Remembering Eavan Boland: “I Was a Voice” by Elline Lipkin

When I was first introduced to Eavan Boland’s poetry I knew I had discovered someone whose aesthetic, voice, and vision would matter deeply not just to me, but to a generation of poets still troubled by gendered struggles within the poetry world. As a graduate student in creative writing in New York City in the ’90s, I was often frustrated by the conservative biases of my program and stunned at how male-centric the reading lists I was handed often were.  When I picked up Boland’s first book of prose, Object Lessons: The Life of The Woman and the Poet in Our Times, I didn’t devour this book so much as I inhaled it.  Here was a woman writing eloquently about unnamed issues I knew were real, articulating the ambitions of many other female poets who were also stymied by invisible barriers, the press of tradition, and the need to know their voices mattered.

Still prominent on my bookshelves, my book is interleaved with colorful flags of Post-it notes and the marginalia of my more youthful self who was gratified by what Boland was offering — awareness of her own gendered experiences, and her struggle to find her place within the history of poetry. Her taut prose adapted her lyric gift as she parsed the past, with sympathy for her former self and an outstretched hand beckoning along the next generation of women poets. All of this felt like a balm to me.

During my years in New York City, I met Eavan in person on several occasions.  At the request of my teacher, Alice Quinn, she visited our poetry workshop where she offered a counterbalance to the curriculum, which, albeit 20 years ago, was still heavily biased in favor of male writers.  A few days after her visit, even more memorably, I traipsed downtown to hear her read with Adrienne Rich at the DIA Foundation. When Eavan spoke of her own reverence for Rich and remarked that she would remember this reading for all of her life, I was struck by her homage and the remarkableness of making visible a legacy of foremothers who had built a foundation so that others could enter.  I felt deeply indebted, in turn, to both Boland and Rich. It was clear how necessary this work still was.

When Boland writes, in the preface to Object Lessons, “I know now that I began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed,” she opens a discussion about the ways in which women were made invisible by a tradition that she also honored.  How to find herself, as a burgeoning teenager, a young adult, and then a mature woman who was ambitious enough to want a life in poetry and the fulfillment of a family is one of Boland’s chief themes — one that spoke deeply to me, and to my cohort of graduate student friends, as we discussed between classes what was never addressed during — questions we didn’t dare to ask.  Boland’s recollection of the difficulties she faced, some only reconcilable in hindsight, was both moving and inspiring.

At the start of Object Lessons Boland describes how much she wanted, when she returned to her student flat, to hear stories about other women poets:

………….I wanted to read or hear the narrative of someone else — a woman and a poet — who had gone
………….here, and been there.  Who had lifted a kettle to a gas stove. Who had set her skirt out over a
………….chair, near to the clothes dryer, to have it without creases for the morning.  Who had made the
………….life meet the work and had set it down: the difficulties and rewards; the senses of lack.  I
………….remember thinking that it need not be perfect or important.  Just there; just available.  And I
………….have remembered that.

Enfolded into this book is just such a story, with its doubts and worries as well as its triumphs.  As she ends her book, Boland is prescriptive and direct. Her articulation, particularly in her essay “The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma” felt as relevant then to me as it is now.  She exhorts, “… women should break down barriers in poetry in the same way that poetry will break the silence of women.”

Years have gone by.  I have graduated with a doctorate in Creative Writing, specialized in feminist literary theory, and volunteered to teach creative writing to teenage girls. Not long afer graduating, when I began to circulate my manuscript, I got a call over Thanksgiving weekend that Boland had chosen my book for the Kore Press First Book Award.  Publication changed my life — but to have her stamp of approval, to know that she saw my project clearly meant as much, if not more, at that time.  A few years later, when Boland’s second book of prose, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet came out in 2011, I could not read it fast enough.  Once again, I experienced the joy of finding challenges described that I had long sensed but couldn’t quite articulate.

In A Journey With Two Maps, Boland further traces the genesis of her identity as a poet while growing up in and outside of Ireland, always aware of the heavy weight of canonical history that relegated women to a far corner of the conversation and how its press informed her education and first attempts at writing.  Her taut, clear statements, rendered with rhetorical force, make her case for how women poets need to reapproach history and reappropriate tradition.

The title’s inclusion of the word “maps” is both metaphorical and literal — as Boland creates a palimpsest that includes a feminist viewpoint about what can broaden the topics that enter into a poem, nevermind which writers enter the canon, crossing from object to subject within.  Boland writes movingly of the masters — all men — offered to her throughout her education in England, America, and Ireland, and how she recognized there wasn’t room within these poems for a female presence who wasn’t decorative or objectified, and the effect this had on her emerging work.

