Teacher: If you are THE Eavan Boland, my class would like to ask you a few (short)
questions about Outside History, which we are studying this term.

EB: Yes, I am. And of course: I'll do my best to answer them.

T:  Well, as threatened, here are my student’s questions. They got carried away, so feel free to ignore, condense, mix and match, whatever.  Don’t be afraid of one-word answers. And some are a bit cheeky. And these aren’t all of them—I just got tired of typing. Thanks for doing this. They are excited.  We still have two weeks of class, so there's no big hurry.

EB:  It is really good of you to send over your student's questions!  That's a lot of typing! Give them my very good wishes, and here are some answers.  I've repeated the questions and numbered them—(p. s. I don't mind cheeky questions at all.  I think I asked a fair
few of them in my time.)

Student:  What inspired your writing of the poem "Outside History"?  I have difficulty establishing the connection between the last stanza and the body of the poem.   Was this written after someone you knew passed away?  I recently experienced a loss and this poem really struck a chord with me.

EB:  It wasn't personal in that sense.  But there's a felt image there all the same.  So you're right in picking that up.  Here's a little bit of the information:
 In 1988 there was an awful double murder in the North.  Two British soldiers strayed in their car into a Catholic and Republican district where a funeral was going on.  Tempers were running high at that time.  They were pulled from the car, kicked and shot and left—half-dressed—dying in the street.  The priest, an old man with a lot of courage, came out and knelt beside them and whispered the last rites and the acts of contrition in their ear.  But  I think they were too far gone to hear.  That photographic image—carried in all the papers—of him kneeling by them haunted me.  Hence "we are always too late".

S:  In "Bright-cut Irish Silver," are you comparing the silver to someone or something?

EB:  Silver work in Ireland during the eighteenth century was a privileged, colonial, male art—maybe not unlike the canon of poetry!

S:  Do you consider yourself a feminist?

EB:  Here's a quote from an interview I gave to the AWP Chronicle.  I hope it helps answer this: " I am feminist: I am not a feminist poet.  I think the distinction needs to be clear.  Feminism involves certainties.  But the actual writing of a poem is the place, for me, where certainties end.  They certainly don't begin there.   They have no place in the awkward, ambiguous, untidy business of writing a poem.  So I'm not a feminist poet, in that the idea doesn't touch the act.  But the journey towards poetry, the sorting through purposes and definitions and identities—in all those ways feminism has been vital and enabling for me.  Feminism is a wonderful and essential ethical position.  Because of that, it's tempting to broaden it and expect it to be an aesthetic as well.  But it isn't.  And
those distinctions, though they may be limiting and painful, are also crucial."

S:  I’ve heard that the story of St.  Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland is an analogy for Christianity’s patriarchy wiping out the matriarchal goddess-worshipping culture.   What’s your perspective on that?

EB:  I'm afraid I don't have one.  It's an old and much prized legend, but I don't think it bears much scrutiny!

S:  Do you have a conscious attraction to/fascination with domestic interiors?  If so, where does it come from?

EB:  I do love interiors.  I love the painters and poets who love interiors as well: like Vuillard and Stevens.  I think in some unconscious way, since I was never going to be an outdoor nature poet, I decided to be an indoor nature poet.  But besides, in a very plain and downright way, I love the way a room looks in the twilight, and then the same room when the lamps come on.  I like the enclosure and mystery and glamour of interiors.

S:  Do you think male poets are capable of writing more "feminine poems"?  Do you think your poetry appeals to men?  If so, in what way?

EB:  I'm taking these two together because they bring in gender.  To answer the last first, I have no idea whether my poems appeal to men.  I think very elusive parts of poetry-reading are gendered.   I could read a poem of Wordsworth's—the Lucy poems—and feel that his masculine identity was crucial to it.  And "The Ode on the Intimations" and feel it didn't matter at all.  I think where my poems appeal, they must connect—as poems do with me—along some current of feeling and recognition.
 The first question: I'm not quite sure what that means.  Male poets have written all kinds of poems I honour for their subtlety, grace, force and expression.  From "Strange Meeting" by Owen—a War Poem—to "Directive" by Frost, which is a passionate elegy for a lost time.   I don't really honour them for their masculine or feminine components
directly.  I'm not sure that answers either question!

S:  Has your poetry changed in the last 8 years, and if so, how?

EB:  It must have.  Nothing stands still.  But I couldn't exactly say how.  In a Paris Review interview Robert Lowell once said that all the poems he was interested in writing, he couldn't write.  And all the poems he could write he wasn't interested in.  That's where I live my life as a poet—eight years ago, as well as today.   I have a new book coming out in the Autumn called The Lost Land.   I'd find it hard to estimate any change or difference in that either.

S:  Who have been your biggest influences?  What poets do you read?

EB:  I'm taking these together.  It's never easy to work out the difference between influence, affinity and example.  Yeats, for instance, was and still is a great example.  But he's a bad influence.   And I don't feel an affinity for him, and least of all for his politics.   But he's a peerless lyric poet.   Of course I feel close to the tradition of women poets: to Rich, Levertov, Plath, Olds, Glück.  I can see them, poem by poem, adding territories to poetry.  I can see the shifts of voice and tone, the strategies they've used, which are beneficial—not just for women—but for the whole craft of poetry.   And I love reading new books of poetry.  I'm always interested, always hungry for surprise.

