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 writ-
ers.’’ 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 dia-
logue 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 minor-
ity in a writing culture is, ‘‘Where does the power
lie? Who has the power?’’ I remember a woman
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 cri-
tique 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 inter-
action between the newspapers and the univer-
sities. 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, ‘‘HowOutside History