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You're listening to Hosier on the Back in America Network. Welcome to Poetism. In this week installment of Poetism, Back in America's Josh Wagner invites Stanford grad student Lorenzo Bartolucci to talk about Hosier's setting of Simu's Hinnies bug poem. How can we speak about loss, especially the loss of people who we have never and will never know? If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast.

Hello there. I'm your beautiful host of this week's program, Josh Wagner, one of the podcast editors here at Back in America, your podcast exploring American culture, values and identity. If you're just joining us, I'm in the middle of a summer takeover of your usually scheduled broadcast and content, bringing you the latest and deepest cuts straight from the ever growing team here at Back in America. If you're new to the format, each week a guest and I select a poet and musician, and we try to uncover the ways in which each art form thinks in, through, and around each other, building bridges and extrapolations. This week, the question at hand is, how can we ask questions of the unknown? Can we describe or communicate what is felt before it is understood? For Aristotle, the very act of asking a question already contains its own answer, which goes to show just how difficult it is to ask the right questions. Is it OK if we don't have all or any of the answers? And are we even asking the right questions on this program? To tackle this plenum of queries, I've asked Lorenzo Bartolucci, a tentative cat parent and graduate student in comparative literature at Stanford University, to join me on the program. Lorenzo's interests span the self and poetry and neuroscience, especially in the 20th century.

But today we're here to talk about Seamus Haney's The Bog Queen from 1972 collection North, the third of many such quote unquote bog poems. And we've paired it, or rather we follow the composer's own inclination to pair it alongside Hozier's Like Real People Do off of 2014's Hozier. The song is actually musical setting slash inversion of the very same poem. Welcome to the court of the bog queen, Lorenzo, and it's good to have you here. Hi, Josh. Thank you very much for having me here. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Before we get too far into the poetry and the music, I'm curious about what excites you about poetry. What excites me about poetry? If I had the definitive answer to that, I could probably get some important prizes, but I don't. Everything is the short answer. I come to English poetry at a remove.

I'm Italian. That's where the accent is from. And so my first encounter with literature and poetry was in Italian. Then I came to the US. There was a period of years during which I had to learn English because what I knew when I first arrived was, let's just say, insufficient to appreciate the finer details of what someone like Haney would have been up to. And then after a number of years, I discovered that I could relate to those finer details at long last. And so the fundamental reason why I've decided to work on poetry full time is that it allows me to perpetuate that spark of rediscovery and enjoyment forward. Yeah, and I think part of why I'm asking you this question is I imagine that a lot of our listeners are people who probably don't read poetry every day or don't study poetry professionally. And so I'm curious if you talk about that spark that you were talking about at the end.

If you are picking something to read, why would you choose a Haney poem or a wordpress on it and not New York Times? Well, I would choose the New York Times, too, depending on, you know, if it's first thing in the morning, that's probably more of my core. But the fascinating thing about poetry is that for all that it seems to be this strange and strictly categorized art form that as a result is impenetrable, very hard to get to. It actually leaves an extremely and surprisingly diffused life. So it is very likely that you come across poetry much more often than you would suspect just by virtue of being exposed to the goings on of the world. The pairing that you and I are going to discuss today being a prime example, because it turns out that if you like Osher's music at all and you happen to listen to Take Me to Church and therefore came across this one song, like real people do, you were really listening to an interpretation of a poem by Shem with Haney, although you might never have heard of Haney himself. And that happens with surprising frequency, because, you know, what poets work with is words and words are what we all live with.

And beauty infused into words as a result obtains a uniquely flexible capacity to travel around. Yeah, I guess this may be a very unfair question, but I'm really curious about how that everyday interaction of poetry and language informs your research and vice versa. Has that changed your own experience of the world, your own sense of self or anything about the way in which you lead your life? Yeah, totally. And for the very simple reason that not just poets, but writers in general are by and large singularly curious creatures. And as a researcher, one of the greatest benefits of one's day to day job is perhaps the attempt to keep up with the curiosity. There aren't many other jobs that demand that you pursue curiosity as a characteristic of your object of study or your work assignment. Studying poetry does involve one such that required that specific requirement. And that's precisely the reason I came to neuroscience. I'm not a neuroscientist.