S:  There’s a lot of detail concerning time of day, especially sunset and sunrise.   Are there particular reasons for this, or are they part of the overall effect you try to achieve?
S:  Time seems more of a companion than a hunter in your poems?  Why?

EB:  Again, these questions seemed to fit together.  I do like the sort of mini-seasons that are in a whole day.  I can't say exactly why.   I live in a suburb— I spend summers there at the moment—in Dublin, right at the foothills of the Dublin mountains.  We can see the foothills clearly from our front window and front grass.  Everything changes every
minute.  And I love twilight in a very coastal city.   Dublin has a very distinctive, humid light that I miss in the clearer, brighter light of California.  So maybe—to take the second question there—that makes time more companionable to me.

S:  Here in the ‘90s, do you still see the domestic women in your poem the same as when you wrote them?

EB:  I'm not sure I ever saw them in just one way.  Or that, for that matter that there ever was a "them".  There certainly was a "me".  And I was interested in putting that "me" into the domestic context in a poem, just as it was located in one in so-called real life.  People were very suspicious of "domestic" poems when I was younger.  They spoke of them as having a lesser, smaller importance.  And that both interested and irritated me.  The domestic world was where I lived with small children.  It had intense adventures, edges,
colours, angles, weathers.  I could see, intellectually, that I was dealing with a devalued
subject matter.  But I was determined to re-value it.  So some of the women you mention,
singular and plural, came out of that struggle.

S:  This may be too personal, but with all your poems about children and family
life, why are there no poems about a husband?

EB:  "Distances" is for, and about, my husband.  And for and about our early marriage.
 And in a later volume I wrote a poem for him which I feel very connected to called
"Love".  And—dammit—the book is dedicated to him! But I don't mind the question at all, and it's not personal in any way I resist.  He has been a great influence on me, and a very sustaining presence in a marriage over almost 30 years.

S:  What is your background in mythology and why has it become so completely a part of your life that you use it to explain your feelings?

EB:  Well, I think mythology explains feelings anyway: not just mine.  It's a great, brutal, power system of explanations.  Of fear.  Of memory.  Of loss.  I'm drawn to it on that account.

S:   In almost every poem you use flowers as a background to your life.   Why?

EB:  I don't think it's quite that much.  And it certainly isn't because I'm a gardener!  But I suppose I'm struck by that mixture of ornament and fragility and decoration which is a flower.

S:  Obviously you’ve held positions outside the home, so why do you identify so
strongly with the domestic life?

EB:  I'm interested in the way you put that.  As if being outside the home would make
you in touch with a reality which superseded it.  Whatever I've done I've given my attention to.  But the visionary, powerful moment of my life was in a home, with
two small children: with all the dailyness of that.  I've always been candid about that.

S:  In the two Daphne poems, were you aware of having mixed feelings about marriage?  Were they written at different times in your life?  Is one a world view, and the other private?

EB:  No, I don't think that it's mixed feelings about marriage (cf.  above!).  But of course the ambiguity of the sexual and societal worlds in which women found themselves in the past, often unprotected, often hostages to customs and conventions which changed too late for them to benefit from it—all that was certainly a ghostly presence to me when I wrote those poems.

S:  What do you feel some of the differences are between being a poet and being a female poet?

EB:  That's such a complex, important question I couldn't answer it well here.   But I'll try briefly.  I think being a poet involves certain relationships with tradition, history, the authority of the past which have had a sort of ordained succession with male poets.  When you are a woman poet, the hierarchies and authorities look very different.  You start to wonder, I think, whether the female image in a love poem—this is just one example—is silent or silenced.  You question the authority of the canon.  You question the way in which the ideas and identity of the poet were made.  And I think a woman poet's relation to the poetic past has to be influenced by the fact that it was a past made in her absence,
and even predicated upon her exclusion.  So the difference is in a series of questions.

S:  There’s a feeling of dislocation in your poems, women looking for a place for  women—in myth, the sea ("The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish”, etc.)—as if she were looking for, not a place, but a memory.   Does this seem accurate?

EB:  Yes, I think so.  But then myth—the whole landscape of metamorphosis and miracles—is based in dislocation.  That's some of the reason I'm attracted to it.

S:  Do your poems sometimes engage the theme of invisibility/visibility?  Objects and people seem to fade in and out of light and dark (like dusk, or the color white), in and out of focus, even in and out of other objects (“Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark”).   Is this a fear of disappearing, of being subsumed, of being extinguished, or being ignored?

EB:  Not exactly.  But I do see what you're saying.  I think the way human beings are at the edge of memory, forgetfulness, non-existence in their all too brief lives, is poignant.  I love Larkin's line "all that survives of us is love."

S:  Was/is a Virginia Woolf an influence on you?

EB:  No, not directly.  My mother loved her work, and showed it to me—I think it was "Granite and Rainbow"—when I was about fourteen.  Woolf was an early feminist: and despite the great discrepancies in her class attitudes, her very clear and powerful and ground-breaking voice in something like "A Room of One's Own" can still move me.

