Jean Valentine: This-World Company 9780472028610, 0472028618

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JEAN VALENTINE

UNDER DISCUSSION Annie Finch and Marilyn Hacker, General Editors Donald Hall, Founding Editor Volumes in the Under Discussion series collect reviews and essays about individual poets. The series is concerned with contemporary American and English poets about whom the consensus has not yet been formed and the :final vote has not been taken. Titles in the series include:

Jean Valentine: This-World Company edited by Kazim Ali and John Hoppentholtr On Frank Bidart: Faltening the Voice to the Page edited by Liam Rector and Tree Swenson On Louile Gluck.: Change What You See edited by Joanne Fdt Diehl On June. Tate edited by Brian Henry Robert Haydeu edited by Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman Charles Sirnic edited by Bruce ~gl On Gwendolyn Brooks edited by Stephon Caldwell Wright On William Stalford edited by Tom AndretVS Denise Levertov edited with an introduction by Albert Gelpi The Poetry ocw. D. Snodgrass edited by Stephon Haven On the Poetry of Pbilip Levine edited by Christopher Buckley Jame. Wright edited by Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano Anne Sexton edited by Steven E. Colburn On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell edited by Howard Nelson Robert Creeley's Life and Work edited by John Wilson On the Poetry ofAllen Ginsberg edited by Lewis Hyde Reading Adrienne Rich edited by Jane Roberta Cooper Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art edited by IJoyd SCh....rtz and Sybil P. Estess

Jean Valentine This-World Company

Edited by Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler

the university of michigan press Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2012 by Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2015

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jean Valentine : this-world company / edited by Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler. p. cm. — (Under discussion) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-472-07183-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-472-05183-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-472-02861-0 (e-book) 1. Valentine, Jean—Criticism and interpretation. I. Ali, Kazim, 1971– II. Hoppenthaler, John. PS3572.A39Z68 2012 811'.54—dc23 2012011070 A few of the essays in this book were previously published. Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint the following essays, some of which appeared under the different title indicated: Kazim Ali: An earlier and modi‹ed version appeared in Orange Alert (University of Michigan Press, 2010) as “Little Map: A Valentine”; Celia Bland, “Secret Book Written in the Dirt: Jean Valentine’s Lucy: A Poem” appeared in American Poetry Review 39.2 (March–April 2010); Suzanne Cleary, “Be Still and Know: Silence in the Poetry of Jean Valentine” appeared in Laurel Review 40.2 (Summer 2006); James Harms, “Jean Valentine: Remnants and Recognition” appeared in West Branch 56 (Spring–Summer 2005); Brenda Hillman, “‘Listening’: The Swerve” appeared in Field 73 (Fall 2005); Lee Upton, “‘Dream Barker’: Preoedipal Fusion and Radiant Boundaries in Jean Valentine” appeared in The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1998); and Michael Waters,“‘Through Such Hard Wind and Light’: Jean Valentine’s Elegy for Elizabeth Bishop” appeared in Field 73 (Fall 2005).

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction kazim ali

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Little Light on the Road: An Informal Primer on Reading Jean Valentine, in Six Brief Sections catherine barnett

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Dream Barker: Preoedipal Fusion and Radiant Boundaries in Jean Valentine lee upton

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Pilgrims lee briccetti Orpheus and Eurydice and Gestures of Turning: Palimpsest in the Poetry of Jean Valentine kathleen fagley On Jean Valentine’s The Messenger philip booth “Through Such Hard Wind and Light”: Jean Valentine’s Elegy for Elizabeth Bishop michael waters Jean Valentine’s Spontaneous Mythologies jonathan blunk Lost and Found: Jean Valentine’s Poems of Childhood and Motherhood dorothy barresi Lit from Inside: Jean Valentine’s River at Wolf martha collins

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70 75

81 92

Ghost Sonnets mark doty

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Incarnational fanny howe

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Remnants and Recognition james harms

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Be Still and Know: Silence in the Poetry of Jean Valentine suzanne cleary

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“This Close to God this Close to You”: Incarnation in Jean Valentine amy newman

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Globe on Fire: Jean Valentine as a Political Poet maggie anderson

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Everyone Was Drunk: Reading Jean Valentine through a Shot Glass Lens jeffrey skinner

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The Gift of the Double Swerve (Jean Valentine’s Endings) brenda hillman

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For Jean Valentine, Out of Thirty-‹ve Years alan williamson

