"from all those epistles of air and unreachable distance..."

On past and future events at Boston College, poetry podcasts, Irish poets and "The Lost Art of Letter Writing"

Hello, beautiful people. Sorry for another short piece today. We are now into October and a routine is only just starting to settle with school, work, internship, swimming, music, and social events.

But first, I had three days of joyful disruption starting on September 28th with a celebration of Rhina Espaillat and the induction of her letters and papers into the archives of Boston College (an event I had mentioned here). Organized by Christian Dupont, director of the Burns Library for rare books, special collections, and archives at BC, this was dubbed The Red Shoe Night, and we were all encouraged to wear red shoes in honor of one of Rhina’s poems.

Rhina is holding her red shoes and wearing her more practical puppy sneakers instead. I am third from the right. The guy in the middle is Alfred Nichol.

(L-R) Christian Dupont, me, Dana Gioia, Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nichol, and A.M. Juster.

As you can tell it was a wonderful evening. The next two days I also attended events featuring Dana Gioia at Boston College and Newburyport. And it was great to see friends on a couple of these days. (Some of whom are readers of this humble Substack!)

On the horizon, I am doing a poetry talk on October 20 in Rhode Island at the church of my friend Fr. Jay Finelli, and on October 21 I am headed back to Boston College for the second day of a conference called The Art of Encounter: Catholic Writers from the Margins. I will miss the keynote due to my own talk but I will be there the following day.

From the event website:

Our hope is that students and other conference participants will have the opportunity of encountering both the authors themselves and their powerful ideas and stories, and in the process glimpse and contribute to a more capacious understanding of what the Catholic community might be, standing close to the heart of BC’s liberal arts education goal: to broaden our understanding of how encountering “the other” might be rich and fulfilling, opening up new possibilities of the richness and multiplicity of the real world—in a word, to finding God in all things.

I found out about this from

Pádraig Ó Tuama

‘s recent Substack post. I will be missing his intriguingly entitled keynote, The Devil’s in the Details: Literature and Language as a Way to Salvation. Unfortunately this event is not going to be streamed or recorded. If you would like to attend in person then please fill out the registration form here.

I am a fan of Pádraig’s podcast Poetry Unbound and have wanted to hear him speak in person for a while. My poetry podcast queue looks like this:

• Poetry for All,

• The Poetry Magazine Podcast,

• The New Yorker: Poetry

• Poetry Off the Shelf from The Poetry Foundation, and

• Poetry Unbound from the On Being Project.

So many episodes, so little time. However, I have been known to stop when I see an Irish name. Not long ago I listened to Diane Mehta read Eavan Boland’s “The Lost Art of Letter Writing”¹ which you can listen to here:

Or watch this beautifully produced video.

There is so much to love about this poem. The enjambment is relentless like the “bicycle wheel/Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass/Again” and enforced by the energy and flow of the non-rhymed tercet.

And the poem beckons us:

…And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see

The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became

Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink...

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

When I was a young girl, back in the day of outrageously expensive long distance phone rates and no internet, I used to write letters to my cousin in the Philippines on onionskin-thin paper stamped with the most common French words I saw at the time: Par Avion. Not only did every letter travel thousands of miles, but each piece of mail traveled through time. Once my words reached their destination the girl on the page was different from the writer, who had already turned a little older and had moved on from the dramas of that day.

The art of letter writing is more and more lost to us in this digital age. Words made, saved, and so easily created and deleted don’t have the same weight—in quite the literal sense. What are we missing when we can no longer hold in our hands something that was held in the hands of a beloved—a piece of paper with the power to invoke the absent voice who asks, How are you?; declares, I miss you!; and pleads, Write back soon… ? My children will never know what it is like to peer into the mailbox for a reply. There was no instant gratification. Letter writing was always playing the long game.

In the end, letters are the stuff of attics and forgotten relations. Letters carry us to the land of Memory, a place inhabited by ghosts.

But if you are like Rhina Espaillat your letters may become the contents of college libraries. Thanks to librarians like Christian Dupont we will get to pore over Rhina’s writings, written in her hand, for years to come if we visit Boston College. Ah…to be such a legend! Viva Rhina Espaillat!

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If you want to meet up at the conference on October 21st please let me know in comments or email.

Thank you for reading. A special thank you to those who subscribe, and an extra special thank you to those who are paid subscribers. I sincerely appreciate your support.

1. If you click the link that takes you to The New Yorker there is an embedded audio file of Eavan Boland reading her poem.