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English Professor Eavan Boland has written some today’s most celebrated poetry. She has published nine books, written essays for The New Yorker and American Poetry Review and penned a large selection of reviews and critiques. When I sat down to talk with her, however, she downplayed her notable achievements and chose instead to focus on the cultural and personal development that has shaped her as a poet, teacher and Irish-American.
When describing her path towards becoming a professional poet, Boland picked apart my idea of what poetry was and rebuilt it.
She said first that a poet is “what you are, not what you do...[it is] inside oneself, when one becomes a poet.”
Boland delineated the distance between writing poetry and being a poet, telling me she did not feel she had become a poet until her late twenties, well after she had published her first collection of poems. According to Boland, a poet does not even have to write poems.
“In the West,” she told me, “a poem is on a page. In many places, poems go beyond the page.”
Yet Boland never described herself solely as a poet; instead, she adamantly affirmed herself to be among the ranks of the teaching poets, those writers whose word craft interconnects with their role as an instructor.
At the end of our hearty discussion of words and labels she paused and said, “Put all the titles you like, but it’s really a continuum.”
Much of Boland’s poetry deals with immigration, exile and the Irish experience. When I quizzed her on what gave rise to these themes, she spoke first of moving to London from Ireland at age five and the “fiery taste of exile” that left burns and pockmarks. Boland went on to describe her move to New York City. She emphasized the “unxenophobic” environment she found, describing America’s great strength as its ability to welcome the dispossessed and fragmented.
“America was built by outsiders and that is how it signifies itself,” Boland recounted.
In this society of outsiders she found that one could retain what pieces or wholes remained of his or her ancestries and origins and still be American. The “terrible troubles in Ireland from the 1960’s” came from arguing about who was more Irish, who had more of a right to that word, Boland said.
Though she found an open port in America’s cities and schools, Boland continued to be attached to Ireland. Yet when she returned to Ireland at age 14, she found that she had not had an Irish childhood, which caused her to lose the “dictionary of Irish signs” needed to be at home in her home.
Now Boland can “always recognize people who are out of their own country,” she said. She can see them “struggling with language and loss.”
Boland eventually found her way to Stanford, where she acts both as an English professor and director of the Creative Writing Program. When I asked her for any advice she would give to hopeful poets and authors, she said the “permission to be a writer is given to oneself.” A young writer, Boland continued, must produce a “fairly high volume of output” in order to see oneself and one’s weaknesses. She relayed advice she had once been given.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”