SOURCE: "Q. and A. with Eavan Boland," in Irish Literary Supplement, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 10-11.

[In the following interview, Boland discusses the place of female poets in Irish literature.]

[Means Wright and Hannan:] A first-rate Irish woman poet would appear to receive less recognition in Ireland than even a third-rate male poet. Do you find this to be true?

[Boland:] I was on a panel in Boston recently at a festival of Irish poetry, and exactly that point was with me. In the audience there were a number of male poets, but I knew of five or six wonderful Irish women poets that nobody in that audience would have heard of. And the breaking-through point for them is more at risk, I think, than for the male poet. My problem is, and certainly my ethical worry is that the woman poet doesn't even get considered: she's under so much pressure in this particular country.

Can you describe these pressures?

We like to think that in a country like Ireland that is historically pressured and has been defeated and has had minorities within it, that people get the permission equally to be poets. We like to think that, but they don't. There is not an equal societal commission here for people to explore their individuality in an expressive way—for a woman to cross the distance in writing poetry to becoming a poet. "If I called myself a poet," a young woman in one of my workshops told me, "people would think I didn't wash my windows." This was a piercingly acute remark on the fracture between the perception of womanhood in a small town in the southeast of Ireland and the perception of the poet. So the second part of the equation of not getting an equal societal permission is that I couldn't say that the people who have had permission—in other words, the bardic poets, who are male—that they have in every case generously held out their hand to these women, that they have equally encouraged them, given them a hearing. The proposals that happen under the surface to make a canon—that are subterranean and invisible—have been radically exclusive. The male writers in Ireland traditionally, in both prose and poetry, do have a kind of bardic stance; they do see themselves as inheriting a kind of bardic role. They have been disdainful of women writers with women's themes; they use a language I don't think you'd see in Canada or the United States. Only recently, for example, someone well involved with literary things in Ireland got up in a conference on "Women and Writing" to complain of the "pornography of childbirth and of menstruation in Irish women's writing."

This kind of discrimination has certainly existed in the United States.

Yes, but you have the huge diversity, that wonderful diversity of pressure and voices and liberalism. Ireland is a very small country, and its literary community is, over the past forty years, very staid in its perceptions. There isn't a lot of oxygen for the young woman poet—who is tremendously vulnerable to how she's perceived.

Rita Ann Higgins, for example, the young working class poet in Galway, or Moya Cannan or Eva Bourke, who can't find their books in the Dublin bookstores?

Yes, there's a huge amount of literary activity going in Galway. Jessie Lendennie [poet-editor of Salmon Press in Galway] was in my national workshop in 1984—a wonderful presence in it. I've known of those tentacles of energy for years, but it hasn't been easy to get any visibility for them. It's easier for me because I'm older, because I've always lived in a metropolitan area.

Is it easier for a women poet in academe, like yourself, to attain recognition?

I'm not in academe. I was a writer in residence last year at Trinity, and this year at University College Dublin, but I would think of myself as academically far from grace. Interestingly, the contemporary poetry course in Trinity this year carried not one woman poet! It's extraordinary to be taught outside in other countries and not anywhere in your own. This is the reason why when I'm in Boston I'm not inclined to be quiet or conciliatory about it: because these things have happened again and again and because they have been passively sanctioned. The male Irish poets have treated exclusion as invention, but there is absolutely no doubt that that exists. There is no give on this issue. It is a matter of fact.

Are there academics in Ireland who would promote the work of women? Women academics? The theme for the American Conference for Irish Studies conference this fall is "Women and Children First."

Yes, that's very interesting. If you look back at Eire Ireland, for example, there are almost no references to women's writing. The ACIS—yes, there are wonderful women there, but I think that ACIS itself has been conservative, the institution itself. The academic in Ireland has had remarkably little to do with the writing of poetry, but it has a great deal to do with the dissemination of it. The problem, I think, is a compound psycho-perception in this country that women are in many ways the caryatids of community. They hold on their shoulders the lives and the shelters—and it's not to say a great regard is not had for them—but as the unindividualized generic feminine presence.

In your American Poetry Review essay, "Outside History" [April 1990], you rue the fact that male poets have made "the image of the woman the pretext of a romantic nationalism."

Certainly: and the nation is an old woman and needs to be liberated. But she's passive; and if she stops being passive and old she becomes young and ornamental. Therefore, within our perception of women as being in the house, as being in the kitchen, holding things together, there's the perception of the male very often as the active and anarchic principle: and therefore nominated as male is the individual, the bardic, the dangerous, the expressive, partly because those were male, but partly because the transaction between the male and the female in literature is an active-passive one. But basically this community nominates women as the receptors of other people's creativity and not as the initiators of their own. Then we have the Church to support and give a sacro-quality to these perceptions. If you take a woman in a town which no doubt is strongly influenced by its Catholic past and its rural customs—where women were counseled patience and its silent virtues—a woman who suddenly says, "Now I'm going to express myself," that society is not going to give her the same permission as to a 23-year-old male with black curly hair. So she's already under a lesser set of permissions to explore her own gift, and a greater sense of inferences that that gift is dangerous to her tradition of womanhood. These are huge pressures!

