Eavan Boland

Like, it's an amazing thing.

But one thing I read was, and I write about this in the memoir, was Eavan Boland's, um, poem, Night Feeding.

And I, it was about bottle feeding.

And so my daughter's birth injury meant she couldn't breastfeed, and I was bottle feeding her.

And you can read a few paragraphs and put it down.

And that...

So reading Eavan Boland took me to memoir, which was easier to get into than fiction in some way.

Ah.

They're kind of performances.

Um, I, I mean, I mean, if you look at what's happened in poetry, um, e- even with the ways, um, someone like Eavan Boland will use a single plain sentence to stand for something.

Uh, Sylvia Plath, I, I mean, I mean, even with something like, um, you know, um, "Daddy, I've had to kill you.

You died before I had time." You know, when she goes, "Daddy, I've finally through.

Yeah.

So that, um, f- it was from s- from reading Sylvia Plath and paying real attention to the diction.

And a- also, um, E- Eavan Boland, um, when I worked, uh, she was my boss at Stanford, kept introducing me to further staccato writing.

[laughs]

Yeah.

There's a version of me that thought of the image in one way, and then I read Evan Boland.

So post-reading the essay, I actually would suggest that you are someone who is very invested in the image.

But it is largely, again, it's the negotiation of what the image does.