I’ve been reading Poetry in Theory, which is an anthology of essays by poets and philosophers written between 1900 and 2000 and today, I read Eavan Boland’s essay The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma. She talks about how the Irish woman poet had to fight multiple ‘force fields’ every time she sat down to write–’romantic heresy’ on the one hand and separatist feminism on the other. Romantic heresy ‘sets limits on what is to count as poetic experience’. It allowed a woman poet to write only about certain things, ‘poetic’ things. She could write about other things only as long as she invested them with sufficient ‘poetic experience’. Feminism liberated her to write about her everyday experiences but prescribed the mood and tone, that of anger. For a poet, both were equally restrictive and stunting.
Boland wrote this essay in 1986-7, twenty years ago and she was speaking very specifically about conditions in Ireland. Some of it may be relevant even now, and even in other places where British poetry is an influence. Or the specific force fields may differ but the general notion may still be relevant.
For example, I can think of two different force fields that affect me, and possibly, other IE poets–what the British and Americans say English poetry should be and what people who write in other Indian languages say poetry should be. The feminist identity does not affect me as much, or not that I’m aware of. I do write about women a lot but that’s never been agenda-driven, more a natural outcome of preoccupations at the time.
The way Boland confronted the dilemma was to look at other art forms that provided a different way of looking. And she found a way to break through in painting:
The precedents for this were in painting rather than poetry…In the genre painters of the French eighteenth century — in Jean Baptiste Chardin in particular — I saw what I was looking for. Chardin’s paintings were ordinary in the accepted sense of the word. They were unglamorous, workaday, authentic. Yet in his work, these objects were not merely described; they were revealed. The hare in its muslin bag, the crusty loaf, the woman fixed between menial tasks and human dreams — these stood out, a commanding text.
This part resonated with me. I love the way Chardin builds tension, even menace, into a collection of mundane things. The cat looks poised to jump in both these pictures and one imagines the chaos that will follow–the kitchen disordered, people screaming, perhaps the meal for a party or big event ruined, fights as a result, domestic squalor. The possibility of so much noise and living in this ordinary kitchen moment.
By the time I started writing, we were no longer mired in romantic heresy (thank god). I think there was a happy mix of ‘poetic’ subjects and the ordinary in our English poetry which meant that I never felt that kind of constraint. The equivalent force field I can think of would be political or socially engaged poetry. As I was telling someone yesterday, I burden under quite a bit of guilt. How can one not bear witness to terrible things? Isn’t that self-indulgent? At the same time, I recently trashed three different poems — on the Gujarat riots, the Bhopal tragedy, and on Kashmiri widows respectively — because I felt they were just not working as art. I was not being able to get into the situations enough to bear witness with any integrity. It’s okay to write shallow poems sometimes. Less okay to write them on the backs of other people’s tragedies.
Another bit that resonated with me:
From painting, I learned something else of infinite value to me. Most young poets have bad working habits. They write their poems in fits and starts, by feast or famine. But painters follow the light. They wait for it and do their work by it. They combine artisan practicality with vision.
The way she uses that is to find a time in her daily routine that would amount to her ‘best light’, and make the most of that time. This is relevant for a lot of people who have to balance day jobs or children with writing. I don’t really have to do that at the moment but I think it’s a good principle to work by in any case. Painterly habits also makes me think of Monet’s painting of the Rouen Cathedral which he did in different lights at different times of the day, to see how it changed. One of the things I’ve been trying is to read / edit a poem at different times in a day and see how that works.
She ends with saying that the ‘dilemma persists; the cross-currents continue.’
What I wished most ardently for myself at a certain stage of my work was that I might find my voice where I had found my vision….Artistic forms are not static. Nor are they radicalised by aesthetes and intellectuals. They are changed, shifted, detonated into deeper patterns only by the sufferings and self-deceptions of those who use them.
I like that last line a lot. Sufferings, but especially self-deceptions.
