Christopher Kempf | November 2023

Christopher Kempf

In savagery, only Yvor Winters could measure up to her.

Whereas her predecessor at Stanford trafficked habitually in the ad hominem, however—Frost, Winters believed, was a “menace to the general intelligence,” Stevens a “hedonist”—Eavan Boland leveled her criticism while reminding us in almost every workshop that we were engaged in one of the great and worthwhile pursuits of the species.

She was a diplomat’s daughter.

Where we had failed, Eavan made clear, others had failed before us—like no teacher I have known, she pursued the defects of a poem back through western poetics to their source, implicitly dignifying our work even as she eviscerated it. “It is a mistake,” Eavan said once, years before ecopoetics popularized the argument, “to make external landscapes indicative of internal mood,” tracing the error through Yeats to Rousseau and back to Herrick’s rosebuds. Of another poem—I have, as with much of Eavan’s pedagogy, documented the statement but not its occasion—she suggested that “the ironization of the speaker is irreparably flawed,” indicting irony as the “leftover debris of an exploded modernism.” “The Catholic countries,” she offered, one of many hand-grenade generalizations she tendered as fact, “aren’t ironic”—indeed, we somehow happened to agree, they were not. 

I was twenty-seven years old, barely published, and, when I moved to California to become a Stegner Fellow in the fall of 2012, the first in my family to set foot anywhere west of Chicago. I had no idea what she was talking about.

That Eavan chased her criticism with literary history hardly made it more bearable—that not one of us was spared that criticism did. 

Though Eavan had her favorites, we took solace in the knowledge that each of us, sooner or later, would find ourselves irradiated in the cold glare of her intelligence. “You cannot do this, I assure you,” she said of one poem, “the laws of physics forbid it.” Of another: “the ending is disastrously wrong.” Or: “the poem needs draconian advice.” Often she damned with faint praise, singling out some ancillary feature of a poem for which she otherwise had little regard. “Good line-breaking,” I have written in my notes from one workshop. “Very nice figuration,” she said in another. More encouraging was the suggestion that one had almost, if not for an ill-considered misstep, produced a piece of writing worthy of the Stegner workshop. “There’s some interesting stuff here,” she said once, “but I think there’s a significant mistake.” On another occasion: “it’s a crucial thing to suppress narrative, but there’s a difference between a mysterious poem and a cryptic one.” Only once in my time at Stanford, an occurrence so notable that I have underlined it twice, did Eavan praise a poem without offering a single suggestion for revision. The poem was Hugh Martin’s “The American War,” and of it she said only four words, what each of us had wanted to hear since we’d met her: “It’s a good poem.”

By today’s standards, the pedagogy seems downright medieval. In a higher education industry committed to empowering students through language use—one which attunes them, ideally, to its expressive capacities and social potential—Eavan’s workshops suggest a particularly academic genus of affliction. “I approach students as critical co-investigators, rather than passive listeners,” I wrote for one job application this past year. “I shape collaborative environments in which students feel inspired to take risks.” Eavan, in contrast, advised that “you really don’t want to do this, Chris—I mean, seriously.” Eavan, wheeling her hawklike gaze upon some other poor unfortunate, said “this is really, really, really not good writing.”

At the heart of Eavan’s savagery, though, was the conviction that language mattered, that attending closely to what she called the poem’s “theater of action” might prepare us for close attention and careful thinking outside of that theater, modeling our engagement, through language, with the world and its inhabitants. To Eavan, our egos were beside the point. In entering the mystery of the word, we assumed responsibility for its care, a burden as daunting, it seemed to me, as it was ancient. “The poetry business,” she told us once, “is full of Sunday painters who want to be Saturday painters”—if we were going to do it at all, she meant, we might as well do it right.

***

Eavan would have learned this responsibility—to language and its history, to the precision of statement and justness of structure—from her father before anyone else. 

As the Irish ambassador to Great Britain, Frederick Boland possessed by all accounts precisely the linguistic facility he would have needed to manage negotiations on behalf of the former colony. “Observe him in the forties . . . discussing coal with the Ministry of Supply,” Eavan wrote in her 1995 essay “A Fragment of Exile.” “His country needs it and he will get it. . . . He will search hard for the right formula of words.”

