"We still believe what we hear": Speech and Listening in the poetry of Maurice Manning, Maria Campbell, and Seamus Heaney

Maurice Manning is a Kentucky-born poet. I first discovered his writing after watching him read his poems on Youtube. It might have been this video for “That durned ole Via Negativa” which begins,

            “You ever say a word like naw,
            that n, a, double-u instead

            of no? Let’s try it, naw. You feel

            your jaw drop farther down and hang;

            you say it slower, don’t you, as if
            a naw weights twice as much as no.”

Or it might have been this video of Manning’s “Old Negro Spiritual”:

            “They ain’t no freedom. What man be free
            from the air him breathe, or set a-loose
           
            from the ground what’s under his two feets?
            It ain’t a man nor woman borned
           
            a-bein’ free! That’s what the man
            was telling me. He had a name

           
            that might make you laugh awkwardly,
            because it’s hard to believe: Catfish.”


These two poems are both from Manning’s 2010 collection, The Common Man. I am glad I first heard these poems before reading them, because the sounds are so important. The speaker wants you to say the word “naw” yourself, he wants you to feel the heaviness in your mouth. And when read aloud, we are able to hear the musicality of the rhyme between “free” and “two feets” or the alliteration of “borned / a-bein’ free.” Wasn’t it Wordsworth who suggested poetry should contain the speech of the “common man”—and yet his own poems rarely used this common speech.

It is equally important that Manning’s speaker wants you to accept a man named Catfish—even if the reality of this name might make you laugh awkwardly. We might similarly laugh awkwardly at the children with strange-sounding names ahead of us at the doctor’s office, or women and men who say things like “I seen” or “I ain’t.” Manning acknowledges our prejudice, but he still wants us to hear Catfish’s voice.

Catfish, we learn through the poem, is the speaker’s friend, and they wind up drinking whiskey late into the night:

            “So there you have it, a white man
            remembering an old black man,

           

            remembering his voice, the way
            it sounded, a song inside the sound;

            it hurt to hear it then, and it hurts

            that I can’t hear it anymore.”

***
            Growing up, I remember my dad saying things like “I ain’t” or “I seen.” He did it on purpose, he said. He hated being told what to do, or how he should sound. It was like how he called himself a janitor even though his official title was “facility operator.” He wanted to sound this way on purpose, even though he had done a semester of university and read more books than anyone I knew. He wanted to speak on his own terms.  

           

            I remember going to karate class, with kids from schools far away from my home. “Why do you talk like that?” they’d ask. “Why do you stick out your tongue when you make a joke?” They were referring to the mannerisms I’d learned from my friends, and teachers, from the people in my life I cared about. I learned to talk less around these other kids. Is that where I learned to hold my tongue?

***

            I’ve recently started working at a library in the community where I grew up. While shelving books and assisting some of our patrons—immigrants who’ve moved to Regina to attend university, or the children who take part in afterschool programs—I came across a book called Stories of the Road Allowance People translated by Maria Campbell with some amazing paintings by Sherry Farrell Racette.

 The first thing I noticed about the book was that in translating the stories of her grandfathers, Campbell had preserved the sounds. One of the stories “Rou Garous” begins like this:

            “You ever heered about dah Rou Garous?
            Never!
            Me I taught everybody he knowed about dem.
            Well dere humans you know
            jus like you and me
            but something he happen to dem an dey turn to dogs in dah night.
            Dats right
            Some of dem dey even turn into wolfs.
            Dats shore funny isnt it
            how tings like dat dey can happen on dis eart.”

I had never seen a book like this before. Words published in hardcover, and yet resisting the conventions of English that had been hammered into me as a student. It was exciting and unsettling to see these words. As a poet, I was drawn to the sounds of the stories—they were so rich with the things I love in all poetry—alliteration, musicality, rhythm. These sounds remind me of the poetry of Maurice Manning. They remind me of Seamus Heaney.

Imagine how delighted I was to find Ron Marken referencing Seamus Heaney in the foreward to the book. Marken writes: “Irish poet Seamus Heaney, in a poem for his mother, an unschooled woman, describes how she conversed with her son, the famous poet: “With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You know them things.’ What is the poet’s affectionate response to her linguistic modesty? “So I governed my tongue / In front of her.”

Marken suggests Campbell engages in a caring governing of tongues, and he puts her translations in context: “The accents and grammar of the narratives you will hear in this book are uncommon, but do not mistake them for unsophistication. Their rhythms and vocabulary are not of the school text; instead they coil and spin lightly around the lives and voices of a complex and courageous people.”

Marken does not stop here. He insists the use of these voices is a political act, a resistance against the colonization of language: “Our European concepts of ‘voice’ are hedged with assumptions and undermined with problems. Voices equals speech. Voice has the floor. Voice is authority. To have voice is to have power. To speak is to hold others in sway, to register opinion. To be dumb or voiceless is synonymous with being ignorant. Even the distinguished notion of ‘oral tradition’ has been charged with bad odours by our professors and critics.”

Can you really argue with him? Increasingly, I’m starting to wonder whether self-professed “grammar-nazis” should really feel comfortable with that title, given our history of colonization, our history of silencing the voices of First Nations peoples.

***

Campbell writes that she remembers “a warm kitchen on a story winter night” where there is “laughter, hot sweet tea and the smell of red willow tobacco.” In The Common Man, Maurice Manning similarly acknowledges his grandmothers and says, “This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers, who told me stories, and to the Kentucky mountains, which made those stories happen.”

I am in the middle of reading Manning’s 2007 collection, Bucolics. I am almost finished reading Anna Karenina and I’ve just started Stories of the Road Atlas People. I’m looking forward to reading Alice Munro’s new collection of stories, many of which I’ve already read in the New Yorker so I know that they occur in Southern Ontario and many of them describe middle-aged women living ordinary lives. There are so many stories to read. I need to remind myself to listen to the quiet voices. To listen for the silent voices. Try to remember the voice of your grandmother. Really listen, and even if you think you are listening—listen harder. We should strive for a greater diversity in voices, not less.





*"We still believe what we hear" is from Heaney's "The Singer's House," cited by Marken.