Eavan Boland on Poets Who Are Mothers
This little post is especially for you and me, Julia Cole.
Julia and I have been sending lines by email to each other almost all the days of 2008, though it has been harder lately. Tonight I was feeling low for not doing better, and then I picked up the May 2008 issue of Poetry magazine and read Ms. Boland on this very issue.
"And yet it seems right to ask—if the skill-based poet [by this she means the poets who "lecture, lead workshops, run classes, teach composition, write reviews, give conference talks and papers"] is a contemporary figure, then who or what is the antitheseis? Who, in other words, is losing out? Is it possible to suggest a category, a grouping, even an individual poet who might be marginalized by such an emphasis? It's a rhetorical question. But here, at least, I can think of some answers. [...]
The down-to-earth question of availability might affect women poets. For instance, a younger writer with children might well look with dread at the opportunities offered by scheduled readings, believing that she herself might just not be able to manage the fixed times or even the travel.
The shy poet, the private poet, the antisocial poet, the curmudgeon, the introvert, and the fastidious craft worker—I could see all of these, in various degrees, at various times, looking with skepticism on a world of skills."
—Islands Apart: A Notebook
And this made me remember a poem of hers that is precious to me:
IT IS STILL THE SAME
young woman who climbs the stairs,
who closes a child's door,
who goes to her table
in a room at the back of the house?
The same unlighted corridor?
The same night air
over the wheelbarrows and rain-tanks?
The same inky sky and pin-bright stars?
You can see nothing of her, but her head
bent over the page, her hand moving,
moving again, and her hair.
I wrote like that once.
But this is different:
This time, when she looks up, I will be there.
Eavan Boland
