Boland's Momentous Transit

Well, we have a chance to collect ourselves this week, a chance to take a break from the reading, to get ready for Northern Ireland and the Troubles next week ... but, more importantly, for the moment, a chance, with our film viewing of The Commitments (1991), to laugh a little, to sing a little, and to root for Jimmy Rabbitt and his North Dublin underdogs. My favorite moment, I think, is when the band, knowing at this point that they've got something special going, slow things down to perform "The Dark End of the Street": it's powerful stuff, for sure. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it. Take notes, raise questions, store away some observations, and we'll plan to discuss the film during the second half of class on Wednesday.

All that said, I have to admit I feel loath to leave Eavan Boland, Object Lessons, and those poignant poems. You heard Feist's new song "Graveyard" before our last class, in part because I was so moved by that chorus "bring them all back to life," thinking that it worked so nicely with Boland's project of trying to recover individual women and women's voices from the "suggestive hinterland of pain" (OL 127). Our vantage point puts us on the near end of what Boland refers to as "a momentous transit," one that "inevitably changes our idea of measurement, of distance, of the past as well as the future. And as it does so, it changes our idea of the Irish poem, of its completion and authority, of its right to appropriate certain themes and make certain fiats" (126). Be thinking about precisely what she has in mind with that transit, and what her specific role is in moving it along. I like this book so much because it teaches us a lot about Irish poetry, Irish nationalism and history, the self-questionings of the aspiring poet (especially the aspiring female poet), and about poetic subject matter and truth, generally. She starts out working for "the clear line, the pure stanza" (218) and ends up pursuing "the dial of a washing machine, the expression in a child's face" (193). I wish we had had to time to talk about another of her many turning points: the observations she makes about Chardin's paintings and what message they hold for her poetry. Late in the text, too, she struggles very honestly and searchingly with her relationship to feminism, lured at times by feminism's promise "to ease her technical problems with the solvent of polemic" (245), but aware as well of the dangers of "separatist prescriptions" (243).

Anyway, there's so much more to cover and to be said relative to this material; to that end, do feel free to leave a lingering thought or two in this space (especially those of you who did not get a chance to weigh in during class with a quote or moment that was suggestive and important for you), to keep the conversation alive.