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I went behind the linen room and up the stone stairs and climbed to the top and stood for a moment there concealed by shadows, in a hiding place, waiting to see, wanting to look again. Into the patient face o f the unhealed. 4. Anti-Heroic A winged god came to a woman at night. Eros, you know the story: you ordained it. T h e one condition was she did not see him. So it was dark when he visited her bed. And it was good. She felt how good it was. But she was curious. And lit a lamp and saw his nakedness. And he fled. Into the dark. Into the here and now and air and quiet of an Irish night where I am writing at a darkening window about a winged god and his lover watching the lines and stanzas and measures which were devised for these purposes disappearing as the shadows close in around the page under my hand. How can I know a form unless I see it? How can I see it now? I propose the light she raised over his sleeping body angered heaven because it made clear neither his maleness nor his birth nor his face dreaming but the place where the sinew o f his wings touched the heat o f his skin and flight was brought down. To this. To us. To earth. Eros look down. See as a god sees what a myth says: How a woman still addresses the work o f man in the dark o f the night: The power of a form. T h e plain evidence that strength descended here once. And mortal pain. And even sexual glory. And see the difference. This time - and this you did not ordain - I am changing the story. L E T T E R TO A YOUNG WOMAN POET E a v a n B o la n d I wish I knew you. I wish I could stand for a moment in that corridor o f craft and doubt where you will spend so much of your time. But I don’t and I can’t. And given the fact, in poetic terms, that you are the future and I am the past, I never will. Then why write this? It is not, after all, a real letter. It doesn’t have an address. I can’t put a name at the top o f it. So what reason can I have for writing in a form without a basis to a person without a name? I could answer that the hopes and silences of my first years as a poet are still fresh to me. But that in itself is not an explanation. I could tell you that I am a woman in my early fifties, writing this on a close summer night in Ireland. But what would that mean to you? I f I tell you, however, that my first habitat as a poet is part of your history as a poet: is that nineteenth century full of the dangerous indecision about who the poet really is. I f I say I saw that century survive into the small, quarrelsome city where I began as a poet. T ha t I studied its version o f the poet and took its oppressions to heart. I f I say my present is your past, that my past is already fixed as part of your tradition. And that until we resolve 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 present and past of poetry —something that feels as if it needs to be said urgently —then maybe I can justify this letter. And if some awkwardness remains, rather than trying to disguise it, I want to propose an odd and opposite fiction. I f most real letters are conversation by other means, think of this as a different version. Imagine a room 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 centre o f Dublin in fact, in a nursing home beside Stephen’s Green. Big, cracking heaps of sycamore and birch leaves are burned there in Autumn and I like to think of the way bitter smoke must have come the few hundred yards or so towards the room where I was born. And so I have no difficulty imagining us sitting there and talking in that diminishing light. Maybe the sights of late summer were visible through the window only moments ago. Fuchsia and green leaves, perhaps. But now everything is retreating into skeletal branches and charcoal leaves. My face is in shadow. You cannot see it, although your presence 16 P N Review 118
page 19
shapes what I am saying. And so in the last light, at the end o f the day, what matters is language. Is the unspoken at the edge o f the spoken. And so 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 sense, I want to talk about the past. The past, that is, of poetry: the place where so much of the tru th and power of poetry is stored. ‘Poetry is the past which breaks out in our hearts’ said Rilke - whose name should be raised whenever one poet writes to another. But the past I want to talk about is more charged and less lyrical than that for women poets. It is, after all, the place where authorship of the poem eluded us. Where poetry itself was defined by and in our absence. There has been a debate since I was a young poet, about whether women poets should engage with that past at all. ‘For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular’ Adrienne Rich wrote eloquently in When We Dead Awaken ‘there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on 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.’ T hen why go there? Why visit the site o f our exclusion? We need to go to that past: not to learn from it, but to change it. I f we do not change that past, it will change us. And I, for one, do not want to become a grateful daughter in a darkened house. But in order to change the past of poetry, we have to know what happened there. We have to be able to speak about it as poets, and even that can be difficult. Ever since I began as a poet I have heard people say that fixed positions on gender, on politics of any kind - distort and cloud the question of poetry. In those terms, this letter can seem to be a clouding, a distortion. But poetry is not a pure stream. It will never be sullied by partisan argument. The only danger to poetry is the reticence and silence of poets. This piece is about the past and our right as women poets to avail of it. It is about the art and against the silence. Even so, I still need to find a language with which to approach that past. The only way o f doing that, within the terms o f this fiction, is to go back to the space you now occupy: in other words, to the beginning. When I was young I had only a present. I began in a small, literary city. Such a voluble, self-confident place, in fact, that at times it was even possible to believe the city itself would confer a sort of magical, unearned poetic identity. At night the streets were made of wet lights and awkward angles. Occasionally fog came in from the coast, a dense space filled with street-grit and salt and the sound of foghorns. By day things were plainer: a city appeared, trapped by hills and defined by rivers. Its centre was a squashed clutter of streets and corners. There were pubs and green buses. Statues of orators. Above all, the cool, solid air of the Irish sea at every turn. The National Library was a cold, domed and friendly building. The staircase was made of marble and formed an imposing ascent to a much less elaborate interior. Old books, shelves and newspapers crowded a huge room. The tables were scarred oak and small lamps were attached to the edge o f them and could be lit by individual readers. As twilight pressed on the glass roof where pigeons slipped and fluttered, the pools o f light fell on pages and haloed the faces above them. I read poetry there. I also read in my flat late at night. But the library was in the centre of town. Often it was easier just to stay in and go there and take a bus home later. There was something about the earnest, homeless feel of a big library that comforted me. I read all kinds o f poetry here. I also read about poets. I was eighteen. Then nineteen. T hen twenty and twenty-one. I read about Eliot in Paris, and Yeats in Code, I read Pound and Housman and Auden. It was the reading of my time and my place: Too many men. Not enough women. Too much acceptance. Too few questions. I memorized the poems. I learned the poetics - although I had no use for that word. But I had a real, practical hunger nevertheless for instruction and access in the form. And so I learned something about cadence and rhythm there. And something about the weather and circumstance of tradition as well. I f I had known what to look for I would have had plenty o f evidence o f the tensions of a tradition as I read about the big, moonlit coldness of Ullswater and the intimacy o f Wordsworth’s hand-to-hand struggle with the eighteenth century. About the vowel changes in the fifteenth century. About the letters between John Clare and Lord Radstock. Tell Clare i f he still has a recollection o f what I have done, and am still doing fo r him, he must give me unquestionable proofs o f being that man I would have him be - he must expunge! When I came out of the library, I got on the bus and watched for ten or so minutes as the rainy city went by. During the journey I thought about what I had read. I was not just reading poems at this time, I was beginning to write them. I was looking for that solid land-bridge between writing poems and being a poet. I was taking in information, therefore, at two levels. One was simple enough. I was seeing at first hand the outcome of a hundred years o f intense excitement and change in an art form: how the line had altered, how the lyric had opened out. I was also absorbing something that was less easy to define: the idea of the poet. The very thing which should have helped me transit from w'riting to being. But just as the line and the lyric had opened out and become volatile, the idea o f the poet had drawn in, and distanced itself from the very energies the poems were proposing. This made no sense at all. When I read poems in the library I felt as though a human face was turned towards me, alive with feeling, speaking urgently to me about love and time. But when I came across the idea of the poet I felt as if someone had displaced that speaker with a small, cold sculpture: a face from which the tears and intensity were gone, on which only the pride and self-consciousness of the Poet remained. I had no words for this. And yet I began to wonder if the makers o f the poem and the makers o f the idea of the poet could be one and the same. It was an amateurish, shot-in-the-dark thought. And yet all I could do was ask questions. What other way had I of dealing with a poetic past whose history I didn’t know, and a tradition composed o f the seeming assurance that only those it confirmed and recognized would ever be part of it? Besides I felt my questions would bring me, if not to the front, at least to the back entrance o f this formidable past. But if these were the gates, who were the gatekeepers? P N Review 118 17

