Eavan Boland: Letter to a young woman poet

wish I knew you. I wish I could stand for a point of time in that corridor of craft and doubt where you will expend so much of your time. on the contrary I don't and I can't. And given the fact, in poetic confines that you are the futurity and I am the past, I not at any time will. Then why write this? It is not, after all, a real alphabetic character It doesn't have an address. I can't place a name at the top of it. in like manner what reason can I have for writing in a form without a basis to a individual without a name?

I could answer that the reliances and silences of my first years as a author of poems are still fresh to me on the contrary that in itself is not an explanation. I could sum up you that I am a woman in my early fifties, writing this upon a close summer night in Ireland. on the contrary what would that mean to you? If I reckon you, however, that my first habitat as a bard is part of your history as a poet: is that nineteenth hundred full of the dangerous indecision about who the author of poems really is. If I say I saw that hundred survive into the small, quarrelsome city where I began as a bard That I studied its version of the bard and took its oppressions to heart. If I say my not absent is your past, that my past is already fixed as part of your tradition. And that until we separate our relation to both past and tradition, we are still hostages to that danger, that indecision. And, finally, that there is something I want to say to you about the not absent and past of poetry-something that perceive s as if it needs to be said urgentlythen maybe I can justify this alphabetic character

And if some awkwardness remains, rather than trying to disguise it, I want to recommend an odd and opposite fiction. If greatest in quantity real letters are conversation by dint of other means, think of this as a different version. Imagine a sweep at dusk, with daylight almost gone I can do this because I associate that light, that hour, with ease and conversation. I was born at dusk. Right in the midst of Dublin in fact, in a nursing residence beside Stephen's Green. Big, cracking heaps of sycamore and birch leaves are consume ed there in Autumn and I like to think of the way bitter sooty vapor must have come the scarcely any hundred yards or so towards the play where I was born.

And for a like reason I have no difficulty imagining us sitting there and talking in that diminishing light. Maybe the sights of late summer were visible from one side the window only moments ago. Fuchsia and virid leaves, perhaps. But now everything is retreating into skeletal branches and charcoal leaves. My face is in shadow. You cannot diocese it, although your presence shapes what I am saying. And thus in the last light, at the extreme point of the day, what matters is language. Is the unspoken at the cutting side of the spoken. And with equal reason I have made a fiction to sustain what is already a fiction: this talking across time and absence.

But about what? What name will I give it? In the widest faculty of perception I want to talk about the past. The past, that is, of poetry: the place where for a like reason much of the truth and power of numbers is stored. "Poetry is the past which breaks on the outside in our hearts" said Rilkewhose name should be raised whenever single poet writes to another. on the contrary the past I want to talk about is more charged and les lyrical than that for women bards It is, after all, the place where authorship of the metrical composition eluded us. Where poetry itself was defined by dint of and in our absence. There has been a debate since I was a young author of poems about whether women poets should engage with that past at all. "For writers, and at this twinkling for women writers in particular" Adrienne Rich wrote eloquently in When We Dead Awaken "there is the challenge and promise of a whole of recent origin psychic geography to be explored. on the other hand there is also a difficult and dangerous walking upon ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into and with little in the past to support us."

Then wherefore go there? Why visit the site of our exclusion? We ne to go on to that past: not to learn from it, on the other hand to change it. If we do not change that past, it will change us. And I, for individual do not want to become a grateful daughter in a darkened house. on the other hand in order to change the past of rhyme we have to know what. happened there. We have to be able to speak about it as bards and even that can be difficult. at any time since I began as a bard I have heard people say that fixed positions-on sex on politics of any kind-distort and haze the question of poetry. In those limits this letter can seem to be a clouding, a distortion. on the contrary poetry is not a undefiled stream. It will never be sullied by means of partisan argument. The only danger to numbers is the reticence and silence of bards This piece is about the past and our right as women bards to avail of it. It is about the art and against the silence. level so, I still need to find a language with which to approach that past. The single way of doing that, within the confines of this fiction, is to advance back to the space you now occupy: in other words, to the beginning.

When I was young I had alone a present. I began in a small, literary city. of the like kind a voluble, self-confident place, in fact, that at times it was flat possible to believe the city itself would talk a sort of magical, unearned poetic identity. At night the ways were made of wet lights and awkward angles. Occasionally mist came in from the coast, a condensed space filled with street-grit and salt and the unimpaired of foghorns. By day things were plainer: a city appeared, trapped through hills and defined by rivers. Its middle point was a squashed clutter of ways and corners. There were pub and verdant buses. Statues of orators. Above all, the somewhat cold solid air of the Irish sea at each turn.