"That the science of cartography is limited and not simply
by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show
the fragrance of balsam, the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love,
we drove to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down, you said.
That was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass rough-cast stone
had disappeared into, as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal,
in 1847, when the crop had failed twice,
relief committees gave the starving Irish such roads
to build.
Where they died, there the road ended and ends still.
And when I take down the map of this island, it is never so.
I can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering
of the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which
persuades a curve into a plane, but to tell myself again
that the line which says woodland, and cries hunger
gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon will not be there."
And if anything really brings back up for me
that the extraordinary rift between past and history,
it is this incident for which I wrote the poem "Quarantine".
The famine was hardly recorded in the documents
and chronicles at the time, and you
have to look for one of the smallest references
to one of the biggest events of it
but also one of the most hidden events, just the death of a man
and woman among the millions who died.
In a book that was published called
Mo Sgéal Féin, which was published in 1901
by a man called Peadar Ua Laoghaire,
who was a priest by that time-- he got back
on himself as a very young man and in fact a child
in the little village of [INAUDIBLE] in West Cork.
And it's a two sentence reminiscence
of a young man and woman whose children
had died in the workhouse.
And who left the workhouse in the bitter cold of the night
to walk back to the cabin where they had
some semblance of happiness.
And they died in the bitter cold that night,
and morning that they were found her feet
were held against his chest to try,
he had tried to warm them as he died.
And to me that stands for that place of shadows
where something extraordinary happens that might not
be recorded but it is part of everything
we have become in Ireland.
Quote-- "in the worst hour of the worst season of the worst
year of a whole people, a man set out from the workhouse
with his wife.
He was walking.
They were both walking north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west
and north until at nightfall under freezing stars
they arrived.
In the morning, they were both found dead of cold, of hunger,
of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact praise
of the easy rises and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory--
their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered, how they did,
and what there is between a man and woman,
and in which darkness it can best be proved."
I wanted to talk a little bit about being an Irish poet.
It's extremely hard to describe the differences.
I have loved and admired American poetry
since I was a child, and it's very hard
to identify the differences.
So once I happened to be judging something for the Irish Times,
and the editor of the Irish Times,
who was obviously exasperated with Irish poetry,
which flows in a very steady stream into that newspaper--
[LAUGHTER]
--introduced the occasion by saying
that they at the Irish Times had finally
done the definitive statistics on poetry in Ireland.
And they have found that, although only 10%
of the Irish people read poetry, 45% had wrote it.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's a statistic that all of us
who live there has some weight and then has some truth.
But I have seen also the wonderful--
I suppose the very charming sides of this.
And every time I tell this story,
I think I won't tell it again, but I'll tell you one
last time.
Ireland has a relationship with poetry
that is almost impossible to quantify and certainly not
something you'd want to think about too much.
But I do remember leaving the house once to come to Stanford
and getting a phone call from the national airline, which
is called Aer Lingus.
And very nice woman at the end of the phone, and she
said to me "Ms. Boland, we just had a board meeting
and we're changing our corporate image".
And she said "we've decided to take
the work of 14 Irish writers, eight of them dead,
and weave them into the seats of the airline".
[LAUGHTER]
So I didn't say too much.
[LAUGHTER]
She said to me, "so, would you fax us
over four lines of your poetry?"
[LAUGHTER]
And then she said-- there was a pause
and she said, "but nothing with the word 'crash' in it, dear".
[LAUGHTER]
And that's a true story.
If you fly Aer Lingus, you will see it
in the seats in front of you.
So there you go, these are the differences in Irish poetry.
But, so one of the jobs which I'm most honored to have,
of course I did teach at Stanford University.
Jason Brown here, great graduate of that
program, and there are many, many wonderful things
about Stanford.
But it is, I would think, one of the very favorite jobs I ever
had.
But I thought of perhaps more than
that, it's that in 1994 the National Maternity
Hospital, where my grandmother died,
asked me to be its poet in residence
for its centenary year.
The National Maternity Hospital is in fact
the hospital in Ulysses by James Joyce.
For those of you who wish to look it up,
it is the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter.
There is very little evidence that the hospital
wishes to be remembered as part of that chapter.
It's not very complimentary, but the hospital
asked me to be their poet in residence,
and I was delighted to be that for the year,
and people in Dublin were interested.
People would say to me, you know,
what are you doing in the National Maternity Hospital?