Enough to make feminists out of women poets?

I think it's important that women writers don't have to be feminists, don't have to be anything. They just have to have enough oxygen to write. I don't care what their political persuasions are.

You're not a separatist.

No, I'm not a separatist. I think that separatism in a small country like Ireland would be another form of censorship. In a funny way, being a separatist might have been advantageous to me. It would probably have made me a less suspect figure on the left of the women's movement here—who I think have had difficulties with me. They wouldn't see me as feminist enough, you see. It's the old story of the hare and the tortoise. They always see me as the tortoise. They don't understand that often you're just trying to get discriminatory funding out of the Arts Council so there are not six traveling fellowships for women under thirty, or artists under thirty, so that women with children can't take them up. But I think the maximum pressure should be kept up to bring these male resistances into the open.

About five years ago you would have found male writers saying, "Yes, there are women writers." But the inference would be: "These are women writers and not Irish writers—they don't belong to the great main discourse." One very eminent Irish poet said to me in New York: "I do accept that the energies of women writing are unctioned." Big deal! It's a very late in the day recognition! You can't be congratulating people on the recognition of human rights and the expression of it. So I think male writers might consider that I have an unconciliatory pose: and I think some of the left of the movement, as I said, too moderate. So it's an awkward position.

Your themes come out of women's experience. Won't the male poets and critics continue to object to that?

But it's the male poets who are separatist, you see; this is their separatism. They want to say, "There's a niche for this, a category for this. There's a cupboard for this—we can get rid of her: this is women's poetry." I certainly call myself a woman poet and I don't allow them to contaminate that particular category. But there is no way that they are not saying that ours are poems of human resonance and human import. I could certainly recommend to all women poets in this country that they argue on their own terms whether a poem is good or bad. We are not going to have an Irish poem to be a poem about a city or a bull or a heifer, but all the poems we write about—houses or children or suffering in the past—are women's poems. And that is where the argument is at the moment.

You won't get into a Virginia Woolfian dialogue on the aesthetics of the female sentence?

No, it's wonderful to talk about. But this argument may be in a cruder stage here. I think it may be at a more pressurized stage, and the ugly part is the intimidation for a woman to write a poem, get a book together, wonder where it's going to be published, how it will be received. In other words, the ugly part in every single minority in a writing culture is, "Where does the power lie? Who has the power?" I remember a women poet who said to me, "I can't publish with a woman's press. I have to publish with another one so that I have credibility." To me that was a heartbreaking sentence because it represented all the oppressions women are under in this country. A well disposed male poet said to me, "If Salmon publishes just women (which it doesn't), it will do them harm." I said, "Why will it do them harm? You have been publishing just men for years!" Tears come into these chaps' eyes because they think: Here's Eavan on a social occasion, saying these hard things to me. Here is one window that is shut off. I think you must be very careful and try to open the window and not break it. You come to a point, you know, where you feel like breaking all the windows. And I have really been getting near that point.

Can you talk about the critique in Ireland; where does it come from?

Everything I've been talking about is due to the fact or emanates from the fact that the critique in this country remains obdurately male and patriarchal. It's a complex matter where a critique in a country comes from. It comes in a very simple way from the contracting out to reviewers by the literary editors, and that's a complicated system. I no longer review any Irish writers. Five years ago I decided not to do that anymore; I wasn't going to waste time. Therefore you have a critique partly made by the reviews contracted by the literary editors. Then there are the critiques undoubtedly made in the universities; and there's a minimum interaction between the newspapers and the universities. Then there's the sort of hum in a literary writing community which is made up of short-hands and off-the-cuffs—that sort of hand-to-mouth critique, which I have a great respect for. Although a great deal of vital work by women has been done, the critique is really sitting on top of it. It's made up of the defense mechanisms of an older writing culture which is predominantly male, and it's made up of everything, I'm afraid, from sneers to pious statements of what makes excellence. The great cry is that all this terrible sewage that people like myself have released into the literary waters is diluting the excellence of our great literature. Though how you can get an excellent literature if it is exclusive, I don't know.

And the language used in this critique? Words like "miniature" and "painterly" and "she's not representative of her sex" as a kind of backhand approbation?

Yes, there are all these code words like "domestic," which imply a restrictive practice within the poem itself. A woman said to me of a male editor, "He said the best poems I wrote were the least female"—instead of looking at the thing the right way around, which is to look at the work of young women, and asking, "How are they putting together the Irish poem differently?" That is the real question. They are putting it together differently, and that means in itself to cast a light around what is being done in other ways and at other times. We need to look at all this as part of the legitimate energies that affect one another and country. But if you look at it that way, the critique is actually obstructing the perspective on that. So we are not able at the moment to consider in this country: how do young women put together that poem? What do they put into it and what do they leave out of it? We can't see that because the whole jargon surrounding it is very emotive. The most significant review to me was one in the Irish Times on my pamphlet, "A Kind of Scar"—the same essay that appeared later in the APR as "Outside History." The work was utterly dismissed. My editor said, "Should I do something about it?" I said, "Leave it." It's always to me a good thing when the murky undertoads come to the surface.

