In this edition of HoCoPoLitSo's The Writing Life, poet Linda Pastan introduces poet Eavan Boland. Her recent books at the time of taping included the poetry collection "In a Time of Violence" and a memoir "Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time." To open the program, Boland reads the poem “Love,” for her husband (2:31). The poem remembers a deep winter in Iowa when her very young daughter was very ill. “The city on which this poem is layered” is Virgil’s book of Aeneid, in which Aenaes goes down to hell and meets his friends and enemies who shout to him, but their voices turn into shadows. Pastan asks about whether place was something that language could claim, and whether living outside of Ireland had given her a unique perspective on her home country. Boland had lived outside of Ireland for a while in childhood, “it kept me an outsider,” but living in America for part of the year gives her the same sense of dislocation, sharpening a sense of place.
She then reads the poem “In Which the Ancient History I Learn is Not My Own.” (7:10) Boland feels that Irish poets have kept alive the bardic tradition of building community, whereas American poets have become isolated. Experimentation, while is important, has broken the poet’s links with their audience. She likens American poets to astronauts and pioneers, innovators and inventors, single and isolated in ways Irish poets haven’t been.
They discuss politics, romanticism, and feminism in Ireland. When she was a young writer, Boland said, the romanticism became “stifling. It was easier to put a political murder into the Irish poem than to put a washing machine into it, because the space was not there for the ordinary and the daily. And it needed to be.”
Boland believe both Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath are influential in bringing about change. They were making political poems out of the private, felt life. Boland reads “This Moment,” (16:10) calling it a concealed elegy, about a street where she raised her children, and lost rituals. Boland discusses the importance of the visual in poetry; her mother was a painter. Ireland doesn’t have much of a history of nature poetry, Boland said, because of the complicated, political, “broken-hearted” nature of land. But she sees herself as “an indoor nature poet,” focusing on the “transforming power of the way something looked.”
Boland said she feels her earlier work was more formal, her later work is freer, but that the later work is always carrying on a dialogue with the earlier material. “I think what every poet does, they open a dialogue with their own formal backgrounds,” Boland said, always interior, always private. “The dialogue with my own background was also obliquely with my history and my inheritance as an Irish poets.”
Boland closes by reading “The Pomegranate.” (24:24) She introduces the poem: “This is just to register my surprise at having a child who turned into a teenager.” The poem is based on the myth of Ceres and her lovely daughter Persephone. Hades kidnapped Persephone down into hell and tempted her with the jewel-like seeds of the pomegranate. Recorded March 2, 1996. For more information about live or recorded programs of HoCoPoLitSo, visit www.hocopolitso.org.
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