And they would say to me, well, do you
work with the new mothers and babies?
And I never went near the new mothers and babies,
because my children were born in the National Maternity
Hospital, and the last thing I would
like to see when they were born was the poet in residence.
[LAUGHTER]
But I did write some poems that year,
and so I do think [INAUDIBLE] often
and I do look back at as one of those wonderful Irish anomalies
being there.
But I wrote a poem in that year called "Pomegranate,"
and it was really to note for myself that --
occasion the birth of my first daughter.
And the "Pomegranate" is built on the great legend
of Ceres and Persephone.
Persephone is kidnapped and taken to the underworld,
and her mother goes to get her back
and gets her back for half the year of,
which becomes the summer and the spring.
But the child stays down there that half the year,
which is the winter and the autumn.
It's really a beautiful myth of the start of the seasons,
but the child could have come back entirely
if they hadn't eaten anything, but they ate a pomegranate.
And this was really just to note my surprise
by having a child who turned into a teenager,
so "Pomegranate."
[LAUGHTER]
"The only legend I have ever loved
is the story of a daughter lost in hell
and found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone, the names, and the best thing
about the legend is I can enter it anywhere.
And have.
As a child in exile in a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first, and at first I was an exiled child
in the crackling dusk of the underworld, the stars blighted.
Later I walked out in a summer twilight searching
for my daughter at that time.
When she came running, I was ready to make any bargain
to keep her.
I carried her back past white beams and wasps
and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then, and I knew winter
was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter, and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where
I can see my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate!
How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe and ended
the story and all our heartbroken searching.
But she reached out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down the French sound for apple
and the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend,
in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be
diamonds by the time the story was told,
a child can be hungry.
I could warn her.
There is still a chance.
The rain is cold.
The road is flint-covered.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world.
But what else can a mother give her daughter
but such beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief, I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it.
As I have.
She will wake up.
She will hold the papery flushed skin and her hand.
And to her lips.
And I will say nothing."
I wanted to also say that particular poem, that thread,
if you like, of the argument of life and house,
is in this other poem, which Gail was kind enough
to mention, called "Thanked be Fortune."
And it is a poem for my husband, and as indeed he
is a presence in this book, been married 35 years.
And my husband is a great book collector,
and those books began to creep from room to room
no matter what agreements we made.
Somehow the books silted into the next room,
and finally sort of silted up the stairs.
And I remember looking one evening of --
when our first baby was born looking at these books,
and they all seemed to be about disastrous life affairs.
I can't remember them all.
But I remember thinking about it.
And so somehow, the contrast of that.
"Thanked Be Fortune" is a wonderful line.
It comes bright, negatively, fortunately [INAUDIBLE].
"Did we live a double life?
I would have said we never envied the epic
glory of the star-crossed.
I would have said we learned by heart
the code marriage makes of passion, duty, dailyness,
routine.
But after dark, when we went to bed
under the bitter fire of constellations, orderly,
uninterested, and cold, at least in our case,
and the bookshelves just above our heads,
all through the hours of darkness,
men and women wept, cursed, kept and broke faith,
and killed themselves for love.
Then it was dawn again.
Restored to ourselves, we woke early and lay together,
listening to our child crying, as if
to birdsong, with ice on the windowsills and the grass
eking out the last crooked hour of starlight."
Now I would find it hard to say how influenced I was really
by the idea of that difference between the past,
and its lack of record, and the history of which
is there in front of you.
And to me, so much of that was embodied in, really,
the great friend of my life, who was my own mother.
My mother was an orphan and came from the middle of the country.
Her mother died in the national maternity hospital.
She was the youngest, the last child.
Her mother died in childbirth.
And her father drowned in the Bay of Biscay.
And so there was a tremendous amount of inertia.
And there was no evidence of her childhood.
And when my own children were born,
my mother never, ever, ever spoke about the past.
And she paid no heed to my inquiries or anything
like that.
And then one evening, she looked very near me.
And I went down to talk to her when leaving.
She was about 10 minutes away.
And I said, so you must know-- you have to know something.
There has to be something.
And all of a sudden, she told me a story so peculiar,
out of nowhere, that I was so surprised.
And I said to her-- a family story about her grandfather.
And I said to her, is that true?
And she said, I don't know.
So about six months later--
[LAUGHTER]
--I said, tell me the story again
And so she said to me-- she told me this story, [INAUDIBLE]
the same as it was.
