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Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: Paradise lost? Today's teens miss out on beauty of yesterday's poetry
Good weather can only mean one thing: Leaving Cert English paper one. Soundings. The Planter's Daughter versus Paradise Lost. Emily Dickinson vibing on a funeral in her brain. Dylan Thomas's point-blank refusal to mourn. Paddy Kavanagh counting the bicycles headed down to Billy Brennan's yard, hornier than a goat, thirsty at the prospect of chasing a bit of skirt down Iniskeen Road on a July evening. Feeling nostalgic, I reached for a copy of the great green book and started to leaf through its fabled pages. First published in 1969, Soundings — more cultural touchstone than simple poetry anthology — had more reprints than the King James Bible. There isn't a house in Ireland built in the last 55 years that hasn't had a half dozen copies cycle through it. Notes, scribbled in pencil, about the margins. Arrows and underlines elucidating on curious metaphors. A girl's name. A heart with an arrow through it. The lovestruck doodles were poems all by themselves. An introduction from editor and academic Augustine Martin implored students to ignore the glossaries provided in the footnotes. 'Nobody — teacher, classmate, critic or parent — can read a poem for you,' Augustine warned. 'Ultimately, the reader himself must lay hold to the poem and experience it in the intimacy of his own mind. Unless he does this, the whole effort of teaching is at worst a fraud, at best a waste of time.' The front cover of the much-loved Soundings poetry book, which was part of the Leaving Cert English curriculum for many years. Strong words, and ones that my own English teacher taught by. To dare read the footnotes was a cowardly surrender to conformity. He would rather you die thinking Austin Clarke had genuinely lost a heifer if it meant you read the poem your way — even if you misunderstood it — so long as you didn't go straight to the bottom to see what the cheat-sheet said. Sadly, Soundings was dumped off the Leaving Cert English curriculum in 2000 after a significant revision of the English syllabus. This new module introduced a broader and more diverse range of texts, including contemporary authors, modern novels, and film studies. The aim was to modernise the curriculum and move beyond the traditional, predominantly male and canonical selections that characterised Soundings. While the reasoning was sound, one can't help wondering what students today and for the last 25 years have lost by being deprived of the exposure to some of the greatest minds in literature. When you're young and live in your own head, reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples can be quite formative. Especially if you had a teacher who brought it to life, as I had. What happened? Was Paradise Lost too dark, too apocalyptic, too critical of Man's first disobedience, to be trusted in the hands of an 18-year-old? Has the Department of Education ever watched an episode of Euphoria? Perhaps the straw that broke the lost heifer's back was The Planter's Daughter, Austin Clarke's love letter to a beauty so profound, it silenced entire pubs. Nowadays, a line of pure genius such as 'They say that her beauty/Was music in mouth' could be construed as a sentiment a little too close to outright objectification, and therefore be disqualified as leery misogynistic nonsense. If that's the calculation, then, oh, what a loss. Some German students visited our school during my secondary school years. I slow-danced with a young fraulein from Baden-Württemberg to The Pretenders I'll Stand by You at a disco in the town hall, and weeks later, in an effort to keep the romance alive until I was old enough to run away to the Black Forest to lumberjack, I wrote her a letter in which I may have told her that she was 'the Sunday in every week'. The scribbles in the margins were commonplace. In my defence, it was the pre-internet age, and we had bonded over our mutual love of poetry and Dawson's Creek. You miss all the shots you don't take. Weeks passed before a letter arrived with a German stamp on it. 'Why Sunday?' the fraulein asked, obviously unimpressed. 'It's the worst day of the week. It is long and boring, and I get depressed because I have to go back to school on Monday.' Bloody Germans, one might say, but here was a valuable lesson in her cold-eyed critique. 'No poem means quite the same thing to any two readers,' Augustine Martin said, 'or even the same reader at different periods of his life.' The fraulein read it her way, and I read it mine. Nostalgia is a seductive sauce, but I can't help thinking Soundings was something worth keeping in the schoolbags of our kids. How else will teenagers come to know that "beauty is truth, truth beauty'? And "that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know". So too, that "the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven'. When you're young, there's surely no more relatable a sentiment than that.