If her father wielded those words on behalf of the Irish people, though, Eavan recognized that governments and other institutions might just as readily employ language in more insidious ways—it was this coopting of the vernacular, she held, which poets were bound by their office to resist. “The psyche of people can be constructed by the state,” she said in one workshop, glossing an argument she’d made years earlier in the essay “In Search of a Nation.” The true power of the state, she wrote there, lies in its ability “to construct its unseen inner life from the minds and memories of those who live in it. To turn inhabitants into citizens and citizens into patriots.” Part of what has made Eavan the most important Irish poet since Yeats, I would argue, is her recognition that Irish poetry itself perpetuated an ideology which denied the lived reality of half the population. Well before such arguments were fashionable, for instance, Eavan criticized the troping of women as symbols for the Irish nation. “[I]n using and reusing women as icons and figments, Irish poets were not just dealing with emblems,” she wrote in “Outside History.” “They were also evading the real women of an actual past, women whose silence their poetry should have broken.” The statement is thirty years old, the position it adumbrates older still, but both possess the ring of our own cultural moment—to adapt Richard Ellmann’s observation of James Joyce, her fellow countryman, we are still learning to be Eavan’s contemporaries.

That language constitutes a profound determinant of social and cultural values remained the premise of Eavan’s own poetry throughout her career. As early as 1987, she argued in “Mise Eire” that “a new language / is a kind of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before.” Eavan’s most anthologized poem, “Quarantine,” objects to representations of Irish history which romanticize women in the service of nationalist myth-making; having described the deaths of a husband and wife in the famine of 1847, Eavan warns against aestheticizing historical suffering. “Let no love poem ever come to this threshold,” she writes. “There is no place here for the inexact / praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.” Perhaps Eavan’s most skilled examination of the fraught relation between language and national identity, however, comes in one of the last poems she ever wrote, “The Break-Up of a Library in an Anglo-Irish House in Wexford: 1964.” Modeled after Frost’s “Directive”—the poem which made Frost the greatest American poet of the twentieth century, according to Eavan—“The Break-Up of a Library . . . ” combines ecological lament with postcolonial critique, diagnosing how imperial power encodes itself in and through language. As she watches the boarding up of the poem’s titular mansion, one of dozens from which a Protestant aristocracy ruled over a predominantly Catholic population, Eavan’s speaker seems torn between melancholy and emancipatory joy, the poem itself part elegy and part revelry. “[T]he end of empire is and will always be,” she writes, “not sedition nor the whisper / of conspiracy but that // slipper chair in the hallway / that has lost the name / no one will call it by again.” Eavan neither mourns nor quite celebrates the passing of the poem’s aristocracy, but one detects a note of wistfulness here for a richer, more accurate language—something wondrous has been lost, she suggests, even as something powerfully democratic has been gained. In this way, Eavan’s poem testifies beautifully to the value of an educated citizenry, one able to command language for its own empowerment—to distinguish, for example, between authentic and fake news—rather than be commanded by it. While Eavan never witnessed the January 6 attacks on the Capitol, the poem anticipates those events in its evocation of an empire undermined by the degradation of language—though Eavan places them in opposition, that is, she also suggests a continuity among sedition, conspiracy, and illiteracy. 

Even as she forged a distinctly feminist and anti-imperial poetics, though, Eavan refused to compromise the formal and intellectual integrity of her writing, deliberately eschewing the kinds of didacticism that marred the poetry of her male contemporaries. The political poem is “not exempt,” she maintained, “by virtue of contemporary reference, from the rules of vigilance and necessity which govern all poetic expression.” “Ideology is unambiguous,” she wrote elsewhere, “poetry is not,” a conviction borne out in the rich ambivalence of “The Break-Up of a Library . . . ” Influenced by New Critical notions of the poem as a balanced formal structure, Eavan decried poetry built around an ethical absolutism, poems in which a speaker exonerated themself from the critique they otherwise wielded so adroitly. “We are implicated in the events we deplore,” she insisted, usually when one of us had trotted out some self-righteous screed against Chase Bank or the Department of Defense or the bourgeois and perdurable tyranny of the nuclear family. In such writing, the “planes and angles of the poem become flattened out,” Eavan’s metaphor refiguring a poem’s tensions, ambivalences, and ambiguities as an almost geometrical architecture. “Where they should have jutted against a horizon, defining it by a sharp and challenging shape,” she wrote, “they made a continuum with it. Or in other words, they fitted smoothly into the context of public opinion and assumption.” For Eavan, successful poems rarely taught readers what to think. They taught them how to think, and did so through their dialectical structure.