And I said to her, do you think it's true?
She said to me, does it matter?
And the third time, when I went down a month later, she said,
I already told you that story.
So that was the end of the story.
[LAUGHTER]
So here is the story she told me.
And you will hear it pretty well as I heard it.
"I know nothing about my grandmother's childhood.
I know that she died young.
I know nothing about her when she was a child.
There are no photographs and no letters.
Nobody ever recalled her to me as living memory.
It's another erasure.
And yet, something does survive."
I should say first that this is a piece from the prose book.
"Something does survive, a story so odd and so strange that it
has the power to upstage all those icons
and arrangements that survived the reported charges
of official family histories, even for me, even now.
It's a story I heard twice and then no more, and so improbable
that each time I thought of it as one of those signs
the past makes when it has transferred
its available resources from memory to allegory.
My grandmother came from a family of millers.
Sometime after the famine, they left the small fishing town
of Milford in Donegal.
Hard-pressed as they were, they still
must have missed the idiosyncrasy
of their own place.
The sight of Mulroy Bay in February light
in the main street with its steep
climb up the side of the hill.
They moved east and south to the town of Dundalk.
Another business failed.
And they moved again to Leitrim, where my grandmother's father
was born and was, to him, that legend clung.
And the way I build that legend now is the way
I heard it, out of rumor, fossil, fact, and 1/2 memories.
He was a small man, compact and saturnine
in the way of many Western people.
If he was anything like a son who I met for a few hours
many years ago, he had eloquent and strained features,
a fine profile, close-set and obstinate eyes.
There was something strained and pinched about it all,
that kept him well away from beauty.
He grew up in Leitrim, one of the hardest of the counties.
And sometime in his early manhood,
I imagine the early 1870s, he fell in love with a local girl.
I know so little about them that I
have to recount the fictional interventionist here and say
that she was, of course, winning,
and expressive, and true to him, and that he loved her
stubbornly.
But there was an obstacle.
She was a younger sister.
In the manner of fairy tales, her oldest sister
was plain and deserving and on no account,
as was the custom, to be slighted by having the younger
girl marry first.
And so it went wrong.
The parents insisted he would offer his suit to the older
sister.
They may have offered him inducements.
But I doubt it.
The inducement can only have been
local custom and iron decorum.
There were no dowries.
These were poor people reduced in circumstance
by a difficult century and utterly
vulnerable to the sickness of a heifer or a farthing's change
in the price of feed.
They would have brought to bear on him the influence
of local opinion and approval.
He must marry the older girl.
And that was that.
And he was implacable.
It would be the younger one, that was all.
The younger girl retained her love for him and he for her.
And finally, and now the narrative
quickens, and gets on steady, and fills with unknown passages
of time lament.
The impasse yielded, love triumphed,
and the wedding day was set.
I have no documents and no certificate.
I have my grandmother's marriage certificate, but not this one.
In any case, the cold signatures of the witnesses
in the sacristan could do no justice to the event.
The wedding day came.
It seems safe to imagine a small granite
church in the middle of a town land
and the weather, more than likely, gray and overcast.
Perhaps the turnout was a bit more
than usual because of the notoriety of the whole thing,
the struggle of wills, and all the gossip and curiosity
incurred on that account.
The bride came dressed in white and heavily veiled.
The vows were taken and repeated,
and said by the bride and the groom.
The priest pronounced them man and wife.
For a single moment, it must have seemed to him
that some wound of ill luck and misadventure in his own life
had undergone a miraculous heal.
Then he lifted the veil.
It was not the face he loved.
Convention had prevailed.
The family had smuggled in the older and plainer girl
and he was bound to her by iron convention and legality
the rest of his life."
But they had 13 children.
[LAUGHTER]
So that sense, as I said, are things in Ireland
that has always fascinated me, that idea.
And of course, in many ways, what has overridden
that has been the events of the last 25 years,
where so much that was stored, and passionate, and wonderful
in the country was overridden by the violence and the injuries
done by Irish people to Irish people.
And this is a poem called "How We
Made a New Art on Old Ground."
It was written at the time of the peace process.
And that peace process began in Ireland
in the middle of the '90s to come as an unbelievable relief
to those people.
Unbelievable quantities of people
would not die, not be mutilated, would not be injured,
would not hate each other because of it.
And I happened to be--
I went one morning to the old Valley of the Boyne,
where, in fact, my mother was born, where, of course,
the great Battle of the Boyne was fought,
which caused all the trouble.