S:  How do you feel about painters?  You have a painter say, "Truth is in our lies."  Is this supposed to mean that truth and lies support and inform one another to some extent, or that neither the truth nor lies are actually valid?  Do painters offer up frauds that we live by, and if so, whose fault is that?  What exactly is the nature of the painter to the person being portrayed?  For example, in "Degas’s Laundresses," the painter seems to represent some kind of danger to his subject.   What kind?  (Ed.  Note: the whole class felt a paradox in your relationship with painters: while it seemed that as a poet you should identify with them, especially since your poems resemble watercolors in so many ways, it actually seemed as though you saw them as appropriating the lives of others in the service of, not beauty, but mere decoration.)

EB:  I do have some mixed feelings about painting.  My mother was a painter.  It was an eerie feeling to sit there as a child, and slowly see your hand turn into oils and colours on a canvas.  My mother has been a great friend in my life, but I haven't really shaken off that odd relation between the portrait painter and the sitter.  It still seems something like a symbol of the way art can prey, and fix and fetter as well as liberate and make living.  So it's not just a way in which painting seems menacing.  I think there is a very real way in which art can fix and restrict life.  That's a warning to the artist—to me of course—that I
can give myself!

S:  What is your relationship with words?  In "The Latin Lesson," you give the impression that words are delicate and must be crushed to be enjoyed.

EB:  In that poem I wanted to make some diagram of the little pieces of usefulness the beautiful word can have—the way eucalyptus becomes a useful balm—and try to weigh that.  Language has huge temptations for a poet.  It can become an actual means of evasion, instead of the crisp, path-clearing instrument towards a truth.  I'm so aware of that it must mean I feel the temptations to do the opposite.  And I do! I love the good, decorated poem as much as anyone.  But I think of Keats telling Shelley not to "load every rift with ore".  And I think he was right.  Language in the end, is about truth, not about decoration.

S:  If you had been born  in a country other than Ireland, do you think you’d be writing poetry?

EB:  There are so many ifs and buts in anyone's life as a poet, that it's hard to judge.  But I've always thought of myself in such an intimate, charged way as an Irish poet that they are almost the same word.   I can't imagine them being separated.

S:  Many of your poems focus on domesticity and handiwork, such as quilting.   Are you very domestic, or does the inspiration come from a mother/grandmother figure?

EB:  I made quilts.  I liked those things.  I didn't have direct example for them, and I probably did them in a very untutored, unperfectionist way.  But they had a great interest for me when I did them.

S:  Are you more like the woman in "The Achill Woman" or "Degas's Laundresses"?

EB:  Neither really.  If I'm anyone I'm the callow student in “The Achill Woman" stumbling on this powerful witness—to the past and history— and missing it.

S:  Which poem is your best?

EB:  There are just some poems I stay connected to: "The Journey" and "Night Feed" and "The Black Lace Fan".  And I suppose you have to think of them as ones in which you said something you wanted to say

S:  We have noticed your preference for certain colors, especially plum and white.   Why?

EB:  I'm not aware of it, certainly! But you may be right!

S:  Does a person's greatest conflicts lie within one's self or in confrontation w/ others?

EB:  I think that may be a philosophical, rather than a poetic, question.  I think poets write poems.  That's all they do.  The conflict for the poet is on a poem-by-poem basis.  Trying to put into language what lies just at the edges of it.  Nothing more.  But nothing less either.

S:   There are several references to being lost or in exile in Outside History.   Is this just a broad metaphor or a more conscious attempt to place women within the male version of history?

EB:  I was a child in England when I was very young.  I felt exile in some sort of gradual,
detailed and very dispiriting way.  What wasn't mine.  What was never going to be mine.  I  think that's stayed with me.
We had two young girls—younger than my daughters are now—about sixteen and seventeen who came to Ireland from Germany after the war.  They were sisters.  They spoke German.  They were lost, struggling, in the shadow of some terrible event that had taken their country, their family, their autonomy.   I remembered their exile later: even though it happened inside my home.   It went into the poem "In Exile".

S:  Is it more important to you that you be recognized as an Irish poet or a woman poet?

EB: Finally, I will be considered—like every poet—on the poems I write, when the categories those poems emerged from, or were tagged with, just aren't there any more.  Poets stand or fall on that.  All poets.  But I'm an Irish poet and a woman poet in the sense that both those identities have helped to configure one another, and become part of the language of the poems in a very direct way.

S:  All of the men in OH are flawed or make bad decisions.   Do you know any men who aren't seriously flawed?

EB:  I'm not aware of men making bad decisions in Outside History.  I'm not aware of much decision making of any kind really.  I think of both men and women as having individual flaws.  I suppose I think of the historic male culture as being far more injurious to women, than the other way around.

T: Thank you for your good answers—my students were delighted. In fact they were so good that, with your permission, I'd like to work up the whole experience into an article.  I haven't seen an article about such "distance learning" before and think people may be interested in ways to use the net/e-mail.

EB:  I'd be very glad to expand in any way. I think that whole idea of "distance" learning is fascinating.