I haven't been trained as a neuroscientist. I just became curious in what some of the poets that I was reading were interested in. It turned out that a surprising number of them were looking at research in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science. And I started to wonder why. But in order to understand what they were doing, you had to look in the direction of science and in my specific case, neuroscience. And once you try to align your gaze with that of the poet, you start to understand that a lot of the imaginative work that the poet did then came to inform the way in which you yourself and the culture that you have, it imagines the human condition and the world, these undefinable things that we can never fully give a definition of. And yet we constantly need to have at hand some sort of working definition that allows us to exist and orient ourselves in the world through. And then thinking about certain poets, can you tell us a little bit about Andrea Zanzotto?

Andrea Zanzotto is, first of all, one of the most important poets to write in Italy in the 20th century. And there's so much that I could tell you about Andrea Zanzotto. But I'll tell you the reason why I'm interested in him. His first major collection of poems had a strange title. It sounds strange in English. It also sounds strange in Italian. It's called Dietro il Paesaggio, which means behind the landscape. But the word dietro in Italian has a very tactile feeling to it, so that when you first read the phrase, the first feeling you experience is that of almost going behind the space that you see in front of you, wearing it like a mask. And that is precisely what the language of Zanzotto's poems tries to do. He tries to bring the notion of identity and to explore the very experience of existing as a constant osmosis with the place that one inhabits.

And in fact, he wrote virtually all of his poetry about the place where he was from, a small village near Padova, because he felt that if you could really express what the experience of living there meant with respect to your attempt to define who and what you are, you would have accomplished about as much as a human being can accomplish. Your comments on Zanzotto actually seem to parallel all that we're talking about with Hini and the Vogue Queen. And maybe it's a good woman transition over that. Do you want us to read the poem out loud if you have it in front of you? Yeah, sure. I do have it in front of me. My Italian accent will have to do in place of a proper Irish one. I apologize in advance. Here it is. Vogue Queen from the collection North, which came out in 1975. I lay waiting between turf face and the main wall, between heatherly levels and glass-toothed stone.

My body was braille for the creeping influences. Dawn suns groped over my head and cooled at my feet. Through my fabrics and skins, the seeps of winter digested me. The illiterate roots pondered and died in the caving of stomach and socket. I lay waiting on the gravel bottom, in a brain darkening, a jar of spawn fermenting underground, dreams of Baltic amber. Bruce berries under my nails, the vital horde reducing in the crock of the pelvis. My diadem grew carious, gemstones dropped in the pit flow like the bearings of history. My sash was a black glacier, wrinkling, dyed weaves and Phoenician stitchwork, wrecked on my breasts of moraines. I knew winter cold like the nuzzle of fjords at my thighs, the soaked fledge, the heavy swaddle of hides.

My skull hibernated in the wet nests of my hair, which they robbed. I was barbered and stripped by a turf-cutter spade who veiled me again and packed combs softly between the stone ions at my head and my feet. Til a pierce wife bribed him. The plate of my hair, a slimy berth-cord of bog had been cut and I rose from the dark, hacked bones, skull-wear, frayed stitches, tufts, small gleams on the bank. And it comes to an end, but it doesn't really seem to come to an end with this rising out of the pit flow. So actually, I love that you mentioned that. The version of the poem I initially read when I was preparing for our conversation today didn't have the last four stanzas. Oh really? And so hearing you reach today, it does feel like it could.

