Eavan Boland PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR EAVAN BOLAND is an Irish poet. Her father was a civil servant; her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted painter. She spent five years of her childhood in Dublin and began her education at Miss Meredith’s. In 1950 she went to London, attended convent school in Finchley and Hammersmith and in 1956 relocated to New York. She returned to Ireland and completed her education in Trinity College Dublin. Boland is the author of Domestic Violence (2007), Against Love Poetry (2001), The Lost Land (1998), An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 (1996), In a Time of Violence (1994), Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (1990), and Object Lessons (1996), all published by W.W. Norton. Her most recent volume of prose, published in 2011, is A Journey with Two Maps. She has also published a volume of translations, After Every War (Princeton University Press, 2004). Her awards include the Lannan award in poetry and the Literary Award of the American-Ireland Fund. In 2002 she received the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence, among others. Director of the Creative Writing Program and the Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, she divides her time between California and Dublin, where she lives with her husband, the novelist Kevin Casey.

You have an amazing facility with sound, although a subtle sound, especially rhyme and assonance. How important is sound to your poems, especially in books such as Night Feed? Do you have to work hard for that effect or does it come naturally? I like the idea that the poem can be a small sound studio. Over time, I’ve changed my ideas on how to make it one. At the start, when I was very young, I liked what rhyme did. Then I found that too disruptive. It shut off to many after effects I wanted. So assonance became an alternative. And I still prefer that. What compelled you to write your latest book of prose, A Journey with Two Maps? I enjoy writing prose. I’m a poet who finds it useful to make a critique. And this book is an accumulation of different arguments, different critiques made over time. In your last chapter in A Journey with Two Maps, “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” you say “I wanted to feel that whatever I lived as a woman I could write as a poet. Once I did that, I felt there was a fusion, a not-to-be-denied indebtedness between those identities: the woman pondering the experience, the poet the expression. This fusion in turn created a third entity: the poet, who not only engaged in these actions, but began to develop a critique about them.” Would you talk more about this? Do you think women poets are afraid to write about their experiences for fear of not being legitimized? No, I can’t say I feel that. For every poet, of either gender, it’s a deeply personal choice as to whether their critiques are in their poems, and/or written as prose. I’ve enjoyed both types of critique in the work of other poets. When it comes to me, I’m in the second category. I enjoy prose, argument and even polemic. I come from Ireland where argument is very familiar, where a back-and-forth on poetry is a common currency. In “Letter to a Young Woman Poet,” you talk about the tradition you inherited, or the canon-makers and how you felt they had determined the “probable relation between the ordinary object and the achieved poem…. Gradually, it became apparent to me that the ordained authority of the poet had everything to do with permission granted or withheld. Not simply for subject matter, but for any claim that could be made for it.” This seems like a struggle all poets must face — whether to go with the canon or the current or to go against it. Often, poets cannot choose how they write or what they write about. What advice do you have for poets writing against the grain? I wouldn’t presume to give advice. Poets can always choose. And the fact is, a poet writing against the grain has already chosen. They don’t need my counsel or anyone else’s. But in A Journey With Two Maps I wanted to make it clear that I don’t believe you absolutely have to choose to go with the canon or against it. The choice can’t be as stark as that. There’s an alternative — a sort of middle space, and that’s why I argued for two maps. I believe a poet can engage with the past and still have a powerful freedom in their present. Poets who have traditionally stood on the margins — women, minorities, post-colonial writers — often have a rich and contentious dialogue with the canon, and have shown they can still be nourished by a poetic past, while making sure the present is on their own terms.