Is it difficult for these young women poets to be reviewed?

Yes, and therefore they get truly demoralized. The working conditions for young women poets are infinitely poorer than the conviviality and congratulations that surround their male counterparts. One of the important hidden agendas in this country is that poets emerge differently. The young male poets tend to emerge in their early twenties. They tend to be economically independent—even if they're restricted they don't have dependence. They're mobile; they can move to the centers of activity; they can move from the rural areas to the metropolitan areas. Although very often pressured, they have some flex on how they can move around. The traditional young Irish woman poet is in her thirties—at best in her late twenties. She may well at that point be economically dependent, be married, have small children. And above all be fixed in one place. She can't get to the local library easily, let alone get to Dublin. She doesn't have many of the available sustenances and none of the amenities. Yet I don't think either the critique or funding or the perception or the community support has followed her the way it has the young male writer.

The poet Rita Ann Higgins advises that women poets refuse inclusion in an anthology unless there is equal representation. Would you concur?

It's an interesting idea—one I'd be emotionally in sympathy with. But I would probably be cerebrally not in sympathy with token representation of any kind. I don't favor a woman being in an anthology just because she's a woman. I favor her being there because I know that many of the younger writers who are best in poetry are women. I think the right way is that women be the anthologists and the editors. I think it would be very interesting if Rita Ann would edit Poetry Ireland. And include men. And we could see what she saw of what is around her.

The periodical Krino has just brought out an edition dedicated to women and writing. Is this a sign that the situation is changing?

I think it's changing—but it's changing slowly. It's changing in ways that have to be closely looked at. I think that token representations in periodicals or conferences are not all the same as looking with a discriminatory eye at the body of literature in a country and saying, "If A is A, then B must be B. If there is a wonderful poem written in Galway in which the bus is put in and a woman on it, and she looks out the window—that has got to affect a poem written in Dublin five years before it or four years after it." I don't think we have recognition here, really. The names are known, but there is still tremendous controversy. There were no women in the communities in the '50s and '60s calling themselves poets.

Your first book came out in 1967.

Yes, but you would find it hard to believe how persona non grata I was. I was regarded as a straight-up lyric poet with the first two books. There was no support of any kind from any male poet, and that was very difficult. I was growing uneasy about the way the thing was handled, from the minus of congratulations for women to the kind of bardic posturing of men at readings. The assumption was that all Irish poets drink, that they behave to women in a certain way. I am a poet who grew up in my generation hearing Sylvia Plath routinely slandered by male poets. I have to except from that some of the male English poets, whom I think were surprisingly graceful and atune to her work. But the Irish poets have continued to slander her.

Because they consider her too "confessional?"

Absolutely. And then, as I said, I became persona non grata. They were fairly happy to sit back and let me disappear. When I didn't completely disappear, I don't know that they knew I didn't disappear for a very long time. I do think you can pick up a number of books by Irish writers that make no reference to any woman writer in those years. Irish Poetry After Joyce, written by Dillon Johnston, came out in the middle of that decade. I think there are 500 pages in that book and two are on Irish women poets. The funny thing is that in my case it made the working conditions more definite; I found it liberating. It liberated me from the slightest interest in their views on these matters. It didn't stop me from liking some of the work they did, but it stopped me from having a huge regard for their views, because I thought they were thoroughly retrograde in many cases.

Adrienne Rich suggests the need for a woman poet to break with the male tradition and create her own personal myth—as she does in a poem like "Diving into the Wreck." Do you find this too separatist a view?

Well, of course, I love her work, and the last line in that poem is just prophetic: "A book of myths / in which / our names do not appear." But no, I'm not a separatist. I would be much more subversive by inclination. Ireland is a country with a strong history of subversion. I think the subversions in this literature have an interesting past. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist is simply a subversion of the Jesuitical program, that's what Joyce was out to do. He wanted to take the original repressive stance and subvert it to show that in another life, when you turned it backwards, it could be liberating. Yeats was more subversive of the British poet at the time than he appears. But by instinct I wouldn't wish to throw out capital labor or any of those things, and if I wished to I wouldn't find it possible because we are daily rooted in the past. People who say you can live in Ireland and not have an interest in the nation—they haven't lived in Ireland. They don't know how powerful these things are! The separatists want us to see the poetic past as patriarchal betrayal. I see that ideology as dangerous to the woman poet; I want to subvert the old forms. Where those elements of the Irish experience are repressive, I would rather subvert them than throw the baby out with the bathwater.