It's most fascinating that those four stanzas would be missing, specifically those four. It's missing the entire history of the exhumation of the body. But I guess before we get into the language, what is a bog queen? What is a bog queen? It's a small shriveled woman, the smallest shriveled corpse, I should say. Ah, that's so fascinating that there are versions of this circulating without the last four stanzas, because, you know, the poem itself puts all these details last. So they were not at the top of the poet's mind when he wrote the poem. So for context, this poem, Bog Queen, belongs in a particular lineage of poems that Heaney wrote, starting in the early 1970s. This was a poetic dimension that Heaney at some point discovered and would never leave. He describes writing the very first of these bog poems, titled Bogland, as a gateway.

The source of his fascination was a particular book titled The Bog People, which came out in 1965 and then was translated into English a few years later, in 1969. That's when Heaney bought it for himself as a Christmas gift. So that's how invested his imagination was into this. It's a book that was written by a Danish archaeologist, Peter Wilhelm Glob. It's to this day, I think, the most influential and comprehensive study of this phenomenon in various boglands. Bodies have started to come up and they were all buried in this soft turf in very similar manners that altogether suggested to Glob, these bodies had belonged to sacrificial victims, people that had been sacrificed to ingratiate the favors of the goddess of fertility, the different peoples that inhabited these regions in Northern Europe, from the Baltic coast all the way to Northern Ireland. There are, of course, other elements of simultaneity, right?

1969 is a year at the very beginning of the Irish Troubles. And so Heaney, being himself from Northern Ireland and a Catholic, was primed to perceive kinship between the atavistic brutality of these Bronze and Iron Age civilizations and what was going on all around him. And in fact, he later acknowledged that writing these poems was always for him a way of holding up, as he said, his own Perseus shield. He was referring to the myth, according to which Perseus, who slayed the Medusa, received the shield from the goddess Athena that would allow him to see the monster in a reflection and therefore know where to hit it without having to look at the Medusa directly in the face, because as we know, the gaze of the Medusa turns everyone that encounters it into stone. And so thinking about these ancient civilizations was for Heaney a way to meditate on the political situation around him, or whatever reason his poetic sensibility couldn't tackle head on.

Yeah, and I just want to pull out two things from that really wonderful introduction that you just gave. One is that there are even modern bodies being pulled out of bogs dating from the Second World War. So it's not just talking to an Iron Age history, but it's not necessarily camperaneous with Heaney in the 70s, but still modern humans are there. And I also love what you're talking about in terms of this Perseus shield, because being turned up by a Medusa is one form of death. But it's static, right? And Dante, the death of the Medusa is the threat of being trapped in hell, of not being able to move forward. But the bog body is also a form of death. This is a death that's mobile, right? The body can be moved, it can be taken in and out. It's in this pea, it's just not solid. And there's the sense of subtle motion. And so I'm curious what you make of these two different visions of death.

You know, it's so fascinating that you bring up this aspect of the whole enterprise behind the writing of these bog poems, because they are in many ways an investigation of death as one of the forms that life takes. This is clearly something that would have been at the top of Heaney's mind, not just because of the sociopolitical situation that he started to think about this theme and this imagery in the midst of, but also because it was a concern that was very much present to the literary landscape that he inhabited. I think that this specific phrase, death as a form that life takes, is one of the ways in which Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea has been described. And it's definitely one of the reasons why Heaney became so involved with Loeb's book. The book has a beautiful epigraph from a poem by a Danish poet. His name is Togger Larsen. And the last line of it is, we grow on that tree as ephemeral flowers.

And that's the last thing that the poet says before the archaeologist sets about his work for the rest over the course of the book. And then when the archaeologist is done with his work, another poet picks up the pen and I think goes back to trying to explore the initial sentiment. And the bog queen, among all the bog poems, marks the moment in which this investigation reaches its keenest moment. Yeah. And can you say more about the order of the bog poems? In the chronology of the bog poems, it's the third, depending on how you count, is titled Bogland. And there there is only one body that appears very briefly. It's not even the body of a human being, it's the body of a great elk. The second poem is the companion piece of Bog Queen. It's titled Come to the Bower. And it describes the finding of the corpse of this small woman by a farmer.