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“The History of the World Without Words”: Mysticism and Social Conscience in the Poetry of Jean Valentine brian teare

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“Awake too you are everyone”: Gestures of Empathy in Jean Valentine’s New Poems rachel moritz and juliet patterson

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Where Do You Look for Me: The Afterlife in the Poems of Jean Valentine eve grubin

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Artifact as Metaphor: Reading Nearness in Jean Valentine’s Little Boat miguel murphy

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Secret Book Written in the Dirt: Jean Valentine’s Lucy: A Poem celia bland

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On Saying No: Valentine and Dickinson Break the Glass julie carr

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The Umwelt of the Question: Notes on Territory and Desire bhanu kapil

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Contributors

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Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the work of my coeditor, John Hoppenthaler, without whose initial work on this project, this book would not have been possible. I want to further acknowledge Suzanna Tamminen, who gave generous feedback and advice at an earlier stage. Eric Gudas, Michael Klein, Kate Greenstreet, and John Hoppenthaler all conducted interviews with Jean Valentine that we could not include in this book, but these will be available on-line at http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id= 4348299. The work of my two research assistants, Anna Silverstein and Jesse Miller, contributed immeasurably to the completion of this project. I would never have been able to manage it on my own without their assistance. Martha Collins gave me the original impulse to take on this work and provided injections of energy at every needed moment. Jonathan Blunk put in countless hours of tireless work to proofread the manuscript and the quoted texts of Jean Valentine’s poems. Finally I want to thank Jean Valentine, whose writing occasioned this work and whose poetry and presence continues to be a beacon for me, as it has been for many others. Kazim Ali

KAZIM ALI

Introduction

Perhaps the reason there has been little critical discussion on the work of Jean Valentine should be obvious: what do you say about work that traf‹cs so sublimely in the half-said, the unsaid, more than that (or less than that?) the half-thought-of, the still unarticulated, ever evanescent? Still, with each passing year, she seems more and more the poet of exactly our moment—one concerned with material immediacy, the physical experiences of the body and the uncharted ineffable realms equally. She’s in›uenced countless younger poets with her devotion to a certain kind of embodied spiritual attention to individual moments. In his book The Art of Attention Donald Revell seems to call for a poetry exactly like Valentine’s, a poetry that is rooted in the individual’s experience of the external and existing world rather than a poetry dependent on “craft.” For Revell “imagination” (perhaps by extension anything one might call “craft”) proceeds not from invention but from observation: The opened eye will see, and light will shape the materials given freely to a poet. What need for invention? As it turns out, craft is to poetry what invention is to the imagination—not antithetical, but needless. The eye does not invent the light; there’s no need. The mind makes no materials; it doesn’t have to. Imagination is the present state of things, and poems rejoice—in particular, in detail—that this is so.1 Though Valentine is more than ever being held up as an exemplar by young poets writing in more experimental veins, more than one of the essays in this book touches on Valentine’s ability to limn the unknown, plumb the unspoken depths of human experiences, and draw dream language into our waking life, practices that at ‹rst glance might seem to align with a more Blakean or Romantic view of the poetic endeavor. Each of the essays tries to see the “how” and the “why” using

texts from Valentine’s own work. Some poems surface and resurface, the way images do in Valentine’s work, the way images do in dreams. In Islamic architecture, the interior of a mosque is strangely empty. The shapes of the exterior are round, inviting—the arch, the dome—but otherwise, just an expanse of ›oor, an interior without structure. The experience in the desert, for both artists and pilgrims, is similarly one of removing external contexts; the singularity of sand and sky—like being at the mountains, or the ocean, other sites of pilgrimage—removes ›uctuations of thought and dares one to focus. Similarly in poems of Jean Valentine, there always seems to be a narrative, a real emotion situation, but it is told in outlines, seen in the dark. In her poem “October Morning,”2 she writes: October morning— sea lions barking on the off-shore rock Autumn evening— seals’ heads nosing through the pink Paci‹c I gather myself onto my day raft, your voice lost under me: ‹rst other tongue

One is always tempted to say you get lost in Jean Valentine’s poems, but the truth is you don’t. Each stanza here places you in time and space, allowing the physical description that follows to be anchored. If she “turns,” she swerves not into the unknown, which for her is always a linguistic space, but into a real and concrete lived space where it seems to matter less whether linguistic structures assert themselves or, as they occasionally do, disappear. Here, she gathers herself on the abstract “day raft,” but by leaving the ‹rst two words of the phrase “your voice / lost under me” on the previous line, she implies that the raft is the voice of the other. She ‹nishes with an otherwise awkward construction, that here functions sonically: “‹rst other tongue.” In tarot cards, the last card of the major arcana, and also the