Eavan is writing here about Irish poetry of the early twentieth century, but her statement seems a profound critique, avant la lettre, of a contemporary poetry culture the most celebrated texts of which sometimes collapse under critical pressure into one-dimensionality. Privileging plaintive force over nuance, homiletics over acuity of thought, form, and feeling, contemporary poetry, as Eavan taught us to recognize, too often strikes familiar poses for a coterie of like-minded enthusiasts. As she perceived within the feminist movements of the 1980s and 90s, an “emphasis on the appropriate subject matter and the correct feelings has become . . . constricting and corrupt.” This mattered for Eavan, as it might for us, because in delimiting the scope and style of poetry—reduced, if its major prizes are any indication, to four fashionable presses and two dozen Twitter-approved poets—so also do we delimit the genre’s radical potential. Eavan worked to preserve that potential; she objected not to socially committed poetry, but to poetry dulled in ethos and argument to what Oppen called “an advanced form of rhetoric.” The mistake, Eavan urges, is as much aesthetic as ethical—when we whet poetry into ideology, we instrumentalize language in ways that render it easy and appropriable; there comes to exist no point of friction, she suggests, no abrasion, between poetry and a state or culture industry which restlessly seek to co-opt it.

Poets sometimes believe ourselves independent of that industry, but Eavan’s work, perhaps especially her critique of the relation between language and power, asks us to consider that we might, in fact, constitute its very core. “Listen,” she advised back in 1985, impelling us even then to discern around us, in advertising copy and State of the Union speeches, in departmental memos and in poetry itself, the coarsening and commodification of the English language. “Listen,” Eavan wrote of those forms, now weaponized. “This is the noise of myth.”

***

The first time I heard her voice—sharp in elocution, unhesitating, the Irish brogue cut with a matter-of-fact cosmopolitanism—I was living in my parents’ basement and painting houses with a local construction company. I had just dropped out of graduate school, and my career as a writer, such as it was, extended no further than a handful of poems published in middling journals and a three-gallon Rubbermaid stuffed with rejections. In a computer folder from that year, I have saved job applications which evoke the despair and lack of direction I felt then, applications for everything from editorial assistantships with SUNY Press to organizer roles with AFSCME and SEIU to a Mobile Facilitator position with National Public Radio. “I look forward to hearing from you,” I ended these cover letters—invariably I never did.

When I say that Eavan changed my life, then, I mean that she plucked me from obscurity—the obscurity, quite literally, of the “Sunday painter”—and provided me with a sense of achievement and professional purpose I had never before experienced. Suddenly, I felt, I had been granted the gift and vocation of poetry. Suddenly, I was a Stegner Fellow, one of five poets to spend two fully funded years, as Eavan explained, writing and workshopping in Palo Alto. I recall very little of that conversation, but when I admitted to Eavan that I was “jumping around the room,” she responded with what I would come to recognize as characteristic remove. “Okay,” she stated, “goodbye then.” Among those who have received that call, recounting its specifics becomes a sort of ritual rehearsed at the slightest of promptings. My wife clocked out from a waitressing shift to find a voicemail from a Palo Alto area code. Another friend checked his phone in the middle of an AWP panel on small press publishing, stepping out to listen to a voicemail he has saved to this day. When I hung up with Eavan, I hugged my parents then ran around the house pumping my fists like an Olympic medalist. I marveled at photos of Stanford’s palm-lined avenues, its arcades and tiled plazas filtered in the distinct wash of NorCal sunlight. I whispered to myself the names of San Francisco neighborhoods, resonant, as I repeated them, with all the allure and mystery of the West: North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Haight-Ashbury. I had never heard those names before, and did not recognize them, except to know that I was moving there, and soon, and that what I had thought would be my life no longer would be. I grew out my hair that summer and made a playlist. I flew to California with a suitcase.