Within the second section, “Maps,” Boland traces a matrilineal legacy that connects with the subject matter central within her life and that she no longer wants to deny.  Her tributes to a range of female poets, including Rich, and an anonymous recuperative “dream-vision lyric” written in Latin, presumably written by a woman, reveals again the importance of knowing one’s history and of homage.  Boland also signals her commitment to recovery of women’s voices within a chapter that describes her intensely moving project translating the work of post-war female German poets, anthologized in her volume After Every War: Twentieth Century Woman Poets.

When I got to the final section, “Destinations” — a single chapter entitled “Letter to a Young Woman Poet” — I realized again the intimacy and the obligation of Boland’s mission.  A riff on the Rilke title of similar name, Boland offers the story or the letter that she first mentions longing for in Object Lessons.  Here, Boland proposes that the young woman poet must claim a past that has traditionally excluded her and closes the book by thanking the women poets in the generation before her whose strength bolstered her when she started out.  She writes, “But I believe words such as canon and tradition and inheritance will change even more.  And with all that, women poets, from generation to generation, will be able to befriend one another.  And that, in the end, is the best reason for writing this letter.” Through her activism and commitment Boland has rewritten a relationship to history.  In her insistence, she holds the door open wide for other women to pass. Her openness, intelligence, and dignity are simply galvanizing.

Not long after it was published, I heard Boland read from A Journey With Two Maps at the Huntington Library. I was six months pregnant at the time, nervous about the impending birth of my first child, my desire to continue writing poems and teaching, and how to make these weave.  When I returned home that evening I reread her chapter “Reading as Intimidation” in which she writes about the period after her first child was born and she learned she would have to authorize herself to write about the emotional and sensual territory of caring for a child.

I paused when I found the lines in the final chapter about wanting a life in which she “lifted a child, conscious of nothing but the sweetness of a child’s skin, or the light behind an apple tree, or rain on slates” and she realized this could become part of her subject matter. The thought echoed lines I remembered from Object Lessons, “As a young woman and an uncertain poet, I wanted there to be no contradiction between the way I made an assonance to fit a line and the way I lifted up a child at night.”  Finally, she realized there didn’t need to be a disconnect between her life as a mother and her work as a poet, and her charge to rewrite, remap, and remake spurred my courage for what was soon ahead.  I was struck by the book’s closing exhortations when Boland insists, despite the canon-makers, that “whatever I lived as a woman I could write as a poet,” and she could hold within her writing “a way to have the child’s medicine and … darkening room in the suburb” as she crystallizes her struggle as a poet to remake identity, forge authority, and reinterpret history.

That evening at the Huntington, Eavan concluded by reading her beautiful poem, “Anna Liffey” which includes the lines:

In the end
It will not matter
That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
The body is a source. Nothing more.

//

In the end
Everything that burdened and distinguished me
Will be lost in this:
I was a voice.

The reverberations of these final words resonated with the myriad commitments about making a life in poetry that Boland makes explicit throughout her prose — yet, in the end it is her vision and voice that will define her.  I know I will continue to return to her work as these texts become part of a genre of necessary books through which one generation speaks to another, beckoning, encouraging to make an essential and inspiring difference.

Every few years I would see Eavan again.  Two years ago, I announced to my poetry workshop that we wouldn’t be having class on our regular night but instead we would be going on a field trip to hear Boland read at a nearby college since I couldn’t stand missing the chance to see her on the one night she was in town.  Last August, I encountered her again at the Napa Valley Writers Conference.  Solidly into her seventies, she looked frailer than I had ever seen her, but I sat in thrall during her lecture which was as full of firm wit, deep breadth of knowledge, and prescient insight as ever.  When I said hello, she was formal but warm, glad to briefly catch up but not overly personal, always encouraging but with set boundaries.  Her mere presence, the example of her life, was enough to inspire me all over again.

Her abrupt passing on April 27^th felt like a rip through fabric.  A textile image seems apropos — a metaphor that represents “women’s work” and that shows both visible seams and the hidden strength of firm backing.  Boland has a new book coming out in the fall and I can’t wait to read it.  Grateful as I am for its emergence, there is sorrow it’s the last she will put out. For now, her books cling together on a nearby shelf, and I look at the picture of the two of us I took that night she read nearby.  I didn’t dare put my hand on her back or otherwise touch her, but it was enough to be in the presence of her words, her being, and all that she represented.

It was a reverberating gift and it still is.

Elline Lipkin is a poet, academic, and nonfiction writer.  Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award.  Her second, Girls’ Studies, explores contemporary girlhood in America.  A Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, she teaches poetry for Writing Workshops Los Angeles.