“A Poet Of In-Betweenness”

In an interview worth reading in full, Henri Cole recalls the crucial encouragement he received from Seamus Heaney about his poetry:

I remember once talking to him about my book The Visible Man—it had just been published and I was feeling apologetic about the erotic content. He told me the poems were a record of something in “the arena of human emotion.” The most important thing was to contribute to the arena of human emotion, he insisted. I’ve never forgotten this. And to hear it from the son of a cattle farmer was unexpected. It seemed the most patient and generous response to a book others had dismissed as aberrant. It pushed me forward. He describes himself as being a poet of in-betweenness—in between Catholic and Protestant, in between England and Ireland, in between rural and city life, and so on. He is proof that in-between is a good place for poetry. In my own writing, I am in between the North and the South, in between formalism and free verse, in between vernacular and high speech, and, as a gay man, in between genders. Heaney’s example made me want to fly beyond all the identity markers others assign to me.