I mean, you will see on the sides
of the houses in the north of Ireland,
him getting on his white horse.
The battle was fought in 1689, but is
of recent memory to the Irish.
And it was King William and King James, and their square,
in the beautiful Boyne valley where
it was somehow-- and somehow looking out
at the start of the peace process at that valley,
touching it.
And this is the poem.
"A famous battle happened in this valley.
You never understood the nature poem till now,
till this morning.
If these statements seem separate, unrelated,
follow this silence to its edge.
And you will hear the history of air, the crispness of a fern
or the upward cut and turnaround of a fieldfare
or thrush written on it.
The other history is silent.
The estuary is over there.
The issue was decided here.
Two kings prepared to give no quarter.
Then one king and one dead tradition.
Now the humid dusk, the old wounds wait for language,
for a different truth.
And when you see the silk of the willow
and the wider edge of the river turn
and grow dark and then darker.
Then you will know that the nature poem is not
the action nor its end.
It is this rust on the gate beside the trees,
on the cattle grid underneath our feet,
on the steering wheel shaft.
It is an aftermath, an overlay, and even in its own modest way,
an art of peace.
I try the word distance and it fills with sycamores,
a summer's worth of pollen.
And as I write valley straw, metal blood, oaths,
armor are unwritten.
Silence spreads slowly from these words to those ilex
trees, half in, half out of shadows,
falling on the shallow ford of the south bank
beside Yellow island.
As twilight shows how this sweet corrosion begins
to be complete, what we see is what
the poem says, evening coming, cattle, cattle-shadows,
and whin bushes, and a change of weather
about to change them all.
What we see is how the place and the torment of the place
are, for this moment, free of one another."
So the theme of Dorcas has been something
that has always been at the forefront of what
I want to write about.
And my second daughter is now an investment banker,
but was once a little redheaded girl
who used to come out with me every single day
that there was a junk fair, antique fair, whatever
it was in Ireland.
There are many, many of them in the city
on the weekends, everything from stamps, and glass,
and lace, and--
and whatever.
So she would come.
We would go through all this together.
And she would collect a few pennies or stamps,
come home and be delighted.
And then, of course, came the inevitable day
when she said, "I just don't want to go.
I have to meet somebody".
And so that was that.
And this is a poem called "The Necessity for Irony."
"On Sundays, when the rain held off, after lunch or later,
I would go with my 12-year-old daughter into town
and put down the time at junk sales, antique fairs.
There I would lean over tables, absorbed by lace,
wooden frames, and glass.
My daughter stood at the other end of the room,
her flame-colored hair obvious whenever, which was not often,
I turned around.
I turned around, she was gone, grown,
no longer ready to come with me whenever a dry Sunday held out
its promises of small histories, endings.
When I was young, I studied styles, their use and origin,
which age was known for which ornament, and was always drawn
to a lurid speech and a civil tone,
but never thought I would have the need, as I do now,
for a darker one.
Spirit of irony, my caustic author of the past, of memory,
and of its pain, which returns hurts and stings.
Reproach me now.
Remind me, that I was in those rooms with my child,
with my back turned to her, searching, oh,
irony, for beautiful things."
And I would like to, if I may, finish
and would be glad to-- but with one comment, a longer comment,
it's a place where I think of myself as having had
to be, for a moment, in that crucible where
I think poets learn something.
That same wonderful child came with us years
before that to the international program,
as an 11 month old baby, to the international program in Iowa.
And she was there a couple of weeks
when she became deathly ill.
And we truly thought she would die.
She had meningitis, and was a very young child
to have that terrible disease, and made a wonderful recovery
thanks to truly wonderful American medicine.
But in that moment, when the international poetry program
was one that I simply couldn't go to,
I was in the hospital with a child at the time.
My mind began to go forwards and backwards about what we write
about when we write poetry.
Why do we write it?
What do we leave out?
And what do we put in?
And somehow, I was so aware of what
we have been spared, of this shadow that have passed us,
and that place we didn't have to go to,
and all those other people who do lose children.
And these poems are poems that really document it.
The first is a poem for my husband, Kevin,
when we met on the bridge, truly at the moment
when I and he thought the child might not live.
It was very, very small and very ill in the first days.
And we met on the bridge.
And I was sitting in the snow.
And everything seemed to be in doubt.