A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet BY Eavan Boland (W.W. Norton, 2011) New Collected Poems BY Eavan Boland (W.W. Norton, 2009) Against Love Poetry BY Eavan Boland (W.W. Norton, 2003)

In A Journey with Two Maps, I felt that your prose was so subtle and so deep that I had to mine it for riches. Do you ever feel like this kind of subtle style gets lost in this day of shock value and short attention spans? If an argument is carefully constructed and stated as truthfully as possible, it won’t get lost. It will wait for a certain kind of reader. And that reader will find it. A Journey with Two Maps has a fairly modest purpose. I’m just setting out the arguments and critiques I found useful and thought about as a working poet. That doesn’t have too much to do with shock value or short attention spans. If a reader has a short attention span, they’re not too likely to turn to this sort of book anyway. In the chapter on Adrienne Rich, you talk about how poems that achieve are deeply rooted in a human life. In your view, what’s the relationship between the political and the personal? Are they mutually exclusive or can they be entwined? And do you think we in America have a bias for or against the personal poem? I’m not sure the idea of the “personal” poem is one I recognize. I think “public” and “private” may be more useful terms. The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were full of public poems — set pieces, from Marvell’s “An Horation Ode on Cromwell” to Tennyson’s hypnotic piece “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But poets in this century and the last have felt increasingly free to work from a private perspective. It became clear that the private poem of insistence and passion was not a substitution for the political poem but a rich extension of it. That’s a shift from the nineteenth century, when the public poem — like, again, Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” — was thought the only suitable way of addressing a public situation. Since then we’ve seen how the private perspective lifts and illuminates the public one. It’s this that has proved the political poem need not necessarily be a public one. That was a real freedom for poets and poetry in the twentieth century. Whether it’s Allen Ginsberg in “A Supermarket in California” or Adrienne Rich in “From An Old House in America,” a private voice can be heard in poems like these to be also a deeply political one. And no, I don’t think there was any bias about this. These were just welcomed as fine and essential poems. After living in London and then New York, beginning at the age five, it sounds like your return to Ireland as a teenager left you feeling displaced. Did that influence your poetry or your desire to be a poet? I certainly felt like an outsider when I returned to Ireland. I was fourteen. I just had a simple sense of having missed so much, and not being able to read the codes and signals of my own country. So much of what we know of a nation, so much of what marks us as insiders, as denizens of a place, comes from the idioms and experiences of childhood. I didn’t have that. I felt as if a portion of my sense of Irishness was missing. I had no Irish childhood memories. I couldn’t share my first sight of the sea, or my term at an Irish-speaking college, or my knowledge of my cousins. At first, that was disorienting. As time went on I began to feel it might not be such a bad thing. In a strange way it even provided me with a perspective as a writer. A way of looking at things from the margins I might have missed otherwise.

Although there are some poets from other countries that become well-known in America, there are still not that many. Why do you think Americans embraced you and your poetry? What, if anything, does your acceptance here have to do with your subject matter?

I’ve read and admired American poetry from the beginning. I went to school for three years in the U.S. when I was eleven, and that’s where I first heard Whitman and Dickinson and first heard American voices saying that poetry out loud. I’ve always seen the powerful vernacular of the American canon as a gift and an instruction. But as for a readership, that’s a different matter. When I read American poetry, I don’t read it as an Irish person. I read it as a seeker of poetry. People find their way to poems no matter what. If they find their way to my poems, I feel honored.

I found one of your responses in an interview to be so inspiring: “This conversation we’ve been having all these years in Irish poetry is not only about gender, but about freedom: who is free to write this poem? Who is free to call themselves an Irish poet? Who is free to return to the past and challenge and question it about exclusions?” In many ways, I found your quote to be applicable to myself as an American poet of Chinese descent. To feel like you are writing at the margin of an already marginalized art form that is poetry can be somewhat demoralizing sometimes. How did you survive as an outsider for so many years?

It’s a very interesting question. And I appreciate your comment about being an American of Chinese descent. There are always rich and complicating parts of an inheritance that, looked at one way, invite a new interpretation. But looked at differently, they are both isolating and marginalizing. Irish poetry looked like a Bardic and male inheritance when I was young — and one that could easily have made me feel the subjects I wanted to write about were not large or important enough for that tradition. I struggled against that. I knew that if I wasn’t lucid and aware in that struggle I could easily end up doubting myself and my work. I didn’t want to end up writing someone else’s poem and justifying it with someone else’s language. So I tried to make my own space. What I found at the end of all this surprised me. I found that the margin is certainly an uncomfortable and even painful place to stand when you’re young. But it can be a valuable vantage point as you begin to grow and strengthen as a poet. It confers freedom. It confers perspective. Sometimes — as many poets have found — you can breathe more easily there.

