Adrienne Rich & Eavan Boland at DIA

The DIA Arts Foundation, way west on 22nd Street in New York's new Chelsea arts hub, hosted Eavan Boland and Adrienne Rich, Friday evening, May 9 at 7:30 pm. The readings are held in a large pure white gallery space. Many tech guys with walkie-talkies, elegant keepsake programs with poem broadsides tipped in (designed by Sherrie Levine), and brilliant intros by Series Coordinator Brighde Mullins. The space seats 250 -- all sold ($5) by 7:15.

Eavan Boland is the model for poet in the next millennium. The first Irish woman poet to surface, she flips the classic/romantic mode that has been poetry's underlying conceit -- woman as object/subject -- to woman as Maker. Her poems rip the words from the text of history to reveal the face of the faceless seethe of human beings on whose bodies power has built roads to nowhere.

The shaman resides in the body of a woman, a mother, a wife, a teacher only insofar as to redefine the role of the spiritual for a new culture: eyes open to the trickery of the tongue which lashes away in the language of the oppressor. In her strong beauty we hear of:

• picking up a daughter from a party at 7:30 am ("The Blossom"),
• the horrors of the lost roads of Ireland which the British forced peasants to build to "escape" the Potato Famine ("That the Science of Cartography Is Invented"),
• a piece of a new sequence, Colony, called "Why I Do Not Speak Irish," which dives into the heart of the authenticity question.

It was a reading covering the room in gentle awe, quiet and sure and unflinchingly intelligent. Adrienne Rich, who drew the maps which allowed Boland to find her way, began her reading by saying of Eavan that she didn't know of another poet from anywhere who came to the complex, divided, and energetic American poetry scene with such intelligence and generosity. Here here. Hear hear.

Adrienne's own reading was truly generous as well, a "retrospective," which began with "Unsounded," written when she was 21, and concluding with "Midnight Salvage," which appears in the recent Politics issue of Longshot as "In the City of Explanations." This poem, a symphony of sorts, pushes images of loss and grief out of newspaper language and into the reader's heart, and is a new direction for the poet. Her early poems, many written when she was a wife and a young mother, were much more formal and contained than the poetry she has become known for. They granted her audience a new way in to her work, and gave new sisterly basis for connections with Boland's work.

This was a courageous reading by two extraordinary visionary poets. Historic, in the way that history itself was redefined herein as belonging to those whose voices were written out of the books, but exist in the blood. This reading was a song of, for, and by women, of, for, and by humanity. It filled the room with tempered joy, tempered with pain as real as memory. This reading filled the crowded room with a sense of true possibility: with words this inspiring, action becomes a necessary part of the poetry.

-- Bob Holman

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