And I went back to Iowa then to read it, actually,
many years later.
I went back to the bridge.
And I was just so moved in my mind
seeing Kevin in front of me.
But of course, if that is something
about the past and memory, the figures our mind produces.
They're not real.
They are the ghosts of the past.
This is a poem of loving memory.
It looks back to that time, and also
is built on a wonderful sixth book of Aeneid,
where Aeneas crosses into the underworld
crosses over the river and his old adversaries
come out to shout at him.
But their voices turn into whispers
because it is the underworld and because their time is over.
And this is a poem about a memory.
It's called "Love."
"Dark falls on this Midwestern town, where we once
lived when myths collided.
Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river, which
slides and deepens to become the water the hero crossed
on his way to hell.
Not far from here is our old apartment.
We had a kitchen and an Amish table.
We had a view.
And we discovered there love had the feather and muscle of wings
and had come to live with us, a brother of fire and air.
We had two infant children, one of whom
was touched by death in this town and spared.
And when the hero was hailed by his comrades in hell,
their mouths opened, and their voices failed,
and there is no knowing what they
would have asked about a life they had shared and lost.
I am your wife.
It was years ago.
Our child is healed.
We love each other still.
Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances,
we speak plainly.
We hear each other clearly.
And yet I want to return to you on the bridge of the Iowa river
as you were, with snow on the shoulders of your coat
and a car passing with its headlights on.
I see you as a hero in a text, the image
blazing and the edges gilded.
And I long to cry out the epic question, my dear companion,
will we ever live so intensely again?
Will love come to us again and be so formidable at rest?
It offered us ascension even to look at him.
But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me.
You walk away and I cannot follow."
And the poem, which, in a sense, is a sequel to that,
is this poem about that experience, which changed
me forever, really, as a poet.
It made me want to think of the sources of the poem,
what we leave out and what we put in.
And somehow, I think every poet comes in some way
to that series of choices.
This is a poem called "The Journey."
And I've deliberately based it on the poetry convention,
the very hierarchical poem convention where
the poet goes down to the underworld,
and goes right down there, and is accompanied, usually,
by another poet, and comes back wiser.
And I go back to the underworld, go down with Sappho,
and come back no wiser.
[LAUGHTER]
And I wanted to mark this as, somehow,
a place that you could learn.
"The Journey."
"And then the dark fell.
And there has never, I said, been a poem
to an antibiotic, never a word to compare
with the odes on the flower of the raw sloe for fever,
or the devious Africa-seeking tern,
or the protein treasures of the sea-bed.
Depend on it, somewhere a poet is
wasting his sweet uncluttered metres
on the obvious emblem instead of the real thing.
Instead of sulpha we shall have hyssop
dipped in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb so every day,
the language gets less for the task
and we are less with the language.
I finished speaking and the anger faded.
And dark fell.
And the book beside me laid open at the page, Aphrodite comforts
Sappho in her love's duress.
The poplars shifted their music in the garden.
A child startled in a dream.
My room was a mess, the usual hardcovers, half finished cups,
clothes piled up on an old chair.
But I was listening out.
But in my head was a loosening and sweetening heaviness,
not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming, really, but as ready
to believe and still unfevered, calm and unsurprised
when she came and stood beside me.
And I would have known her anywhere.
I would have gone with her anyway.
And she came wordlessly.
And without a word, I went with her down,
down, down without so much as ever touching down,
but always, always with a sense of mulch
beneath us, the way of stairs winding down to a river.
And as we went on, the light went on fading.
And I looked sideways to be certain it was she, misshapen,
musical Sappho, the scholiast's nightingale.
And down we went, again down until we came to a sudden rest
beside a river in what seemed to be an oppressive
suburb of the dawn.
My eyes got slowly used to the bad light.
At first, I saw shadows, only shadows.
Then I could make out women and children.
And in a way, they were the grace of love.
Cholera, typhus, croup, diphtheria, she said,
in those days, they racketed in every backstreet and alley
of old Europe.
Behold the children of the plague.
Then to my horror, I could see to each nipple
some had clipped a limpet shape, suckling darknesses,
while others have their arms weighed down,
making terrible Pietas.
She took my seat and said to me, be careful.
Do not define these women by their work, not as washer women
trussed in dust and sweating, muscling water
into linen by the river's edge, nor as court ladies brailled
in silk on wool and woven with an ivory unicorn,
nor as laundresses tossing cotton,
brisking daylight with lavender and gossip.