What was it like for women poets of your generation as a group? Was it competitive or supportive? Would you say it was harder for women to find an audience then or now?

I think Ireland now — and well beyond it — is blessed by very strong and accomplished women poets who have finally been recognized as writing at the very center of the Irish poetic tradition. And an international one as well. Paula Meehan, Nuala ni Dhomnaill, Eilean ni Chuilleanain, Medbh McGuckian — these are all wonderful poets. And all very different from one another.

What’s your writing process like? How much and how do you consciously try to change from book to book? Do you feel joy or torture or something else when you write?

I don’t exactly feel joy or torture. Or I try not to. I definitely feel some exasperation at the fact that I don’t work more quickly. That I second-guess my poems so much. But, honestly, I think the majority of poets feel like that to a greater or lesser degree.

Do you think poets need to suffer to write great poems?

Only in the Latin sense. The old Latin word “patior” carries the sense of knowing, enduring, apprehending. Suffering the world through instinct and knowledge and feeling. That’s what poets do. Not so much a process of pain as a duty of instinctive comprehension. In that sense, any poet suffers the world. But your question also hints at the mythology of self-destruction that’s a part of poetic history. I feel so much resistance to that. Even in my lifetime some poets — Plath is obviously one — died by suicide, and were an infinite loss. Every suicide, every addiction, every disappearance of a poet through pain or loss of stamina seems to me a bleak loss. I just read that part of poetic history with the feeling that a temporary condition robbed us of the permanent power and light of their language. In the case of a poet like Plath, that hurts, even right up to the present moment.

What do you think of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and the work that they do and the research they have done on women and publishing and lack of book reviews on women writers?

I think VIDA does wonderful work, and has a challenging, compelling website which is helpful to anyone who visits it. There are not enough VIDAs.

How would you say the poetry landscape has changed today compared to when you were first starting out?

The poetic landscape — to use your term — was so small, so tribal when I began that it could hardly qualify as a candidate for change. It was the Irish poetic world, and in my teens and twenties it was the most intensely marked horizon I could imagine. There’s a wonderful poem by Milosz called “Happiness” which looks back at the Krakow of his poetic youth. It has a kind of piercing accuracy. He writes: “In their black capes poets strolled the streets. / Nobody remembers their names today.”He finishes with the line “This is our beginning. Useless to deny it.” I feel that way about the Dublin I knew as a young poet. And in my memory, it’s changeless. I don’t notice too many other changes. Or at least I’m not a reliable witness to them.

Would you characterize yourself as an ambitious poet? Why or why not?

Every poet is ambitious. It’s a difficult task, to make a good poem, to do it again when you’ve done it once. Then to try to do it twice. And so on.

Do you read more experimental or more avant-garde poetry of today? If so, what do you think of this kind of writing?

I’m not sure I categorize poetry that way. I enjoy an enormous amount of contemporary poetry, and I’m open to it all.

What advice might you give women poets who are also mothers of young children?

Once again, I wouldn’t presume to give advice. But I think I understand something of what they go through, and the difficulties they have. I certainly remember how distracted I was when I had two little children under the age of three. Every day I felt it was almost impossible to get anything started or finished in terms of poetry. So I kept a notebook. If I couldn’t write a poem, I could write a few lines. If I couldn’t do that, I could note down an image. It helped. I also understand, from my own experience, that the difficulties aren’t just about time and energy, although that’s part of it. It’s also about the psychology of being a poet, of being creative. There is something powerfully collective about being a mother. It joins you to community, to custom, to the history of human love itself. But, on the other hand, there’s something powerfully individual about being a poet. At times it’s a hard, uncertain journey going from one to the other, defining one place for yourself and then the other. I remember that. And I feel for it.

What kind of projects are you working on now?

I brought out A Journey With Two Maps earlier this year. Now I’m sort of gathering a new book of poems. But I’m slow, as always!