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I went behind the linen room and up the stone stairs and climbed to the top and stood for a moment there concealed by shadows, in a hiding place, waiting to see, wanting to look again.

Into the patient face o f the unhealed.

4. Anti-Heroic A winged god came to a woman at night.

Eros, you know the story: you ordained it.

T h e one condition was she did not see him.

So it was dark when he visited her bed. And it was good. She felt how good it was. But she was curious. And lit a lamp and saw his nakedness. And he fled.

Into the dark. Into the here and now and air and quiet of an Irish night where I am writing at a darkening window about a winged god and his lover

watching the lines and stanzas and measures which were devised for these purposes disappearing as the shadows close in around the page under my hand.

How can I know a form unless I see it? How can I see it now?

I propose the light she raised over his sleeping body angered heaven because it made clear neither his maleness nor his birth nor his face dreaming but

the place where the sinew o f his wings touched the heat o f his skin and flight was brought down.

To this. To us. To earth.

Eros look down. See as a god sees what a myth says: How a woman still addresses the work o f man in the dark o f the night:

The power of a form. T h e plain evidence that strength descended here once. And mortal pain. And even sexual glory.

And see the difference. This time - and this you did not ordain -

I am changing the story.

L E T T E R TO A YOUNG WOMAN POET

E a v a n B o la n d

I wish I knew you. I wish I could stand for a moment in that corridor o f craft and doubt where you will spend so much of your time. But I don’t and I can’t. And given the fact, in poetic terms, that you are the future and I am the past, I never will. Then why write this? It is not, after all, a real letter. It doesn’t have an address. I can’t put a name at the top o f it. So what reason can I have for writing in a form without a basis to a person without a name?

I could answer that the hopes and silences of my first years as a poet are still fresh to me. But that in itself is not an explanation. I could tell you that I am a woman in my early fifties, writing this on a close summer night in Ireland. But what would that mean to you? I f I tell you, however, that my first habitat as a poet is part of your history as a poet: is that nineteenth century full of the dangerous indecision about who the poet really is. I f I say I saw that century survive into the small, quarrelsome city where I began as a poet. T ha t I studied its version o f the poet and took its oppressions to heart. I f I say my present is your past, that my past is already fixed as part of your tradition. And that until we resolve 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 present and past of poetry —something that feels as if it needs to be said urgently —then maybe I can justify this letter.

And if some awkwardness remains, rather than trying to disguise it, I want to propose an odd and opposite fiction. I f most real letters are conversation by other means, think of this as a different version. Imagine a room 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 centre o f Dublin in fact, in a nursing home beside Stephen’s Green. Big, cracking heaps of sycamore and birch leaves are burned there in Autumn and I like to think of the way bitter smoke must have come the few hundred yards or so towards the room where I was born.

And so I have no difficulty imagining us sitting there and talking in that diminishing light. Maybe the sights of late summer were visible through the window only moments ago. Fuchsia and green leaves, perhaps. But now everything is retreating into skeletal branches and charcoal leaves. My face is in shadow. You cannot see it, although your presence

16 P N Review 118

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