Those first months, and indeed for long after, the Stegner workshop felt because of Eavan like the absolute epicenter of the poetry universe, that locus from which radiated the culture’s forms and fashions and aesthetic-cum-ethical dernier cri. Eavan talked about poetry in a lexicon I had never heard, insisting that decisions at the level of line and syntax remained inextricable from larger questions of history and morality. Her language for the pitfalls into which we wandered was as various—and as wondrous and esoteric and illuminating—as poetry itself. “Do not narrate over a lyrical moment,” she cautioned one afternoon. “Repetition is anti-emotive,” she said on another occasion. Of another poem she warned that “metapoetics only works when the body politic of the poem is strong.” As she leveled these prescriptions, Eavan worked diligently to maintain diagnostic objectivity among her students. If John Berryman cultivated a sense of “joy” and “fellowship” in his workshops, as his student Philip Levine reports in “Mine Own John Berryman,” Eavan felt that knowing our classmates too well prevented us from assessing one another’s work. “Workshop cannot be a coterie,” she believed, since the searching out of a poem’s flaws required the utmost vigilance. A poem would be “over-figured,” as she often put it, or would suffer from an “oil-and-water acoustic,” or would mire readers in “the four-wheel drive of cerebral apprehension.” “Form,” she admonished one “metrist” in the workshop, “has a bullying effect on voice.” “If the speaker is unchanged, the poem is a failure—it is a fatal error, Chris.”

In a workshop that often resembled a form of cultural sparring, Eavan delighted in posing statements around which, like Eliot’s “ideal order” of literary monuments, we were expected to arrange ourselves. “Does anyone want to guess what ‘artifice’ is?” she asked once, apprising us, when we predictably failed to appease her, that in fact artifice was “a made construct in the poem.” On many occasions, she would begin class by sharing a poem few of us had ever seen. “You know what’s an interesting piece of writing,” she would say, sitting back and watching us decipher for ourselves, head in hands, precisely what made the poem notable. “Oh, you like sonnets?” she asked once. Recurrent among these provocations was the question of which mid-career poet should receive one or another heftily endowed reading invitation. “Do you really think so?” she gaped at one suggestion. “Is that really a mid-career poet these days?” When a classmate mentioned that Jack Gilbert might make an engaging visitor, Eavan helpfully reminded him that Gilbert would not, unfortunately, be able to make it—he was dead. I quote these statements so extensively because their speech patterns and substance bring us closer, I think, to the distinct rigor with which Eavan taught. “This is the Stegner workshop,” she said, and I remember marveling at the implicit assumption that, under Eavan’s watch, poetry remained a grave and intellectual endeavor.

But Eavan was also one of the funniest people I have known, possessed of a social perspicuity and razor wit which made her as keen a diagnostician of the dinner table as she was of poetry. She adored gossip, and from those years a handful of then pertinent names recur in my notes. “Michael Robbins hasn’t really been to charm school,” she observed after Robbins’s takedown of Robert Hass had appeared to Molotov effect in Poetry. James Franco was a “gentleman amateur,” Dean Young a “stylist,” and Louise Glück, then teaching at Stanford, was “hardly an unalloyed fan of Anne Carson.” “Louise is a foodie,” Eavan then reflected, no doubt having just discovered the term. “Are any of you foodies?” Satirizing Plath’s “Daddy,” Eavan summed up the poem in devastating ventriloquism: “Look at me in this costume drama.” Remarkably conversant in both technology and popular culture—she lived half her life, after all, in the California of the tech boom—Eavan’s aristocratic manner jarred in gorgeous chiaroscuro with her plebian indulgences. “Downton Abbey is a piece of nonsense,” she declared one day, apropos of nothing. “An iPhone is not hip,” she offered. “I have a Samsung Note 3, the best phone in the world.” She loved dogs and babies. She knew the CEO of Nike as “Phil.”

Such idiosyncrasies, broached alongside her withering criticism, softened the honed edges of Eavan’s pedagogy. It remained impossible, of course, for us to imagine her sleeping or eating or exercising—we suspected she never did—but to envision Eavan playing Fruit Ninja or rolling her eyes at William’s deathbed marriage to Daisy, the kitchen maid, was to bring her into the real world in ways that her teaching style sometimes precluded. It could feel, in Eavan’s workshops, like one was undertaking some scrutiny for which one was both intellectually and existentially ill-equipped. Before class, I would shotgun coffee at the Tressider Union and review my notes from the previous week, rifling for some obscure clue that might help me anticipate whatever catechism to which she subjected us. Afterward, I spent days replaying the workshop in memory, rehashing precisely what I’d said of a poem and how Eavan had responded. Despite these exertions, I sensed even then that I was watching a kind of sacred practice passed down from its ancient and occulted origins. In those moments, Eavan seemed to preside priestlike over the cadences of the workshop, a ceremony surrounded in mystery and alive with the vital current of language.

