Eavan Boland, Interviewed by Jody Allen-Randolph in PN Review 93 (1993)
The poem she inherited:
I just tried to write someone else's poem: the poem in the air. It wasn't my poem. It was an inherited mixture of the British Movement poem - overtones of Larkin, with postures of irony - and the Irish lyric, with postures of mood and melancholy. It had moving parts. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. It may not even have been the worst sort of poem to try to write. It was quite formal, quite challenging in a structural way. You could practice your fingering fairly well with it. Nevertheless there I was, in a flat in Morehampton Road, which had a real oilskin tablecloth which I can still see, struggling almost every evening to write someone else's poem.
On formalism:
I still think there are worse things for a poet to have than a coincidence between an intense formal initiation and the first feel, the first tang of imaginative excitement. And that's the real theme of the book for me: that's what I still recognize in poems like 'The Poets' - just the excitement in that flat in Morehampton Road, of writing poems. Of feeling I was a poet. And of course that's also the flaw in the book. It's written by a poet. That's the lens I used almost all the time. I never did that again. All the same, I have an affection for New Territory. It was a very intense book to write. I understand the impatience some people have expressed about it being formalist, and so on. On th eother hand, it's too much of a received truth of poetry critics to talk about formalism in a young poet as something negative, or as necessarily covering an evasion of feeling. I don't quite see it that way. There is a fear of feeling in almost every emerging poet. You're not sure what's the proper self and what's simply transmuted egotism. Somehow the engagement with form helped me to know one from the other. I was still a long way from integrating psycho-sexual themes with imaginative strategies. I wouldn't even have recognized that language when I was writing New Territory. But I knew there were ways of disciplining tone and impulse.
'Are buds less welcome to the April bough
Because they open where all others have?
Is snow less white, the wingspan of the crow
Less black because their purities survive
From past to future and from then to now?
And so is any love not any love?'
Her name is Yoshimi - she's a black belt in karate
Working for the city - she has to discipline her body -
Cause she knows that it's demanding to defeat these
Evil machines - I know she can beat them -
Oh Yoshimi
They don't believe me
But you won't let those
Robots defeat me
Oh Yoshimi
They don't believe me
But you won't let those
Robots eat me
Those evil natured robots - they're programmed to
Destroy us - She's gotta be strong to fight them -
So she's taking lots of vitamins - cause she knows that
It'd be tragic if those evil robots win - I know
She can beat them -
