The Poetics of Hearing

For the ten weeks I studied under her, Eavan insisted upon reading each text from the syllabus aloud—poems, excerpts, whole novellas.

“How is it?” curious friends of mine, and poetic fans of hers, asked excitedly throughout the quarter.

“It’s kind of like Eavan Boland is reading me a bedtime story,” I answered.

In hindsight this remains an accurate simile. A peppering of adjectives and modifiers stacked like dominoes around her speech. They punctuated the text. Right. Well. Yes. Lovely, lovely. Good. Her hellos were curt and her goodbyes were nods.

On our first day, I recognized this voice and cadence within seconds of hearing it spill out from the doorframe. It was a Dublin dialect, artfully diluted, similar to the one I once knew from my late grandmother Brenda. Or as I imagine I once knew it, I tell my mother. I cannot remember grandma reading me any particular bedtime stories; certainly no Beckett or Joyce or John Millington Synge.

This is not for lack of opportune time together—though she passed when I was six— but maybe for lack of intellectual opportunity itself. In Dublin she left school at fifteen to begin working. She was married at twenty, pregnant at twenty-one, and divorced at twenty-four. She had my mother in Dublin at twenty-three, in 1962—the same year Eavan entered Trinity College and published 23 Poems, her first collection.

I know enough about Irish dialect to know that Eavan’s cosmopolitan education and grandma’s hurried metropolitan one likely yielded many discrepancies in formal accent; the similarity between the voices of these two women is not to be confused with sameness, my mom reminds me over the phone. And yet the sound of Eavan’s voice is the relic that most connects me back not only to a romantic, constructed conception I have of my late grandmother, but also to the national Irish literature for which Eavan’s voice was a solid theoretical frame in my education. Who owns a national literature? She would pause the reading and ask. How much can a national literature tell of the real truth? In my notebook and in my own silent reading, these questions of hers echo in my ears and seep into the primary text.

“We have no oracles,” Eavan wrote in 1993 in “In Which the Ancient History I Learn is Not My Own,”

no rocks or olive trees,
no sacred path to the temple
and no priestesses—
the teacher’s voice had a London accent.
This was London.
This was England. 1952.
It was Ancient History class.

Ireland was far away.
And farther away
every year.

Eavan’s Dublin—as she knew it through her own literature and imagination— is not the Dublin of my grandmother’s experience. Yet I do not doubt that for the years they shared the city their soles walked the same sidewalks and their minds wandered down similar alleys. They were both transient dwellers there; my grandmother early in her life and Eavan later on. For the few years they overlapped in the city, in the early 1960s, my mom was born in Rotunda Hospital, a fifteen- minute walk from the edge of Trinity campus. I imagine Eavan and Brenda, albeit wistfully, both crossing over the O’Connell Bridge— walking home, running to the grocery store. This image is the great gift of Eavan’s poetry. Her personal opportunities and accomplishments may have been exceptional to the standard, twentieth century Irish woman— but her voice was always in service to her—an extension, and an echo, of that life.

Sound, like the notion of place or belonging, is an easy sense to forget or misremember until a memory is sparked or sparked again. This is especially true in the tradition of storytelling and literature: the memory of a story is jogged just as the teller begins to retell, and the act of telling is essential to the continuation of memory itself. The act of recounting, remembering, and retelling is integral to literary fiction, narrative plot, and emotional arc. In the final moments of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” for example, Greta Conroy pauses on a staircase, moved beyond movement, upon hearing “The Lass of Aughrim” played in a nearby room.

“What about the song?” Gabriel Conroy asks his wife later, unaware of the memory the song has triggered within her, the memory of a lost love and a forgotten place. The song becomes a metonym for so much else that has been forgotten in the text and in her life: Michael Furey, Galway, old Ireland and the culture that goes with it.

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

I read these words in Eavan’s voice, as it is how they first came to me while sitting in her class. Associating stories with the spaces and voices that first bring them to us is a sacred blessing in the study of literature, and in this way I am especially privileged. I read some of the most canonical works of twentieth century Irish literature in Eavan Boland’s voice. I feel the ways she would be accepting of certain characters and skeptical of others. I feel how her voice would trail up, quickly, at the turn of a question, or stop, abruptly, and certainly, at a story’s conclusion—how she would laugh, out loud and wholly alone, at a reference that was over my head.

To know a poet’s voice is to recognize a specific style or personality in the printed words: you can hear Joyce in “The Dead” and the rest of his work without ever hearing him in person. You can hear Eavan’s shrewdly observant honesty in her poems: “where exactly / was my old house?” she asks in “In Which the Ancient History I Learn is Not My Own.” Yet to feel a poet’s voice is notably different. It is to experience their literal oration vibrating through the room, to hear how they decorate and pause over words, to understand where they would stop reading and why. Though more ephemeral in nature, the spoken voice of the poet-teacher is equally as enduring as the literary one. To the writers and readers who knew Eavan’s voice, it proved to be both singular and collective, certain and questioning, localized and broad. I value what the canon did. She looks up through her reading glasses, swiping a finger over the illuminated screen and coming to the end of the story. She clicks to lock her iPad and crosses her hands on the table. But I don’t disvalue what it didn’t.