And it sort of reconnoiters the scene. There is this farmer that's digging and hits upon something strange. He keeps digging and he finds that there's a whole human body buried there in the midst of what has all the markings of a religious ceremony. Garments all over the place, the corpse neatly framed by two slabs of stone and everything that the end of bog queen describes in the four stances that so interestingly were left out of the version that you read takes place. The body is found and curious people arrive and they try to snatch pieces away from this unique finding. People take garments, people take a lock of hair from the body and nothing is left. And then the farmer covers up the body again. And then the wife of the owner of the land where the body had been discovered.

So Lady Moira came to hear of it, went to speak to the farmer and asked him to dig up the body once again. And then she decided to restore the body to its original state, adding new garments, even adding a new lock of hair, replaced the one that had been stolen. This was actually the first documented finding of a body in the bog land of Ireland dating back to 1781. And so it also takes on a sort of originary significance in the perspective of an Irish poet. And then when this happens, bog queen begins, which most strikingly of all, speaks in the voice of the dead body. The first line of the poem, as we heard, is I lay waiting between turf face and the mean wall between heathery levels and glass-toothed stone. It's such a almost bewildering gesture, I think, you know, for a living person to speak not just in the voice of the dead, but in the voice of the decomposed. This is not a poem that gives life to the afterlife. It's not a poem that gives life to some soul.

This is a poem that undertakes the impossible task of giving voice to the disappeared, to the dissolved. And I think that that's and what's more, it's a male poet that decides to do that by impersonating the remains of a dead woman. So there are so many ways in which this is a whatever word you want to use it, a radical, a problematic, an unviable gesture. And yet, clearly, there was something that the poet's imagination had to express that could only follow the route of this one gesture, I think, that resonates very, very powerfully, because then this is the poem that Hozier decided to draw upon to write the lyrics of his own song and then also to find the music of that song. I really want to ask you about that first line, I am waiting, which again repeats if you've seen this later. And the obvious question is waiting for what, right? There's also a kind of etiology between the body being there and waiting to be discovered. That first line is one of the more perplexing for me. Well, so it's a pity that this is a podcast. And so we're listening, can't look at the poem on the page because with respect to a question like that,

it's so interesting to look at how such a striking line is, first of all, picked to be the first one in the poem and then is repeated later on. So as I try to convey in my reading, my poor reading, I should say, this is not a poem, the linear of which seems to matter very much. There isn't a sing song quality that marks very clearly to the ear where one line ends and the next one begins. So if you just were to hear it, I think it would be very hard to guess at what the poem actually looks like on the page. And then you look at it and it looks extremely regular, right? All these very small stances, each one is four lines. And you start to wonder what that means. Why? Why are the lines laid out in this way? And that one line in the beginning may begin to provide a sense of what it is. You know, the four lines suggest among more traditional forms, a ballad, right?

And a ballad is nice to listen to because each stance of four lines is self-contained, usually contains one sentence or two. The sentence begins at the beginning of the four lines, ends with the fourth line, and then you move on to the next stage of the story. The first stance of this poem follows that pattern. There is one sentence that begins, I lay waiting between turf face and the main wall between heathery levels and glass to the stone. And that's where the sentence ends. None of the following stances manages to do that. The following sentence already overgrows from the second into the third stanza. And then you come to this, what is this, one, two, three, fourth stanza where the sentence ends on the third line. And the fourth line again is the first one. I lay waiting and the poem begins again.

So the shape of the poem reflects the endlessness of this process of trying to come to an end that from the beginning you imagine to be quick and easy to get to, and yes, yet can't manifest itself. And so the poem goes on and on and on. Waiting for what? Well, that's part of waiting that all you know is that you're waiting, but whatever is supposed to be coming doesn't come. Especially from the point of view of someone that like a court has nothing to do except feel the creeping influences and the seeps of winter. Right. So it's the way in which the corpse is just becoming part of the bog itself. There actually is no physical or semantic difference between the signal and noise location of where you are and like what you actually are. And I keep thinking of the line for bog lands. The bog holes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet center is bottomless. If you drain the bog, you might be able to find everything that all the bodies, everything that was lost, all the diadems had fallen to the deep.