But these are women who went out like you, when dusk became
a dark sweet with leaves, recovering the day,
stooping, picking up teddy bears, and rag dolls,
and tricycles, and buckets, love's archeology.
And they too, like you, stood boot deep in flowers once
in summer, or saw winter come in with a single magpie in a caul
of haws, a solo harlequin.
I stood fixed.
I could not reach or speak to them.
Between us was the melancholy river, the dream water,
the narcotic crossing.
And they had passed over it, its cold persuasions.
I whispered, let me be.
Let me at least be their witness.
But she said, what you have seen is beyond speech, beyond song,
only not beyond love.
Remember it.
You will remember it.
And I heard her say, but she was fading fast
as we emerged under the stars of heaven,
there are not many of us.
You are dear and stand beside me as my own daughter.
I have brought you here so you will know forever
the silences in which are our beginnings, in which we
have an origin like water.
And the wind shifted.
And the window clasp opened and banged.
And I woke up to find the poetry books stacked
higgledy piggledy, my skirt spread out where I had laid it.
Nothing was changed.
Nothing was more clear.
But it was wet.
And the year was late.
The rain was grief in arrears.
My children slept the last dark out safely.
And I wept."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Yes?
A simple question, I suspect.
Is there a connection in the prose story
that you shared us with the Biblical grief of the Pieta?
So do you remember [INAUDIBLE]?
Yes, I do know the story.
And I do it.
I tried, as much as I could, to take this story
as I heard it from my mother.
And then it has all kinds of biblical references.
And I agree with you.
But as she told it to me, she told it to me
as a piece of sort of known family history.
You know what I mean?
An unprovable piece of narrative.
And I was so taken by it that I noted it down.
But I think there are echoes in it.
But I don't think she told them with those echoes.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes?
Could you tell us a little about your process
of writing as a writer and how you
derive these wonderful poems?
Well, it's changed.
It is certainly changed since I was younger.
I grew up in a literary city.
Certainly, when I was 18 or 19, people always
sat at cafe tables and wrote poems straight off, you know.
And I certainly thought that any poem that you could write
in a weekend wasn't worth it.
I changed all of that.
There were no workshops.
There was no revision.
There was nothing like that in Dublin.
But it changed over the years very much in terms of revision.
That may be a sociological thing.
I suspect that a missing factor in poetry today,
an undocumented factor compared with 100 years ago,
is how much people can do with their heads or how little.
I'm an outgrowth of a later stage.
I can do very little in my head.
But I'm convinced that there were people who
could do a lot in their head.
And therefore, they could do the last process pretty quickly.
For me, the work is as I write.
It's not-- I don't write when it's done.
So I think the, for me, the process is entirely
governed by the fact that what I write
becomes what I will change.
Nothing comes out of changes.
I wish it did.
I think it takes too long.
And Henry James said, it's taking too much of my life
to do too little of my work.
[LAUGHTER]
There's that whenever you do this thing.
Yes?
I was wondering, which four lines
did you fax to the airline?
[LAUGHTER]
I faxed four lines from a poem called "The Singers."
And I don't know that I-- "finding voice where
they found a vision" is the last line of it.
And so it's there, that they're all upside down.
And it's [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
I think that it was a very well-intentioned initiative.
But somehow, you know, it was one of those things in Ireland.
Ireland thinks up a lot of these things.
[LAUGHTER]
And not all of them come to fruition.
But that particular one did.
It's very hard when you're sitting, looking
at the seat in front of you, to know who knows what,
including myself.
And if you look at it, it's very collage-ey.
But those were the four lines.
But it's very hard to see them together as four lines there.
They're around the place.
But that they're woven into it.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes?
So one of your predecessors at Stanford was Denise Levertov.
Oh, certainly.
And she used a lot of the myths and classical allusions.
And I wondered what you think of her work.
I love Denise Levertov's work.
And I have the honor to [INAUDIBLE] Denise.
And she's irreplaceable.
I have the honor to come after Denise.
But I was a great admirer of hers from way back.
And she has a hugely interesting way
of doing almost a watercolor of myth.
It's so quick, and fresh, and immediate that it never
looks like myth.
So I love her work.
And her work, to me, looks more important every single day.
I really think so.
Yes?
You talk a lot about the disconnect
between past and history.
Yes.
