Drawing map of demons that face female knights

A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

EAVAN BOLAND has been one of the most important Irish poets of the last 30 years; and unquestionably the most brilliant Dublin-born poet since Thomas Kinsella.

Her very public brilliance may have worked against her over the years, for the Irish poetry world — and it is a strange old world of fortune-tellers and horse thieves — is suspicious of brilliance.

It loves drunkenness, for example, or a visible impoverishment, but it hates the poet who seems to be in control all the time; especially if that self-control is attended by privileged social origins or ecstatically successful academic careers.

Boland is most like the sublime Máire Mhac an tSaoí, also a cerebral Dublin poet from a great national family. God, if only they’d fall down dead drunk off the footpath we’d love them more and we’d give them 10 extra pages in every anthology. But, highly bred and convent-finished, these poets just won’t give in. Let’s punish them, lads.

Boland has been a teacher for most of her life, apart from those few well documented suburban years when she saw a horse in a housing estate. But the horse she leapt upon was a winged one. Teaching. Poetry. Workshoping. Theorising. Again, poetry. She began at an extraordinarily young age as a Trinity College lecturer and she is now, like the late Frank O’Connor, a distinguished teacher at Stanford University.

At Trinity she was a contemporary of Brendan Kennelly; at Stanford she succeeded the great activist-poet, Denise Levertov. She is in that company because she has created her own masterpieces, like her mother who was an artist. Boland explains the title and thesis of this present book by recalling her encounter with a painting by her mother that had been signed as the work of a man who was her mother’s teacher. The event allowed her to interrogate the idea of apprenticeship, of workshop and multiple authorship; or, rather, hidden authorship: “Had it simply been an afternoon’s painting, done by the apprentice, but guided by the master and so signed by him? Hadn’t my mother once pointedly told me what the strict definition of a masterpiece was? Not a defining work, she said, but the apprentice’s final piece before being admitted to the guild? The questions continued: the answers never fit. But they showed me, those questions, that the issues raised were too rich and complex to be confined by a fixed viewpoint. It was not a moment to confuse authorship with ownership.”

This refined and steady cognition is her trademark. She embraces ambiguity; she relishes cultural debates and ideas that settle awkwardly against each other. Here, she opens out the debate about poetry into a broad American milieu, that huge world of readers where she finds a set of antecedents and a catholicity that embraces her. “I was out of boarding school. The harshly structured days were gone,” she writes of her intellectual beginnings. “I sat in my father’s study. Perched on a tiny, awkward trio of steps that went down into the room.” She began conversations at midnight, treated now like an adult. Such conversations were the beginning of a second journey into the land of ideas, a place where she could forget about “the lipstick, the compact with its pale powder... Here for a while I was different — plucked by words out of the routines and rituals of young womanhood”.

The journey has ended for her at the Stanford seminars. West is where she settled, the West of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, though Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop and Edna St Vincent Millay all illuminate her poetic journey; a journey of enquiry into the two great projects of Modernism — to re-make the poem and to re-make the reader of poetry:

“Why write about Millay? She is uneven. Her later work is unconvincing. Her reputation is problematic. But I have been drawn to her from the start partly because of her vivid spirit, partly because of a compelling and indispensible handful of poems. But also, because she is — in poetic terms — the scene of the crime.”

Boland’s admiration for the Black Mountain poets, the disciples of Charles Olson, is concentrated in the persons of Duncan and Levertov. Reviewing their correspondence she identifies “the rancour and courage” of William Carlos Williams who resisted “Eliot’s strategy of high purpose.” She succumbs to the charm of Levertov and identifies quite brilliantly that essential element in Robert Duncan, the element of poet and audience: “Duncan’s way of becoming a poet was essentially — as was Pound’s — collaborative. He needed witnesses, companions, an audience.”

That element of Duncan I saw in action, personally, on a number of occasions when I met him in late 1978; he was attended by a coterie of admirers, talking endlessly and hardly taking a breather for food. I remember walking with him and Jess Collins through the Markets area of San Francisco in search of burritos (“what, you haven’t had burritos?”) and even while walking there was a young Duncan audience and a Duncan lecture. It was like walking the streets with Bob Dylan. How sharply Boland has spotted that, but such perception is typical of this book.

A Journey With Maps is certainly more than its subtitle; it goes well beyond an enquiry into the nature of the woman poet. Like Levertov’s own The Poet in the World (an essential read for everyone), Ms. Boland’s book is about becoming a poet and remaining a poet only. That is a genderless journey, like becoming an astronaut or a good vet. The obstacles placed in the path of women are faced by all women; social and societal views of women that place every woman, even a breeder of greyhounds, at a disadvantage. A woman has to be twice as clever like Judge McGuinness, or twice as blood-thirsty, such as Margaret Thatcher, just to arrive at a fair starting point. Boland has spent a lifetime drawing a map of the demons that face every brave female knight.

She has single-handedly created an alternative circuit for women writers, a circuit of publishing and reading. We will know that this great movement has been successful when women editorsfinally annex the anthologies of Irish poetry. In writing about Paula Meehan, she reminds us that “The emergence of women has now made a new space in the Irish poem ... in the work of women poets the so-called domestic shifts the political poem into a private realm where priorities are re-arranged.”

Boland’s fine essay on Paula Meehan is one reminder of the work she’s prepared to do to nourish that space where women make poems. A Journey of Maps works, therefore, more as nourishment than a broadside. It is a serious woman at work in the field while the puffing enfilades of men protect the great prize of Irish anthologising for themselves.