But there's something still so reclusive or lost, even if you know where it is, but you don't know how to find it. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it does. Or you're waiting to be found. And that in itself is an impossible riddle that, however, perfectly encapsulates the human condition in many ways. But certainly the human condition is experienced in the thrall of love, which is a very difficult experience to confront and undergo if you do it earnestly, you know, and if you try to look into the eye of what it means to fall in love with someone and give yourself over to them in all your nakedness, which is precisely the experience that then Hozier uses the language and the imagery of this poem to elaborate on in his own. It's so interesting that you brought up the other poem, Bogland, which again has nothing to do with bog bodies specifically has to do with the land in which the bodies happen to be. But its concern is the nature of the land out of which these bodies bubble up. And there's a very gradual shift of focus from the land to the things that come up through it.

And it's a focus that then the second shift from the poetry to the song carries forward. In a sense, Hozier does what your version of the poem already did. There is this whole anecdote of this little woman being found with all her garments on and all her or her things about her. The poem consigns those to the very end to give right of place to this impossible voice that speaks to us. I lay waiting. That's all we hear. The body describing its seeping through the land and the human marks of what it once was appear at the end of the poem like an afterthought. In Hozier's song, they never appear. So there's a slow process of spoliation that the song sort of completes.

And by virtue of stripping this voice of all of this human reference, the metaphor is actually activated into the form of a symbol that we can all relate to, I think. It becomes a bewildering symbol for the experience of being in the hands of someone else, which is what love ultimately comes down to.

What did you bury before your hands pulled me from the earth? I will not ask you where you came from. I will not ask, and neither should you. Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips. We should just kiss like real people do.

I knew that look, dear, eyes always seeking. Was there in someone that dead long ago? So I will not ask you why you were creeping in some sad way I already know. So I will not ask you where you came from. I will not ask, and neither would you. Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips. We should just kiss like real people do.

I will not ask you where you came from. I will not ask, and neither could you. Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips. We could just kiss like real people do.

I will not ask you where you came from.

I love that. And when we were talking about this song before we started recording, I was really struck by these lines about history and memory. I will not ask you where you came from. I will not ask, and neither should you. And later on, so I will not ask why you were creeping in some sad way I already know. And I think part of what's so interesting about the metaphor of the bog, the bog body, is the discovery.

Even if all this language at the last four stands has been eliminated, the song fixates on like interaction between the body and the discoverer. I think you have had a really fascinating quote from Hozier himself about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a very short statement about how he decided to write this poem. I'll quote, I kind of like the image of someone digging up a person from the earth and falling in love with them. And at the same time, I suppose that person being dug from the earth is relieved, reborn

and somewhat suspicious of the motives of a grave digger. A fine love story. It's amazing. I think it's absolutely brilliant. And I think you put it perfectly. In a way, the song holds up a mirror to the poem because it stages the opposite moment. The poem describes the moment of discovery. From the point of view of the bog queen, the moment when she was still in the earth waiting.

In the song, it's still the bog queen, presumably, that speaks, but she looks back on that moment after she has been found and in conversation with whoever it was that found her. And I'm saying bog queen, but one really brilliant thing the Hozier's song does is that it never mentions the queen. I think that the lyrics could be sung as much by a man as by a woman as by whoever else, because we all fall in love. And you know, when I first heard this song, it really got me thinking. If we fall in love, we're all, of course, aware of the beauty of it.