Hers were master classes, it seems to me, in an inherited pedagogy we are unlikely to see again, brilliant in its counterpointing of censure and encouragement, unflinching in tone, uncompromising in its expectations. Eavan’s flickering disclosures of her warmth—when she indulged us in some anecdote from her childhood, when she bankrolled frivolous dinners at Nopa or Garçon, places she knew we could never afford—represented in quieter form something she made explicit quite often: that in fact she loved her students, and came to view them, I think, as an extended poetic family. She was training us not only as poets, I now recognize, but as future teachers of poetry, as much a part of her legacy as her own writing. One of the highest compliments I ever heard Eavan offer was her declaration, delivered with great pride of Peter Campion and David Yezzi, who had come up in our discussion, that “they were my students.”

In losing Eavan to an untimely death at the age of seventy-five, then, we have lost not merely one of the most important poets to have ever lived—and I don’t think that overstates the issue—but a singular and utterly exacting literary pedagogue, one who asked a great deal of her students but who gave them, in turn, a great deal of herself. 

We are poorer poets in her absence, to be sure.

I fear, though, that as contemporary poetry turns with increasing disregard from the discipline and humility on which Eavan insisted—from the subordination of feeling to form, from historical consciousness—we will also lose sight, sooner or later, of the distinct and powerful thinking of which poetry is capable. Eavan’s pedagogy matters, it seems to me, because she asked us to learn from and ultimately move beyond our predecessors in language. Eavan urged us toward an art that would outlast our own lifetimes, an art not timely but timeless; this didn’t mean that we should forswear social critique, nor that our poems should accord with some Wintersian house style, but that our work might sustain and reward multiple readings, cut through as it might ideally be—as Eavan’s own poetry is—by the intercrossing of opposed forces, by interanimating tensions, doubts, and contradictions. 

“Who is the greatest living American poet?” Eavan often asked, sizing us up by the originality and conviction with which we defended our candidates. 

“What is the contemporary poem we will remember in one hundred years?”

***

Among Eavan’s students, I might acknowledge, many remain far less sanguine about her pedagogy and her stewardship of the Stegner Program. 

Where I found her teaching a potent antidote to the infantilization of both poets and poetry—her students were adults, Eavan believed, and were expected to hold their own—others have found an arbitrarily and unnecessarily cruel approach to the workshop, one which refigured that space less as a creative incubator than a gladiatorial arena. Eavan’s workshops, many believe, coerced students into performing erudition in ways that felt marginalizing and sometimes aggressive. If one had not mastered her particular critical vocabulary, or if one disputed the ethical and aesthetic premises on which that vocabulary drew, one risked exposing oneself as a naïf, out of place in the workshop, a misspent fellowship—we saw this regularly.

During my own years at Stanford, many felt that Eavan singled out male writers for special and perhaps unwarranted recognition. Wielding her attention, at times, as a form of social and pedagogical power, Eavan could bestow on charismatic men everything from a private chat to European residencies and post-Stegner Jones Lectureships. Yet the most compelling accounts of Eavan’s mentorship have come, in the wake of her death, from women, including Alexandra Teague for The Poetry Foundation and Nan Cohen in Poetry Northwest. And Stegner history resounds with anecdotes of Eavan’s munificence toward women writers: a medical bill covered, airfare arranged in the wake of a family member’s death. Having come of age as a poet in a culture dominated by male writers, Eavan wrestled with the assumption—sometimes reaffirming it, sometimes powerfully refuting it—that men constituted the primary arbiters of cultural value. I benefited from this assumption, of course. Far more talented writers did not.

At the Spirit of ’77 cocktail bar, across from the 2019 AWP conference in downtown Portland, a former fellow shared her frustration at being relegated to subordinate status in Eavan’s workshops. Equally affronted, she divulged, a group of Stegners had been planning to confront Eavan in an effort to moderate and democratize the program. While my own insight into the episode is limited, the group seems to have objected not only to Eavan’s teaching and to what they viewed as her indifference to women, but also to the conspicuous whiteness of the program over which she presided. Since 2010, less than a third of poetry Stegners have been writers of color, and until the program hired A. Van Jordan in 2022 no poet of color, to my knowledge, had taught the Stegner workshop. Whether this confrontation actually took place I can’t say, though Eavan herself, for what it’s worth, seemed alert to the limitations of the program in terms of racial representation. “In some areas this program is conservative,” she admitted. “Great ethical movements don’t make great poetry.” Both statements, of course, suggest a range of exclusions and inequities built in to values mistakenly perceived, from the New Criticism on, as solely aesthetic in nature; Eavan would have understood this, even if she promoted those values nonetheless.

