An afternoon with Seamus Heaney

Recorded in 1988, this interview with Seamus Heaney touches on his childhood in rural Ireland near Slieve Gallion, the politics of Northern Ireland, his poetic craft and the natural world's influence on his work. Heaney sits onstage with Georgetown University's George O’Brien in front of an audience of students at Howard Community College in Maryland. With his arm slung over the back of the chair, Heaney talks, reads, recites, and laughs. His work is grounded in rural Ireland's physical world, he says: "So the places and the people that are there, there are also places and presences that allowed that richness, that generated that thing in the language itself, to begin with. There was a kind of hedonistic, self-indulgent quality to writing about all that too." He reads "Alphabets" and "From the Republic of Conscience", "A Peacock's Feather", and sonnets from "Clearances". He also recites "Digging". This video broadcast with permission from the Heaney family estate and Faber & Faber Ltd. For more information about HoCoPoLitSo, to obtain a full transcript, or to support live or taped literary programming, visit www.hocopolitso.org