Common Themes, Common Threads

Here are some new blogs I've found. The Laundry Narrative and The Thrifty Poet. Interestingly, the Laundry Narrative blogger doesn't describe laundry as one of the things she's interested in (on her profile) and Thrifty Poet doesn't have any poems on her blog, but they both seem to like clothes, one of them is a mom, and there is a lot of colorful musing going on. I can get behind that. Oh, and Thrifty Poet does list several very important books by poets on her list of books she wants to read. Donald Hall, Louise Bogan, and Eavan Boland -- which is how I found her blog in the first place.

Cassie Premo Steele actually has an entire post about Eavan Boland, and quotes a piece of her prose, one of my favorite bits.

“The more I lifted a child, conscious of nothing but the sweetness of a child’s skin, or the light behind an apple tree, or rain on the slates, the more language and poetry came to my assistance.” ---Eavan Boland

I'm eating my lunch at work and since I don't like to eat at the computer, I'm searching for something new about EB to read while I eat my lunch at my little round office table. I didn't get very far.

But, in other news, I have decided to diary again, and even to try PAD, if I can find the time. Oh, and write my thesis. Remember that?

I've been worried that I needed something 'new' for my thesis, some new spin, and I've been thinking that while so much scholarship about EB focuses on her as a poet, I could focus on her as a mother -- that the role of domestic imagery in her poems is not just political or feminist, but deeply personal. That while she write poems about being a fore-bearer for other women poets (and there is plenty of criticism about that), she's also a fore-bearer for mothers who want to write. She is a fore-mother. Not a forefather. No. It seems that Cassie Premo Steele agrees with me.

"This is why Eavan Boland’s writing is, for mother writers, revolutionary: she asserts that the selfish, interiorly focused mother can be a poet. Not just be a poet, but also somehow a good poet. And a good mother."

Maybe I'll making some progress after all. A photo for good luck.



Found at this new blog, Fiber Fantasies, when searching for a new photo of EB. What luck. So much richness.