This article is taken from PN Review 118, Volume 24 Number 2, November - December 1997.
Letter to a Young Woman PoetI wish I knew you. I wish I could stand for a moment in that corridor of craft and doubt where you will spend so much of your time. But I don't and I can't. And given the fact, in poetic terms, that you are the future and I am the past, I never will. Then why write this? It is not, after all, a real letter. It doesn't have an address. I can't put a name at the top of it. So what reason can I have for writing in a form without a basis to a person without a name?
I could answer that the hopes and silences of my first years as a poet are still fresh to me. But that in itself is not an explanation. I could tell you that I am a woman in my early fifties, writing this on a close summer night in Ireland. But what would that mean to you? If I tell you, however, that my first habitat as a poet is part of your history as a poet: is that nineteenth century full of the dangerous indecision about who the poet really is. If I say I saw that century survive into the small, quarrelsome city where I began as a poet. That I studied its version of the poet and took its oppressions to heart. If I say my present is your past, that my past is already fixed as part of your tradition. And ...
The page you have requested is restricted to subscribers only. Please enter your username and password and click on 'Continue'.
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 284 issues containing over 11,400 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 284 issues containing over 11,400 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?