No ideas but in things

I think I disagree with this, but still:

“Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer’s prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance that will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to look back.” — James Baldwin,Autobiographical Notes

I read a quote from you where you stated you are a feminist and a poet, but you don’t consider yourself a “feminist poet”. Can you elaborate on this distinction?

“I’ve always been feminist, since I was a very young woman in Ireland, and at a time when women were very hampered by inequities there. And I’ve always believed that advantages, freedoms gained for women, are not sectional: they are necessary and balancing for a whole society. In that sense, feminism is a compelling ethic. But it’s not an aesthetic. I’ve always been certain of its central value. But the truth is that poetry begins- as all art does - where certainties end. That’s the departure point. It’s rooted where the imagination is rooted: in ambiguities and darknesses and memories and obsessions that aren’t available to ethics, but are capable of truth. So, even though the distinction seems too fine, it has meaning for me. Feminism has helped me see society differently, and define myself as a writer differently. But it stops at the margins of the poem, at the edge of the act of writing it.” — Eavan Boland, interviewed here. 

Since it’s not quite 7 on a Saturday morning (and I’ve been up since 5:30), I’m not going to be able to comment on this coherently. But I consider myself a feminist poet - and I do consider it an aesthetic, one that has many strengths. (An example here.) While Eavan Boland says that poetry begins where certainty ends, her poems are grounded in the real, in specific, concrete, historic events. (An example here.) They are rooted in the imagination, but more so they are rooted in the historic, the un-imaginable, the certain.

When I saw Eavan Boland speak at Bread Loaf, she said, “if history is an abattoir then what are we as poets going to do about it?”

In Memory of Adrienne Rich

This, and her 1997 National Enowment for the Arts letter, remind me so much of Sharon Olds’ Open Letter to Laura Bush.

nationalbook:

Adrienne Rich’s history-making 1974 National Book Award acceptance speech