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‹rst—the culmination of the journey and the beginning of the next journey, a card without a number, is “The Fool.” It is best to come to Valentine’s poems a little foolish, a little empty-headed. In the “House and the World,”3 she begs for some release: All this anger heart beating unless I’d come inside your blind window and stay there like you

She knows, though, there is more than the blindness, the insideness of the angry one. She wants the cello part carrying us the whole time

and all the other strange experiences the poem promises are yet to come: the “tipped groin,” the “›ying whitehorn hedge,” the “cup.” Many of the most exciting poems being written today traf‹c in disruption and new syntactic systems. Sometimes in the heat of the erotic moment nouns do not always appear at the beginning of sentences, or contain sentences that could dissolve, but in Valentine’s poems, the fragments are not meant to outline the lost whole, nor are they meant to function as a small collage—the new form of postmodern veracity. Think of them rather as a jigsaw puzzle, perhaps with a few missing pieces, maybe a lot of missing pieces. Valentine is a writer of poems of personal experience the way Jane Cooper was, the way Eleanor Ross Taylor is. In this sense, though she is revolutionary in terms of craft and technique, she is nearly “old school,” by which I mean “confessional.” Valentine herself does not have an accompanying body of critical work or poetics statements that enable us to accurately track her aesthetic commitments,4 so we will open this collection with Catherine Barnett’s meditation on Valentine’s mechanisms of meaning-making, in particular looking at a later poem of hers, “The Pen.” In her earliest book, The Dream Barker, Valentine wrote more in received forms. In her earliest work, her rhythms unfolded as long phrases, usually repeating themselves, imitating the lulling sound of

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the waves, or a mother’s voice, or the individual consciousness drifting into sleep. In her poem “September 1963,”5 she writes, “Tears, stay with me, stay with me, tears. / Dearest, go: this is what / School is, what the world is.” And by the end of the poem, she eschews epiphany and goes for the drifting: Glad, derelict, I ‹nd a park bench, read Birmingham. Birmingham. Birmingham. White tears on a white ground, White world going on, white hand in hand, World without end.

Lee Upton continues our book, looking at some of the techniques, themes, and in›uences of this early work, and also provides an overview of Valentine’s aesthetic trajectory over the several books that follow, including Pilgrims, which Lee Briccetti looks at in her essay. Several essays follow that examine Valentine’s development of certain themes and ideas through her next two books Ordinary Things and The Messenger. Kathleen Fagley takes a careful look at the notions of “palimpsest” and “threshold” in Valentine’s work of this period, while Philip Booth provides close readings of several other poems. After The Messenger, life intervened. For ten years, Valentine did not publish another book. It was a transformative experience in her life, for while she stopped writing and publishing, she worked as a caregiver during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, she got sober, and she converted to Catholicism. Michael Waters looks at Valentine’s elegy for Elizabeth Bishop from this period. Claudia Rankine wrote, “The languaged self, then, in order to keep itself human, in order to cohere, has to fragment. The ‘I’ exists in time and is married to biological, personal, historical, and cultural meaning. Not to realize this is to commit a blink of omission.”6 Valentine’s speakers have the same porous identity. They are real, they are her, to be sure, but also they are us, they exist in the world of commonality and universality. Rankine notes further that we cannot do with the totally hermetic or symbolic in art: “The ‘I’ ultimately has a responsibility to the ‘you.’ It recognizes we are always being broken into by history.” Jonathan Blunk and Dorothy Barresi each look at ways Valentine has negotiated the social presence of an individual and the 4