And we like to reminisce it. And we all have our beautiful memories that we like to go back to. But we also all must remember the moment when the person that we were in love with finally saw us for what we are and when we finally saw them for what they were. And that is perhaps the most important moment of encounter with someone, because there's nothing to offer except who you are. And there's nothing to see except who the other person is. And between them, the inexplicability of the bond, the attraction that I think is incomparable

to anything else. But it's not necessarily a pleasant moment. It's a moment of quintessential exposure, which then is remembered as such and which this song invites us to remember as such. And in that sense, you know, the spoliation of the body, the gradual stripping of the voice of the corpse, of the voice of the queen from the remains of the corpse is, yeah, is perfect. It's really perfect.

One word you used earlier to describe this moment is utopia, which I think you're talking about like this moment of of nakedness, of exposure, ignoring the reality of the world. And there's an erasure there, but again, almost a necessary erasure, both of the fact that this probably has happened countless times. An erasure of the history between other people. A precondition or a part of that vulnerability or just being seen in a way that you are not always seen. I think the best place to try to weave a way through the complexity of this question is

what I find to be the most when I first heard it and then went to read the lyrics, I found to be the most unsettling but also uncanny moment in the song when the speaker says, I knew the look there eyes always seeking was there in someone that dug long ago. So I will not ask you why you were creeping in some sad way. I already know. And considering that the one who's speaking here is yet again impersonating corpse and therefore something that has become part of the year, I am just paralyzed by the extent words make me identify with that person because as the speaker, you are telling someone that

you know that when they came looking for you, they were looking for signs of somebody's passage over your own body. And the utopia, of course, that every lover at some point constructs for themselves is the fantasy that nobody has passed through the body, the life, the sentiments of the person that you're in love with before you did. And in some sense, that's true, right? The uniqueness of the feeling of being in love is that you are sort of seeing somebody for the first time and you feel that's the quintessential definition of the feeling that

you never met someone like that person before. But of course, you can't be the first person that meets that other person. And life teaches you to reckon with the fact that often you're neither the first nor will you be the last that that person falls in love with. And holding in a single thought these two things, the feeling of having found something unique and the awareness that you're not the first and will not be the last to have found it. You know, there are actually words that he used to refer to what the necessary poetry,

as he calls it, that I think are apt here. He says that what the necessary poetry always does is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature, our own, is constantly exposed. And that's the necessary experience that both the poetry that he is referring to here and the experience of being in love forces to come to terms with, perhaps for the best. You know, that's not for anyone to determine, perhaps, but that's what I think the song gets to.

Yeah, I love that. I don't know what to say after that. And I'm also always struck by the sense of being a real person versus, I guess, the implication of being a non-real person. And that part of that self-deception that you're talking about is about fewing whether you exist or not. And then there's always these lines, and we should kiss like real people do. We could kiss just like real people do.

And there's an implication that whatever it is in love, it is unreal. And so I think you're getting an area of this idea as there's the real world and then there's the fictional, delusional world of love, which you think you imagine as being more real than reality itself. These lines seem like deeply ironic, right? The real people they're referring to are the people within that world of love, too, right? It's not we should kiss like, you know, a stockbroker would, but we should kiss like the category of real people.

And I think that is not a question and that is a confusing statement. But I think I am trying to still wrap my head around those lines, which I think are really funny. I think ironic is the right word, but in the most serious sense of the word, which is not to say that they're not funny, but, you know, like like the clowns of opera, the things that make you smile and laugh are the things that are telling you something that you won't easily forget, like a good joke. Right. And I think when I first heard this song, I've always imagined it taking place

in a specific moment, just like the poem. The poem takes place in this one instant when the body comes out of the earth. The same way I've always imagined these words being spoken by someone in bed with the person they love, because there is nothing more unreal than the feeling of being held by the one person that you want more than anybody else in the world. And it's a moment of suspension. You're there somewhere. It can be on a bench.

