-length collection, was written six years ago now:
December
I shall be eighty soon.
I go on looking for
The Geminids somewhere
Between Cassiopeia
And the big beech tree.
It is a brief, seemingly simple poem. Still, moving in itself, this sketched, late-life self-portrait carries some extra meanings worth bringing to fuller awareness. The meteor shower we call the Geminids emerges from the part of the sky holding the twinned stars named after Greek mythology’s Castor and Pollux. Michael’s twin brother, Peter, died in 2014. There’s also the poem’s beech tree, with the below-surface, multiple experience held in its reading. For a person looking up, the tree serves as a marker, a spotting point helping identify one area in the almost overwhelming beauty of skyscape. For a person standing on earth, it’s a reminder that here at home, on a minor planet at the edge of a spiraling constellation’s vastness, we live in a world where stars are small and a beech tree, large.
I was slow to look back at Michael and my email exchanges; I know too well my own failures as a writer of letters. When I did, I found among them this: “I have been thinking of what music I would like to be played at my funeral. Do you know the adagio from the divine Schubert’s string quintet? It’s like being in heaven. And Billie Holiday, singing ‘I’ll be seeing you’? Billie makes of a popular song something sacred.” And then, this reply to a note I’d sent after too long a pause: “No need to apologise – No need to rush – we have the rest of our lives – hugs – ML”
My condolences to Michael’s beloved wife Edna, to his children and grandchildren, to all who knew and loved him, to all who loved his poems.