{"id":113303,"date":"2018-03-01T10:36:23","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T15:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=113303"},"modified":"2018-03-02T13:50:32","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T18:50:32","slug":"look-what-we-found-georgia-nigros-revised-seamus-heaney-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2018\/03\/01\/look-what-we-found-georgia-nigros-revised-seamus-heaney-poem\/","title":{"rendered":"Look What We Found: A note from Seamus Heaney to Georgia Nigro"},"content":{"rendered":"

A framed, typed manuscript of a famous poem by the late Seamus Heaney hangs by the desk of Professor of Psychology Georgia Nigro in her Pettengill Hall office. At the bottom is a handwritten note: \u201cTo Georgia \u2014 hoping you approve of this order \u2014 how you heard it! S.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, Heaney, who was a friend of Nigro\u2019s husband, Senior Lecturer in English Robert Farnsworth, gave a reading at Bates. The reading included one of his newer poems, \u201cA Sofa in the Forties.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Georgia Nigro holds a framed copy of Seamus Heaney’s poem “A Sofa in the Forties” that he inscribed for her.<\/p><\/div>\n

The poem begins with children on a sofa pretending they\u2019re riding a train, but the reader soon understands that \u201cit is really about the trains taking Jews to concentration camps,\u201d Nigro explains. That shift, \u201cfrom playful to serious was so startling, but beautifully done. I liked the way it grabbed me and sort of massaged my emotions from one place to another.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the reading, she made a point of telling Heaney how much she admired it. What Nigro didn\u2019t know at the time, nor did anyone else in Schaeffer Theatre that night, was that during the reading\u00a0\u2014 as he was at the lectern \u2014 Heaney swapped the order of the third and fourth stanzas, and that new arrangement was how the poem would later be published.<\/p>\n

She learned about the switch when he mailed her the original typewritten poem, with hand-drawn edits \u2014 made right after the Bates reading, reflecting his new preference. And that\u2019s how the poem appears in 1996\u2019s The Spirit Level<\/em>, published a year after Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nigro recalls the thrill of receiving the unexpected gift from a poet who is \u201cthe voice you want reading you bedtime stories when you\u2019re an adult.”<\/p>\n

She’s loved his work all these years, recalling his \u201cstunning\u201d reading of the poem \u201cDigging\u201d at Bates in 1986, when he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.<\/p>\n

Nigro has always kept the framed poem \u2014 and a photo of the family dogs\u00a0\u2014 near her. The placement is intentional, she says, because the poem is a treasure. \u201cI like having his poem and a picture of my dogs to remind me that there\u2019s more to life than the large screen in front of me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heaney sent Nigro a poem with handwritten revisions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":113361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[11010,133,14,166],"tags":[10876,11321,7039],"class_list":["post-113303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-creativity","category-faculty-staff","category-humanities-history","tag-georgia-nigro","tag-look-what-we-found","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113303"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113577,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113303\/revisions\/113577"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}