It can be can be in bed. It can be walking down the street. There is this moment, this one swing from one second to the next when it's just the two of you. And there's not like real people. There's like being outside of the real run of life. And then in many respects, the moment when you kiss someone is the moment when you return to the absolute concreteness of life. And so in Edwina, at the same time is the moment in which the unreality of the feeling

that you're experiencing reaches its climax, but also the moment in which you recognize it as something ephemeral and unreal. And the two things coexist endlessly. No, yeah, I put it there is something both real and unreal about all these experiences and that even at its most ironic or comic, it still conveys that same. It's not mystical, but it's a moment in which it feels like you can't describe. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the crudest way to put it would be it's always the old story about desire.

You want something until you get it and then you don't want it anymore. You want to kiss someone like real people do. And then you kiss this person and then desire. But I don't think that that's what the I don't think that's everything that the song is is gesturing towards, or at least that might be the simplest way to put what the mechanism of desire involves. But there are depths to its unfolding that are still worthy of being probed and that reveal much more about our attempts to reconcile the imaginary with the real and both in a

vision for the life that we want. That I think these songs is inviting us to hold on to in the strangest of ways. It can ask you same more about that last point. Well, I mean, what more can you ask than to fall in love with someone and spend the rest of your life with them? Right. This is the romantic perspective that I myself personally still like to subscribe to from time to time and that I think this song is coming from.

That's why love songs exist and have always existed. Right. But it's a dream that they will happen. And it's a dream that even if you are lucky enough to meet a person with whom you end up spending the rest of your life, you cultivate day after day and every day that involves a balancing act between the rest of the world in which you inhabit and this space of intimacy that you have stumbled upon and now are trying to keep alive. And so long as it lasts, it is nothing less than a vision, I think.

Actually, I think that's almost a natural pause to wrap up our time together. I like the image of the song as it's like Percy's shield reflecting the poem back on itself. It is really taking this one interaction, this one moment between the body and discover and expanding it in all these different directions that I did not think were in the poem, but I now am convinced that they are lying there somehow. And I don't want to generalize to all songs and all poems as doing some more work. But there is something of the song as discovering things that were glated or there, but were

not on the surface. No, no, it's digging its own corpse out of the poem in many ways. But to do that, it needs to hold up a mirror to it. And when you put one mirror in front of another, you have an endless depth of mirrors extending in two ways. And I think that in many ways, that's what Heaney first did when he started writing these poems. And that's precisely the endeavor that Hozier picked up on and then contributed to by adding

his own song to this series of poems in a beautiful way, I think. I think that's a great image. There actually is one more question, which is the question that we ask all our guests on Back in America, which is what is America to you? Which has nothing at all to do with the last hour talking about, but I am still super interested to hear what comes to mind. What is America to me? I don't know that I'm qualified to answer the question except by underlining and underlining

again the last two words to me, because the more time I spend in this country, the more I realize that you really can't bring it down to any one place or any one environment that you're exploring. I've lived in a number of parts of the U.S. I've lived in New Mexico, I've lived in Boston, I've lived in the Bay Area, New York City, Washington D.C. And then, you know, I think I have a sense of what Americanness is. I take a weekend trip to the Allegheny Forest in the middle of Pennsylvania, and I just

realized that I'm still just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg. And for me, I think that that's what America very uniquely is, a continent of discovery, especially coming from Europe. That's a perspective that I think it takes a lifetime to adapt to because, you know, my own country is smaller than California, and the same goes for most other European countries. So the scale of variety is unprecedented, but it's a scale that does something to you. I've spent a long time in the U.S. now, and it's not very long ago, actually, that I realized

that throughout, you know, say, for the better part of a decade, I kept thinking about myself as an Italian. I'm an Italian in the U.S. And then there came a wonder, I thought, Jesus, I have now spent almost 10 years in the U.S., many of which have been my formative years. So I guess that in some strange way, not sad, though, unlike Hozier's, but in some strange way, I can begin to hold part of my identity American as well. Thank you so much for talking to me last hour.

Really appreciate it. It's really fun. I think I learned a lot about the poem that I did not know it was said before. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for doing this, Josh. I think all the credit goes to you for thinking of this podcast and making it happen. It's a wonderful initiative.