To its credit—or to the credit, more likely, of those students who advocated for change—the Stegner Program has indeed become more representative of late, as ongoing hiring initiatives attest; of the poets of color since 2010, moreover, more than half have arrived in the last few years. These are important steps. At the same time, the poets admitted to the program have come increasingly from a short list of fashionable young writers already well established in the poetry culture. Readily accessible online, the names need hardly be cited; one knows the “cool kids club” from their social media presences, from “Thirty Under Thirty” and “Ten Poets to Watch” lists, and from the much acclaimed collections they have published even before entering the program. At the risk of hubris—or of trafficking in insidious, up-from-the-bootstraps ideology—I was nobody when Eavan called me, a PhD dropout painting houses for $9 an hour and subsisting on Totino’s pizza rolls in my parents’ basement. Where Eavan once plucked writers from the obscurity of indie publishing and adjunct jobs, the Stegner Program now exacerbates the significant inflation of the poetry and academic markets, perpetuating, as it does, a celebrity culture in which our most valued poets are those who sign modeling contracts.

While I sympathized, to a certain extent, with my friend’s disappointment in the Stegner Program, I was and remain skeptical of her insistence that, as she put it more than once, “we’re changing Eavan.” The statement—delivered, I have to say, with a kind of pleased righteousness—seemed indicative of a broader disregard for the past among contemporary poets. For the enfant terribles of poetry, even the most socially committed of older writers serve as foils through which to demonstrate one’s superior virtue. The quick character assassination, the well-publicized gripe, the tweet fired off in calculated indignation—there are few ways to bolster one’s credentials more efficiently than by singling out one’s predecessors for reproach. Never mind, for these writers, that Eavan produced out of nothing an unabashedly feminist Irish poetics. Never mind that she had confronted cultural brokers “so established, so imposing and powerful,” she wrote, that “it never occurred to me that they might not be equally inclusive.” 

“We’re changing her,” my friend repeated, unconcerned, I can only surmise, with all that Eavan had stood for and fought against and borne witness to.

Writing on the pressures and paradoxes involved in coming of age as an Irish writer, Eavan described in her 1995 essay “Lava Cameo” how she endeavored to “reexamine and disrupt and dispossess” then dominant modes of writing. “Not because of feminism,” she wrote, “not because of ideology, but because of poetry.” 

“We’re changing her,” my friend said, as if it were something of which to be proud.

*** 

“Mine own Eavan” may be mine only, then.

I suspect that for many others, though, including those who often disagreed with her, she proved a transformative pedagogue and a guiding compass with which to navigate a life in poetry.

In my final workshop with Eavan, held in a tiny seminar room on the third floor of Margaret Jacks Hall, she urged us to remain committed, despite the pressures of the profession, to poetry’s unique capacity for re-appropriating language from those forces that would vitiate it. Steeling us for the challenging work that lay ahead, she cautioned us that “age twenty-five to thirty-eight are the most difficult for young poets,” citing the “nomadic poetry life” of fellowships, residencies, visiting appointments, and graduate programs through which many of us would inevitably pass. “It’s a tough poetry world,” she said. “How resilient do you think you are?” In the same way, though, that Eavan’s poetry veers beautifully from the domestic to the existential, from an upstairs bedroom beside a child’s crib to the creative potential of language itself, her valedictory suddenly became something less practical than spiritual, a last benediction before we left her—and, as it would turn out, before she left us. Poetry would be a difficult life, she repeated, full of hesitancies and rejections and jealousies. 

“But the game is worth the candle,” she said.

“Be the poet who wrote the poems.” 

And in one of the last things she ever said to me, starred toward the back of my notebook and delivered, as she so often spoke, as if she were writing an essay, Eavan elaborated a quiet metaphor which continues all these years later to recur to me nearly every evening. “You must cross the twilight,” she said, “between writing poetry and being a Poet. Once you think of yourself as a Poet, you’ll be invincible.” 

In her actions and words, I think, in what she did and what she failed to do, Eavan had crossed that twilight. 

Whether she proves invincible remains for us to determine.

Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way Books) and What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU Press), as well as of the scholarly book Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.