And I'm wondering if you think that poets and other artists
have some kind of political imperative
to discover and expose that disconnect,
and why that disconnect exists in the first place?
I think there was several very interesting parts
of the question.
I'm in the--
I don't think poets as such have political imperatives.
And I think people are right to stand by the process
and privacy of the artist.
It would be very difficult in Ireland in the last 25 years
to not hit somewhere deeply at [INAUDIBLE],,
whether or not you're political.
And you live in the toxic climate
of the gaps between language and the gaps between the past
and history.
I don't think it's a political imperative for poets.
And I wouldn't presume to say so.
But it was very important for me,
because Irish history is a very compelling and very assertive
narrative.
And I did not want to take my meaning as an Irish person
from a story of heroes.
I didn't need to do that.
I think what we are and who we are is infinitely more
important than the story of heroes.
We survived.
We were human.
We lived through it.
And we should honor that.
The story of heroes is a very seductive story.
And it is usually the story of the strongest.
It's not the story of everybody.
And so, to me, it was important, for me.
And I certainly would not commend that to anybody else
if they have their own journey.
I would say that Irish writing from Joyce onwards
has been very conscious of it.
And although Irish literature was heavily
accessorized by the national tradition in the 19th century,
I think 20th century Irish writers
began to break away in one way or another,
whatever they called it.
And that was part of it.
Yes?
Can you talk a little bit about how
you do or don't place yourself in the Irish tradition of being
a writer in exile and how that may or may not
have changed your sense of your voice
or your sense of your perspective?
Well, I grew up as a Irish writer.
I learned the unwisdom of placing myself anywhere
in that tradition.
And I think I would certainly say that--
there's an old jazz phrase, 'once you've been there,
there you are'.
There is no way that I don't always--
I'm always in Ireland.
And I will always be.
And I suspect that's true of most Irish people.
And so, yes, in the sense of the broadening of something,
I do think that it is very important that we--
I started way back.
But we did not have a hubris as writers.
Irish writing was commendable because it was human,
because the Irish story was a dramatization
of the human story, not the other way around.
If we were going to sit down and say,
it's important because it's Irish,
then it's really a narrow view.
And I didn't agree with that.
But I do think you change and you re-change.
And I think you re-change your dialogue
with the place you came from.
I have been very critical of Ireland.
And I believe it is the duty of the writer
to make those critiques and to continue those critiques.
[INAUDIBLE] wrote a thing about--
she said the measure of the writer
is the ability to use their words
against their own loyalties.
And certainly, I think Irish writers have
made a very good try at that.
It's, at times, easy as an Irish writer to be moved by the story
beyond criticism.
But it is no service to the story.
And I think the right thing is to be in the critique.
I thought of myself as, because I was a woman,
because I think there were genuine tensions in that
country, that they certainly could see women
as women writers.
But they found it very difficult to see women as Irish writers
with the ability to change the past and write the future.
I certainly believed that a literature
without the voice and the vision of women
disfigures the national literature.
And I certainly believe that all the way through.
I do genuinely think things have changed.
But for me, it certainly was about writing poems.
It's a very intense country.
And it's very intense about its literature.
And the danger is you will all end up
talking about something that isn't literature.
And that's the-- charming as that may be at certain times,
it's also digressive.
So I think I was unbelievably fortunate to be
born in that place at that time when those great writers had
found the way through.
And I think every Irish writer of my generation
thinks exactly the same.
Yes?
I'm wondering if I could request another poem that you
might have that you would read?
I think that's in the subjunctive [INAUDIBLE]..
[LAUGHTER]
A "Woman Turns Herself into a Fish."
Yes.
But thank you for asking.
Let me find it now.
And it was a long time ago.
And --
"Unpod the bag, the seed, slap the flanks back.
Flatten paps.
Make finny scaled and chill.
The slack and dimple of the rump.
Pout the mouth, and brow the eyes, and now.
And now eclipse in these hips, these loins, the moon,
the blood flux.
It's done.
I turn.
I flab upward, blub-lipped, hipless.
And I am sexless, shed of ecstasy, a pale swimmer,
sequin-skinned, pearling eggs, screamlessly in seaweed.
It's what I set my heart on.
Yet ruddering and muscling in the sunless tons
of new freedoms, still I feel a chill pull, a brightening,
a light, a light.
And how, in my loomy cold, my greens.
Still, she moons in me."
Right.
So [INAUDIBLE].
[APPLAUSE]