Saturday, June 4, 2016

Letters in Poems: The Lost Art of Letter Writing

Eava Boland (1944) is an Irish poet and director of Stanford's Creative Writing Program. She is a prolific writer who describes herself as "woman poet", because she has always had trouble reconciling those two words. "It was like there was a magnetic opposition between the two concepts", she said. "The woman coming from the collective sense of nurture in Ireland, and the poet coming from the much more individualist, creative realm".

Here is a poem by here about letter writing. I also recommend clicking here to listen to the author reading her text. 

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.


The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers


Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,


Always performing—even when a shadow
Fell across the page and they 
knew the answer
Was not forthcoming—the same action:


First the leaning down, the pen becoming 
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory. 
Then the letting up,


The lighter stroke, which brought back
Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel 
Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass


Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn 
Again just in time for the May Novenas
Recited in sweet air on a road leading


To another road, then another one, widening
To a motorway with four lanes, ending in
A new town on the edge of a city


They will never see. And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see


The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became


Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew 


By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?



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