The Spinoff
14-05-2025
- General
- The Spinoff
Help Me Hera: Am I wasting my potential?
All my friends are writing books and leading organisations. Meanwhile I'm just pottering around. Want Hera's help? Email your problem to helpme@ Hi Hera, I am in the age group where friends are writing books or leading organisations, whereas I have given up on all that. I've taken a career sidestep and now have little stress and certainly no profile – the career equivalent of moving to the country. Coming from a family of creatives, I suppose it was always expected that I would do something more remarkable. But the truth is, I can't be bothered. Good writing is very hard work, and being a boss involves big hours. Not interested. It's not that I've given up on life. I listen to podcasts, read, cook, walk, swim in the sea, wonder if there was ever life on Venus… you know. I suppose I am just living a small life and I had always thought I'd live a big one. Is it OK to just potter around like this, or am I wasting my life and not living up to my potential? Dear Curious, HELL YES, squander that potential. This is the kind of letter I aspire to write. If you're lucky enough to be born without the specific mental disease that gives you a burning desire to write 30 identical crime novels (guilty) or invent radium for fun, then the wisest and most righteous thing to do is enjoy your life to the max, as if it were a rare piece of immersive performance art that lasts exactly as long as a human life. For what it's worth, I don't think there's anything small about the life you describe. A big life and a public life are two entirely separate things. It doesn't take a Harvard-trained psychologist to see that there are plenty of vocationally prestigious people who live spiritually narrow and psychologically stunted lives, no matter how impressive their respective LinkedIn pages are. Besides. When it comes to local prestige, the stakes are hysterically low. As far as I can tell, there's basically no material difference in the amount of fame and public adulation you can achieve as someone who occasionally appears on NZ television, and a truck driver who makes a habit of honking his horn at passing school children. Emily Dickinson got it right when she wrote 'How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell your name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog.' Obviously, comparing your situation to Emily Dickinson, perhaps the most famous and esteemed poet in Western history, is a little cooked. But lucky for Emily, she could afford to languish in obscurity during her own lifetime. If you're in a financial position to throw your hands up, by all means, throw them up. Maybe the deeper existential question here is what does it mean to live without feeling as if you have a specific calling or vocation. This is a question that stresses almost everyone out, because there's a lot of pressure to 'follow your dreams' and not a lot of advice on how to know which dream to follow. It's easy to feel like there's something wrong with you when you meet someone who has been practising advanced neurosurgery on their teddy since age five. But there's no moral superiority in being this type of person. Sure, we need the neurotics and the obsessives, to perfect the atomic clock, or write Moby Dick. But there are many notorious disadvantages to having this type of personality, and if you don't believe me, read literally any biography of a historically notable figure. Admittedly, I'm always telling young people to follow their dreams, because sometimes people need a little friendly bullying. Your 20s are a great age for forcing yourself out of your comfort zone, and it's healthy to intentionally cultivate a little naked ambition, if only as an antidote against future regret. But you're not a teen with a dream. You've already accomplished a lot, and have arrived at a place where you know what's important to you, and can finally get down to the serious and important business of enjoying your damn life. That doesn't mean you have to give up your Hollywood Star just yet. You might get a second wind one day and decide to write that tell-all memoir. But we're all nobodies from the perspective of eternity. History is stacked to the tits with people who didn't beget statues, but who enriched the world around them. In the words of George Eliot: 'for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Emily Dickinson Museum unveils updated Carriage House Center
AMHERST, Mass. (WWLP) – The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst is celebrating the completion of its reconstructed carriage house. The ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on Tuesday. The carriage house once stood to the east of 'The Evergreens,' which was the home of Emily Dickinson's brother. It has been reconstructed sustainably, maintaining its historical appearance. The building will serve as a welcome center, museum shop, and help launch the final phase of restoring Dickinson's homestead. Executive Director Jane Wald told 22News, 'It's a very special place. We think that visitors enjoy being able to encounter her physical environment. And that gives them a window into her poetry. To understand where it came from. The struggles and the appreciation for nature and the wider world.' 'The Evergreens' also officially reopened. It has been closed since August 2024 because of the carriage house construction project. Local News Headlines WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WWLP.