backdrops of history, mythology, and other psychic sources like fairy tale that govern the construction of identity. The idea of “autobiography” in Valentine’s work is the introduction of alchemy: the secret experiment that preserves the individual experience against the grid of the poem. Jean Valentine’s “Willi, Home” tells about the death of a friend. She dreams of a “daffodil / lying in bed, with the sheet pulled up to its chin.”7 But far from being her ill friend, by the end of the poem she realized “the daffodil / is me. Brave.” Valentine’s ability to empathize—to connect the experience of the poet with the experience of the man dying—is characteristic of her dissolution of boundaries—between observer and observed, between people, between the internal and the external life. When Jean Valentine looks straight at the death of Willi, Willi dying, she loosens the lines and lets the words, the very blocks of meaning, actually mean without intervening syntax interrupting anything: “Brave. Willi’s an iris. / Brave. Brave. Tall. Home. Deep. Blue.” Her ability to use connective language between words to communicate experience shatters under the pressure of actual lived experience, and Valentine never looks back. Her next book, The River at Wolf, marks a major turning point in Valentine’s aesthetic (presaged by the “new poems” section of Home. Deep. Blue). She most fully approached her interest in the dream life in Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Martha Collins’s and Mark Doty’s essays look at the aesthetic development in these two books, while Fanny Howe’s meditates on what appears in the poems when the connective discursive narrative slowly disappears. Among the points Collins raises in her essay is the seriality of Valentine’s work across her career, often times returning to the same themes and images, sometimes repeating lines, using the same titles, occasionally reprinting poems themselves. While James Harms considers Valentine’s use of the fragment across her writing career, Suzanne Cleary considers the equally important and related concept of silence in Valentine’s work. In 2000, Valentine published The Cradle of the Real Life, a book that looks back on her long career, as well as her ten years of silence in a chilling and intense sequence entitled “Her Lost Book.” In “Child,” Valentine writes: You are in a blind desert child

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your “too-muchness” is written in the Torah child it is written in the pit written in black ‹re on white ‹re deer star black star third star who sees8

Each line exists singly here. In bare observation of Valentine’s words whipping by and disappearing into the wind, it seems the individual line, and not the phrase or sentence, is the unit she seems to be placing her words into—like Sappho, whose fragments assemble tantalizingly close to a picture, Valentine seems to hover at the edge of “closure” but makes adamant refusal of arrival. Yet these poems are ‹lled not with intangible concepts, but with simpler things: a pitcher, a pen, a blue dictionary propping a window open. There is an embracing of the notion of emotional truth to be adduced in poetry, but there is a de‹nite rejection of the poet as guide of the reader to that place, as if one is being led by the hand halfway into the forest and then left there. Yet the child in the desert is blind. The desert is blind. The three stars know there is a space language can’t go. The writing of the poem degrades from positions of authority (the “Torah”) through positions of lack of material authority, but perhaps a very deeply personal authority (“the pit”) and into the alchemical place—a place governed by nature and its chaotic processes, beyond the ego of the personal and beyond the “separate” life of the personal—the white ‹re. The black ‹re. The “‹nal” space entered is a space in which the primary emblems of our mythologies—the stars one might follow in the desert expecting to arrive eventually—and why not?—at a child—are revealed not as emblems for an external myth, nor as shamanistic amulets for the internal myths, but as something of a con›ation of the two.

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Several essays that follow consider Valentine through speci‹c lenses. Maggie Anderson’s essay discusses Jean Valentine as a political poet, while Jeffrey Skinner discusses the images of alcohol and alcoholism. Brenda Hillman muses on the implications of one of Valentine’s formal techniques. The year 2003 saw the publication of Valentine’s collected poems, Door in the Mountain. This collection brought Valentine the National Book Award as well as making the range of her work available to a new generation of readers. Perhaps one of the qualities that makes her work so empowering and enabling to younger writers like Catherine Barnett and others is that it turns on the thought, not on the word. This essential notion—the act of restoring past experience to present immediacy—to “this-world”— makes reading a Jean Valentine poem such an active experience. And since her poems turn so much on the thought, the rhythm of that thought becomes the rhythm of language. Fraught and freighted with silences, Valentine’s poems are a sonic pleasure. “Fears: Night Cabin”9 begins with short truncated images: Snake tick black widow brown recluse

The brief overture is followed by three separate images, each perhaps representing one of the “fears” of the title. Each image has a separate lineation, each has separate rhythm of language: —The truck last night on 79 dragging a chain —A cloud rounding slowly at the window —The wick unlit curled cold in the kerosene lamp.

The ‹rst line of the ‹nal couplet echoes the sounds of the opening, while the second, with its opening hard consonants, gives way quickly, in the word “kerosene,” to the closing image.

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Amy Newman considers the notion of bodily incarnation of spiritual energy in Valentine’s newer work in her essay, while Alan Williamson muses on the breadth of Valentine’s writing in terms of a creative writing workshop with Robert Lowell that he and Valentine had attended together thirty-‹ve years previous. Brian Teare presents an overview of the role mysticism has played in Valentine’s recent work, while Rachel Moritz and Juliet Patterson explore the concept of “empathy” and connection between the reader and the writer in the new poems of Valentine’s Door in the Mountain. Since that time Valentine has published two new books, Little Boat and Break the Glass, and a chapbook, Lucy, the text of which is included in Break the Glass. Eve Grubin writes about the “afterlife” in her essay, and Miguel Murphy dwells on the image of the boat throughout Valentine’s work, particularly in Little Boat. Little Boat in a way marks a second turning point in Valentine’s career. With the most delicate of images, for example, from “To My Soul (2),” “And what we had / give way like coffee grains / brushed across paper . . .”10 Valentine constructs a barely shimmering world, not really luminous at all, but rather occupying that space of the half-lit interior of the mosque where one does not really have to strain to see, but merely wait until one’s eyes adjust to the darkness and open space. Sound and sense, so sensually close throughout Valentine’s writing, do push against each other here, but rather than pass the energy of meaning in a poem back and forth between them (as in “September 1963”) here they nearly dissolve or blur into one another, as in “I wanted to be sure to reach you”:11 “But to you now I offer—forgive me, River— / what I could never then, give over.” We close out the book with three essays looking at Valentine’s newest work. Celia Bland writes about her long sequence Lucy, while Julie Carr writes about the in›uence of Dickinson on Valentine in her essay on Break the Glass, and ‹nally Bhanu Kapil responds to Valentine’s “From the Questions of Bhanu Kapil,” a sequence of poems included in Little Boat and inspired by Kapil’s work The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. As Hans Hofmann has written, “Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some ‹nal transformation culminate in a magical reality? In

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truth the latter is impossible without the former.” To read Valentine is to ‹nd oneself in the layered drama of her poems, but safely held in a recognizable world. You think you don’t have a map, but your own life is your map. In “Little Map,” she writes: The white pine the deer coming closer the ant in my bowl —where did she go when I brushed her out? The candle —where does it go? Our brush with each other —two animal souls without cave image or word12

It is our hope that this collection of essays will bring new readers to Valentine’s work and help longtime readers consider her work more deeply. NOTES Note on the texts of Jean Valentine’s poems: Though citations for earlier books conform to page numbers for Door in the Mountain rather than the individual titles the poems originally appeared in, there are occasional variations in the texts of poems from their original printed versions. 1. Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2009). 2. Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 13. 3. Ibid., 20. 4. In various uncollected interviews Valentine seems as interested in writers ranging from Eleanor Ross Taylor to writers of the LANGUAGE movement.

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5. Valentine, Door in the Mountain, 56. 6. Claudia Rankine, “The First Person in the 21st Century.” In Fence, Fall/Winter 2000–2001. Volume 3, number 2, pgs. 111–12. 7. Valentine, Door in the Mountain, 167. 8. Ibid., 261. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. Jean Valentine, Little Boat (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 64. 11. Ibid., 42. 12. Valentine, Door in the Mountain, 257.

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CATHERINE BARNETT

Little Light on the Road An Informal Primer on Reading Jean Valentine, in Six Brief Sections

1. In the Bardo Jean Valentine’s eighth book of poems, The Cradle of the Real Life, opens with “The Pen”: the pen The sandy road, the bright green two-inch lizard little light on the road the pen that writes by itself the mist that blows by, through itself the gourd I drink from in my sleep that also drinks from me —Who taught me to know instead of not to know? And this pen its thought lying on the thought of the table a bow lying across the strings not moving held

“The pen that writes by itself”—how badly my young son wanted one. He used to hide under the booth at the local diner, where he’d copy the words from Jean’s poems into his ‹rst notebook. This is how he learned to write; in many ways, we both learned to write from this book. He learned how to write “pen” and began to understand longing. I learned how poetry can embrace confound11

edness, empathy, the known and the unknown, intuition, paradox, crisis. I learned how poetry can enact but not solve the mysteries. Since then, Jean and I have become close friends and she reminds me, both through our friendship and in her work, of Rilke’s words: “Try to live in the uninterpreted world.”

