Journal entry, Johnny Foley’s pub, poetry reading Campbell, Boland, Tracy 10/5/00

10/5/2000 We’re gathered at Johnny Foley’s pub in San Francisco for a poetry reading with Siobhan Campbell, Eavan Borland, and Bob Tracy. Johnny Foley’s does it up right with little sandwiches, and cheese bites. When I was last here was for the Irish poetry festival Finnegan’s Awake. It’s the same crowd, the event is funded by the American Ireland fund. Bob Tracey, an eminent James Joyce scholar, is emcee, introducing what he calls the 70s wave of Irish women poets. Bob Tracy says the second book can either make or break a writer, Eavan Boland is most renowned for her second book, The War Horse, published in 1975, she has nearly 20 books under her belt. She explores themes in the Mother Ireland tradition, she explainsthat so many poems were written by men where the women became objects, incapable of speaking. She explores the permutations of the role of women and Irish national identity. She mentions how permanent wave can be a gesture of greeting, or a farewell. In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), explored the ordinary lives of women and the extraordinary obstacles women poets faced in a male-dominated literary world. Her poetry is liquid nitrogen. She invokes the air, Saint Brigid, and the forced silence women bear. Words draw meaning out of sound. If a prayer cannot be read aloud, is it any less of a prayer?