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Emily Dickinson Museum to unveil ‘passive' carriage house
AMHERST — The Emily Dickinson Museum will celebrate on Tuesday the $1 million reconstruction of a 170-year-old carriage house that once stood on its Amherst property and is slated to become the first 'passive' museum structure in the country, according to officials. The ribbon-cutting ceremony, hosted in partnership with the downtown Business Improvement District and the Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce, will take place at 5 p.m. at 280 Main St. 'We wanted to present and interpret the structure just as Emily Dickinson herself would have seen it in the mid-19th century,' the museum's executive director, Jane Wald, told The Republican in an interview last week. 'We know that this matters very much to visitors who come to see where she produced her poetry.' The carriage house, demolished in the early 1950s, stood to the east of The Evergreens, the home of Dickinson's brother, Austin, and his wife, Susan, part of the museum complex that recently reopened for tours. The construction of the carriage house was based on insurance maps, deeds, early town maps and a single existing photograph of the original building, which stored the family carriage and housed stalls for horses. Its reconstruction, designed by Connecticut-based edmStudio architects, uses 'passive' strategies such as continuous insulation, airtight construction and high-performance windows. Museum officials said they expect to win certification from the Passive House Institute US Inc., making it the first such commercial building in Amherst, as well as the 'first passive museum building and passive historic house reconstruction in the country.' Archeologists previously obtained artifacts from the carriage house site, including medicine bottles, knobs and a lock set from a door in The Evergreens. 'It was used as a storage area or an outdoor closet where the family would just put things they're no longer using,' Wald said. Its reconstruction, by Teagno Construction Inc., of Amherst, 'reflects Dickinson's regard for the natural world and the inspiration she drew from it,' Wald said. The house will first function as a visitors center and museum store, while the main homestead will be restored to its original functions. These included a scullery kitchen, laundry room, woodshed, pantry and living corridors for domestic staff, Wald said. After the final restoration, the carriage house will become an educational program space. Wald said that recent cuts in federal arts funding have reached the museum, including a $115,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services for digitized documentation. 'There's an understanding in the museum world that more funds are now not going to be available,' she said. 'Without those funds, we need to assess what the impact will be.' Wald said that recent scholarly work on the poet has included a focus on 'class and privilege' and 'ecologies,' or her relationship with the natural world. 'Without question, Emily Dickinson is a global icon,' Wald said. 'Her influence is continually being felt among new generations of poetry readers.' Sources include the recent Apple TV+ comedy-drama series 'Dickinson' and singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. Wald said that musicians across genres continue to set Dickinson's poems to music, including classical, country, pop, rock and rap. 'Interest in her poetry continues to grow exponentially, at least my observation of the last, last number of years,' Wald said. 'Her poetry really speaks, or can speak, to everyone.' In addition to the ribbon-cutting, the Emily Dickinson Museum will host its annual Poetry Walk through downtown Amherst on Saturday, in honor of the 139th anniversary of the poet's death. This is a free public program. To learn more about Poetry Walk, visit Read the original article on MassLive. Read the original article on MassLive. Read the original article on MassLive. Read the original article on MassLive. Read the original article on MassLive.
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Federal agency cancels $117,000 grant set to go to Western Mass. museum
A federal agency has cancelled a $117,000 grant that was set to go to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, according to the museum. On April 9, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) notified the museum that the grant had been terminated, the Emily Dickinson Museum said in a Facebook post. The museum had been awarded the grant in 2023 to help it digitize records related to a newly catalogued collection and locate related information among existing records. 'The notice states, 'IMLS has determined that your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency's priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program,'' the Emily Dickinson Museum wrote. The Institute of Museum and Library Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. 'Our work to amplify Emily Dickinson's revolutionary poetic voice — by opening her family homes to visitors, by interpretive and educational use of her family's material legacy, by holding up her enduring poetry — continues with support from the Museum's friends and our unending gratitude," the museum wrote. You can to the Emily Dickinson Museum online here. Vigils bring Easter firsts for new WMass Catholics Once a squatter's delight, Patriot Property points to success with Mattoon Street apts. 70th Westfield River Wildwater Canoe Race — less drama, more paddling A message of love and the importance of organ donation 'Due process' hangs in balance in Garcia case (The Republican Editorials)
