Yes, there’s a huge amount of literary activ-
ity going in Galway. Jessie Lendennie [poet-
editor of Salmon Press in Galway] was in my
national workshop in 1984—a wonderful pres-
ence in it. I’ve known of those tentacles of energy
for years, but it hasn’t been easy to get any
visibility for them. It’s easier for me because
I’m older, because I’ve always lived in a metro-
politan area.
Is it easier for a women poet in academe, like
yourself, to attain recognition?
I’m not in academe. I was a writer in resi-
dence last year at Trinity, and this year at
University College Dublin, but I would think
of myself as academically far from grace. Inter-
estingly, the contemporary poetry course in
Trinity this year carried not one woman poet!
It’s extraordinary to be taught outside in other
countries and not anywhere in your own. This is
the reason why when I’m in Boston I’m not
inclined to be quiet or conciliatory about it:
because these things have happened again and
again and because they have been passively sanc-
tioned. The male Irish poets have treated exclu-
sion as invention, but there is absolutely no
doubt that that exists. There is no give on this
issue. It is a matter of fact.
Are there academics in Ireland who would
promote the work of women? Women academics?
The theme for the American Conference for Irish
Studies conference this fall is ‘‘Women and Chil-
dren First.’’
Yes, that’s very interesting. If you look back
atEire Ireland, for example, there are almost no
references to women’s writing. The ACIS—yes,
there are wonderful women there, but I think
that ACIS itself has been conservative, the insti-
tution itself. The academic in Ireland has had
remarkably little to do with the writing of poetry,
but it has a great deal to do with the dissemina-
tion of it. The problem, I think, is a compound
psycho-perception in this country that women
are in many ways the caryatids of community.
They hold on their shoulders the lives and the
shelters—and it’s not to say a great regard is
not had for them—but as the unindividualized
generic feminine presence.
In your American Poetry Review essay,
‘‘Outside History’’ [April 1990], you rue the fact
that male poets have made ‘‘the image of the
woman the pretext of a romantic nationalism.’’
Certainly: and the nation is an old woman
and needs to be liberated. But she’s passive; and
if she stops being passive and old she becomes
young and ornamental. Therefore, within our
perception of women as being in the house, as
being in the kitchen, holding things together,
there’s the perception of the male very often as
the active and anarchic principle: and therefore
nominated as male is the individual, the bardic,
the dangerous, the expressive, partly because
those were male, but partly because the trans-
action between the male and the female in liter-
ature is an active-passive one. But basically this
community nominates women as the receptors
of other people’s creativity and not as the initia-
tors of their own. Then we have the Church
to support and give a sacro-quality to these per-
ceptions. If you take a woman in a town which
no doubt is strongly influenced by its Catholic
past and its rural customs—where women were
counseled patience and its silent virtues—a
woman who suddenly says, ‘‘Now I’m going to
express myself,’’ that society is not going to give
her the same permission as to a 23-year-old male
with black curly hair. So she’s already under a
lesser set of permissions to explore her own gift,
and a greater sense of inferences that that gift is
dangerous to her tradition of womanhood.
These are huge pressures!
Enough to make feminists out of women poets?
I think it’s important that women writers
don’t have to be feminists, don’t have to be any-
thing. They just have to have enough oxygen to
write. I don’t care what their political persua-
sions are.
You’re not a separatist.
No, I’m not a separatist. I think that sepa-
ratism in a small country like Ireland would be
another form of censorship. In a funny way,
being a separatist might have been advantageous
to me. It would probably have made me a less
suspect figure on the left of the women’s move-
ment here—who I think have had difficulties
with me. They wouldn’t see me as feminist
enough, you see. It’s the old story of the hare
and the tortoise. They always see me as the tor-
toise. They don’t understand that often you’re
just trying to get discriminatory funding out of
the Arts Council so there are not six traveling
fellowships for women under thirty, or artists
under thirty, so that women with children can’t
take them up. But I think the maximum pressureOutside History