March, 2025

March, and an anniversary of sorts: five years since my older brother died – although exactly which day… “Aujourd’hui Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.”  How true that uncertainty rang for me the first time I read it, and still does.  For, really, what of the calendrical dares to exist in the face of such experiences as the death of a loved one? Isn’t dyschromia a feature of catastrophe, not a bug? And doesn’t it follow, that it is the particular that reigns above all, in every trauma? For example, while the calculation of the minutes, days, and months of M—’s dying and death elude me, I recall with perfect clarity the aseptic sweetness of a chemotherapy suite; a slight trembling of his forefinger as held a newspaper; the serpentine tail of his rosary and the Ruy Lopez underway on the battered chessboard in his bedroom –the unforgeable signatures of his fate. In a way, as gestures and things, they have become him, and he, them. Inevitable? Perhaps, as I have said. (And did I honestly know more of him – do we know more  of anyone —  when he or they lived?) In any case, all the more reason in our grief to cherish them, to cup their urgent flames in our hands. To seek shelter in their recollected company, too, and to resist everything – and there are so many everythings — that would erase them. One thinks, after all, of Neruda’s beautiful image — “memory…the fierce cave of the shipwrecked…”

But let’s turn now to something rather more pleasant: Plume contributor Brian Culhane’s exegesis – and much more — of Seamus Heaney’s “The Guttural Muse”, below.

Heaney’s Muse

Today, as I was leafing through Michael Schmidt’s The Great Modern Poets: The Best Poetry of Our Times, an anthology I’d bought mainly for the photos of the poets, I opened to a fine portrait of Seamus Heaney next to this beauty:

“The Guttural Muse”

Late summer, and at midnight
I smelt the heat of the day;
At my window over the hotel car park
I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting
As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up
That evening at dusk – the slimy tench
Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime
Was said to heal the wound of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

I recalled when I’d first read this poem in his Field Work (1979) and then again in The New Yorker, just a week or so after the poet’s death in 2013, and now I’m once more amazed by its directness, simplicity, and compression. In the first stanza, the scene’s set: Midnight, a hotel room, looking out at the car park next to the emptying disco. I imagine the speaker not especially focused on what’s going on below his window, just sensing the youthful voices, hearing them without attending to their words. He’s just absorbing the scene, which is, we come to understand, in contrast to his own situation: he’s feeling his age late at night (though the poet isn’t exactly old, having published the poem in his late thirties), alone in an unfamiliar rented room, observing the young at play.

A moment tailormade for self-pity, estrangement or nostalgia instead becomes something quite different. The voices of those youthful disco-goers offer him, surprisingly, a kind of comfort. But let’s pause here. It’s common enough to call certain voices comforting—as well as loud, boisterous, flirtatious—but “thick”? Odder still, those youthful voices rise to his ear the way bubbles rise to a lake’s surface when a fish is feeding. The poet’s calm and almost reportorial tone makes the weird quite natural: Haven’t we all been soothed by thick voices that come up to our ears like the rising oily bubbles from the slimy tench? The poet’s power of memory and metaphor conjoins a very strange set of elements, indeed—muddied airs, oily bubbles, fish slime—a congeries likely found in the witches’ brew in “Macbeth.” Yet far from casting a maleficent spell, Heaney’s amalgamation heals.

T. S. Eliot’s oft-cited view, in his essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” is apposite and worth considering in this context. He states that at its best a poet’s mind “is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.” Such congruences put me in mind of Eliot Weinberger’s intriguing idea that poems are where affinities happen. In Heaney’s mind, not the noise of typewriters but that of disco-goers; not the smell of cooking but that of the lake’s night airs—such are the strange new wholes generated from an admittedly commonplace experience, where airs can be muddied and voice rise like oily bubbles.

The curative property of touch is a staple of folk medicine, Samuel Johnson’s mother having sought to cure her infant’s scrofula by holding him up for Queen Anne’s royal touch. The healing touch of the youthful sounds culminates in one of the poet’s loveliest final stanzas:

A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Swarming and puddling into laughs? Even though I’ve never heard a voice so described, those verbs organically arise from the prior stanzas’ water imagery. So, too, does the tench, the doctor fish, now prepare us for that pike “all badged with sores.” The sores are visible signs (badges) of the hurts age inevitably impresses on those past youth. If no fish’s touch can heal such sores, the girl in the white dress holds out a reminder of that time when the “soft-mouthed life” was not merely desirable but readily available.

From this late night scene, the poet finds a moment of inspiration, one not alluded to but obviously enough the source of this miraculous poem itself. The muse of the poem’s title points us to how ancient Greek religion and myth saw the muses as goddesses that brought artistic inspiration. The “guttural muse” here is clearly the young woman in the white dress: guttural, from the Latin for “throat,” describes sounds formed there, like cries, howls, grunts, croaks—or perhaps the laugh of a girl being courted in a car park.

Heaney once wrote about the poet’s need “to get beyond ego in order to become the voice of more than autobiography” and in doing so find a kind of speech where “sound and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry individual utterance away upon a current stronger and deeper than the individual could have anticipated” (“The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath”). Here, in “The Guttural Muse,” Heaney goes farther than ego, fusing sound and meaning that indeed “rise like a tide out of language,” where laughs swarm and puddle, voices rise like oily bubbles, and a lone old pike may yet find a “soft-mouthed life.” While the synonyms of “guttural”—rough, rasping, grating, harsh, low—suggest a kind of vocal roughness, they also summon the sounds tides may make, especially as the sea moves up and down a gravelly shore. There’s a swelling roughness in Heaney’s diction, in this poem and elsewhere, and just as often a tonal undercurrent of sweetness, harmony, and longing.

Let’s see, anything else?

Ah, yes. As a Post-It note reminds me: many thanks again, to all of you who have submitted poems to Plume. As I believe I said, we read slowly, carefully – and are now all but finished, down to less than a handful of submissions. Acceptances have been sent out, and …demurrals.  We begin again the last two weeks in May.

And: As the time grows closer, we’ll note several upcoming readings by Plume staff and contributors. (Although you might begin with Nancy Mitchell’s wonderful poem in Ploughshares.)

Finally, as usual, some recent/present/forthcoming titles from Plume contributors:

Patrick Donnelly                          Willow Hammer 
Stephanie Burt                             Super Gay Poems
Phillis Levin                                  An Anthology of Rain
Heather Treseler                          Hard Bargain
Angie Estes                                   Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City
John Kinsella                               The Darkest Pastoral

That’s it for now, I think

As always – I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume