"A rat just bit my sister, and Whitey's on the moon," sang the poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron.
In Derry city, where Heaney delivered countless readings and on the spot where Bill Clinton sang the poet's praise during his historic 1995 presidential visit, they queued up to pay homage to the Nobel laureate.
As the list of contributors to Branch-Lines - a kind of posthumous festschrift of poems and essays - shows, his influence is still profound: Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon and Peter Porter are among the 56 writers and critics queuing up to sing the praises of a poet whom Ted Hughes acknowledged as "the father of us all".
"I live in contented poverty," sings the idealistic poet Rodolfo in "La Bohème," before declaring that he has "the soul of a millionaire".
He felt it was his duty, as a poet, to sing the praises of his favourite political leader.
Use intro tags to introduce a quotation, like this: Walt Whitman, a famous poet, wrote "I sing the body electric".
There he'd be at the end of it, nodding to the ramblings of rock stars and singing the praise of poets.
I much prefer Ovid's version in its entirety — especially his heartbreaking description of the natural world's grief over Orpheus's murder, sung poet to poet: "The trees that often gathered to your song, shedding their leaves, mourned you with bared crowns".
This exploit, sung by the poet Theodosius the Deacon, realized the Byzantine dream (after dozens had failed to liberate Crete) of imperial mastery of the eastern Mediterranean.
A comic highlight was "Ombretta sdegnosa del Missipipì," sung by the poet Pacuvio (the enjoyable Bruno de Simone), whose geographic malapropism allows the composer a sophomoric repetition of the final two syllables.
