Kicking off at 7pm, poets Frank Bidart, Sven Birkerts, Eavan Boland, Lucie Brock-Broido, Greg Delanty, Jonathan Galassi, Eamon Grennan, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Muldoon, Atsuro Riley, Tom Sleigh, Tracy K. Smith, Colm Tóibín, Jean Valentine, Anne Waldman and Kevin Young will each perform their favourite Heaney piece.
“Popular culture likes to house songwriters and poets under the same roof, but we are not the close family that some imagine,” Simon says of the great man. “Poets are distant cousins at most, and labour under a distinctly different set of rules. Songwriters have melody, instrumentation and rhythm to colour their work and give it power; poets accomplish it all with words.
“Seamus, though, was one of those rare poets whose writing evokes music: the fiddles, pipes and penny-whistles of his Northern Irish culture and upbringing.”
There’s another free Favourite Poems – In Tribute To Seamus Heaney event running at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn on November 15 where actor Gabriel Byrne, playwright Enda Walsh, authors Alice McDermott and Colum McCann, and poets Colette Bryce, Henri Cole, Mark Doty, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Nick Laird, Conor O'Callaghan, Meghan O'Rourke, Brenda Shaughnessy, Matthew Sweeney, and Craig Morgan Teicher will do the honours.