Digging by [[Seamus Heaney]]<br /> via Poetry Foundation
Dinah Lenny mentioned this poem at LAAC Writer's Club 2024-04-18
Seamus Heaney mentions how his father and grandfather worked the land to dig and grow potatoes, yet he chooses to do his "digging" with his pen.
See also and cross-date his other poem about digging potatoes: https://nationalfamineway.ie/seamus-heaneys-at-a-potato-digging/ "At a Potato Digging"
He eschewed computers, often writing by fountain pen in his beloved notebooks.“Keyboards have always intimidated me,” he told The Paris Review in 2003.“A pen is a much more primitive instrument,” he said. “You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”He would then turn to his vintage Olympia typewriter to type his handwritten manuscripts. He immortalized the trusty machine in his 2002 book “The Story of My Typewriter,” with illustrations by the painter Sam Messer.
digging the words into the page sounds adjacent to Seamus Heaney's "Digging" which analogizes writing to digging: https://hypothes.is/a/J-z8OgfQEe-0adtJyXyb3g
There's something here which suggests pens, typewriters, keyboards, etc. as direct extended mind objects as tools for thought. A sense of rumination and expulsion simultaneously.