Dead Poets Society

This isn't a post about the film, but since I've mentioned it now, I do love the film. When I was teacher I always made sure my Year 10 classes saw it before we looked at the module on Seamus Heaney. Heaney was an alive-poet at the time, but the film is about the communion of saints between dead and alive ones, so I felt it was appropriate. And that's what this post is about too.

O Captain! My captain!

So anyway. I am haunted by these dead poets. Mainly Lorca, but since I chased him around Riverside Park in New York and met Langston Hughes at the Schomberg, I feel like Hughes has the eye out for me too. I will explain. 

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland gave me a grant this year to research Federico Garcia Lorca for a novel I'm writing. The journey has taken me to Granada and New York, by way of Manchester, Sunbury Pennsylvania, Woodstock and an elderly Amish couple's warm, wood-smokey home. On the way to the New York City my friend Peterson and I listened to podcast about the Harlem Renaissance, and I learned about Langston Hughes, the poet, who wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers when he was only seventeen. If he'd been on Twitter they'd've said his parents wrote it, and that he was a puppet of social justice warriors, no doubt. Anyway, I came home and Langston appears to have followed me, I have heard his name spoken several times since then and, inexplicably drawn to an album  I hadn't heard in years, I hear the words through Courtney Pine; 'I've known rivers, ancient dusty rivers, and my soul has grown deep like the rivers...  I heard his name again last weekend at the Children's Books Ireland conference, referenced by Kwame Alexander who grew up in New York with a mother who nurtured his skill with words.

I don't know why dead poets are so important, but they are. Maybe it's because they've left a deliberate legacy. These words we read are what they gave of themselves, so carefully. I like it that we can haunt them back, returning to their work, bringing our own words to them, asking them to listen to us and then waiting for their response. I think this kind of nerdy seance can be traced back to my evangelical Christian youth, when we'd ask questions of God and then randomly open the Bible, hoping that the spirit would cause the pages to fall open at just the right answer. It's not a bad way to proceed when you're at a loss for words, although I suppose it bears considering that we only ever read the Bible or poetry with a mind that already knows what we seek- we are only looking for the words to stick our truths to after all.

When Michael Donaghy was alive he wrote this poem about him haunting his father and his father haunting him back. 

Haunts by Michael Donaghy

Don’t be afraid, old son, it’s only me,
though not as I’ve appeared before,
on the battlements of your signature,
or margin of a book you can’t throw out,
or darkened shop front where your face
first shocks itself into a mask of mine,
but here, alive, one Christmas long ago
when you were three, upstairs, asleep,
and haunting me because I conjured you
the way that child you were would cry out
waking in the dark, and when you spoke
in no child’s voice but out of radio silence,
the hall clock ticking like a radar blip,
a bottle breaking faintly streets away,
you said, as I say now, Don’t be afraid.

It's a kind of time travel poem about mortality and communication and, like a lot of his poems, I can read it over and over and find myself in lots of different ways inside it. Years ago, before social media as we now know it, I was telling someone on a forum (remember those?) about Michael Donaghy. I was saying how wonderful I thought his poetry was. Soon after, Michael posted a note on the forum to say that he had found the post during a random ego-google and really appreciated it. We emailed back and forth a couple of times. I'd say it was back when the internet was lovely, but that kind of thing can still happen. Sadly, Michael Donaghy died a few years later. He was not old. His poetry continues to follow me around. I feel like I have this lovely ethereal community of dead poets who let me speak and listen to them. You know, the 'fantasy dinner party' that people talk about, but it's not really a fantasy, because they're still here.

Anyone else? Who is haunting you right now?