2. The History of the World (or walking outside of time) A few years ago Jean rearranged the furniture in her living room. A beautiful old antique clock, given to her by her great-aunt Frances, was on the ›oor. She lifted it up to the bookshelf and then she opened the clock’s little door to examine the pendulum inside. On the other side of the door was a yellowed label that said: “Warranted, when used well.” The directions explained how to adjust the pendulum to speed time up, or slow it down. In Jean’s poems, time both speeds up and slows down; her poems hover between memory and anticipation; time is not linear; past, present, and future often collide: On your sidewalk walking past your café the piano was being tuned, hard, trying it, one note at a time trying, walking outside of time —was that the night— & space (Little Boat)

“You ought to go to bed at night,” she writes in a poem (“Truth”), “to hear the truth / strike / on the childhood clock / in your arms.” As Celan said (in “The Meridian,” a speech he gave in 1960), a poem “ceaselessly calls and hauls itself back . . . from its now-no-longer into its still-now.” Part of this ceaseless calling issues from Jean’s elegies, which refuse to accept disappearance; as Borges wrote, “the voices of the dead / Will utter me forever.” I was lying there (from Little Boat) I was lying there, half-alive in a wooden room at a Russian country place.

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You sat by me quietly. It’s true you left sometimes, but came back, sat by me kindly quietly. Woodsman, would you go back to the littlelight-wrapped trees and turn them on again? The hide of the deer shivered The summer wind rif›ed through my hair. You are on a long, patient, summer visit from death. I am forgiven. Forgiving. To your place the next to be born.

In her chapbook, Lucy, Jean addresses our “most adult human ancestor,” who is over three million years old, and in the following poem she collapses time, especially in the last two lines, which assert an impossible temporal reality: #3 In the electricity of love, its lightning strike or in its quiet hum in the thighs like this little icebox here not knowing any better or in the dumb hum of the heater going on little stirs in the room-tone I rush outdoors into the air you are Lucy and you rush out to receive me At last there you are who I always knew was there but almost died not meeting when my scraped-out child died Lucy you hold her, all the time. (Break the Glass)

In “Then Abraham,” also published in Break the Glass, Jean writes: “Still, all the history of the world / happens at once.” 3. To the Interlocutor In the middle of a ›ight to a conference out west, Jean’s cell phone rang. She picked it up, said hello, covered the mouthpiece, and whispered, “Oh, it’s only Rilke, again.” 13

If you’re familiar with Jean’s poems, you know she can and does speak to just about anything and anyone. She speaks to ghosts, guests, ghost elephants, Gerry Stern, God, fathers, rivers, brothers, mothers, forgivenesses, X, Emily Dickinson, language itself (“Poetry”), the living, the dead. “I used to tell myself,” she once said to me, “to write, as an exercise, as a prompt, to write as if you’re writing to someone who will understand everything.” She described this kind of writing by saying it’s “like looking into Rembrandt’s eyes in that self-portrait in the Metropolitan. You feel like he would understand anything you could say to him and he has seen everything and he knows everything—and that to me is paradise because I’ve always wanted to be understood but didn’t know how.” Jean has said she’s not interested in subject matter. Her poems don’t speak about; for the most part they speak to. There is a thrilling, unsettling realization as we listen in: the “you,” whom we understand to be absent, must also be present because he/she is being addressed. Her poems are often located in what Celan called “the mystery of encounter” and we overhear this intimate speech, and we participate in it. From the ‹rst poem in Jean’s ‹rst book, Dream Barker, published in 1965, to the most recent poems she’s been writing, despite many changes in form, the “you” has persisted. This is the ‹rst poem in Dream Barker: first love How deep we met in the sea, my love, My double, my Siamese heart, my whiskery, Fish-belly, glue-eyed prince, my dearest black nudge, How ›at and re›ective my eye re›ecting you Blue, gorgeous in the weaving grasses I wound round for your crown, how I loved your touch On my fair, speckled breast, or was it my own turning; How nobly you spilled yourself across my trembling Darlings: or was that the pull of the moon, It was all so dark, and you were green in my eye, Green above and green below, all dark, And not a living soul in the parish Saw you go, hélas! Gone your feathery nuzzle, or was it mine,

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Gone your serpentine Smile wherein I saw my maidenhood smile, Gone, gone all your brackish shine, Your hidden curl, your abandoned kill, Aping the man, liebchen! my angel, my own! How deep we met, how dark, How wet! before the world began.

And from the last few poems in Break the Glass, the poem titled “You ask,” draws us immediately into the direct address, even with its title: you ask, Could we have coffee? —No, my truth, I’m still on this side. I saw you last night, again, at the bar on 57th, O faceless dancer, and I put down my mask I wanted you to touch me You stood there neither man nor woman, beautiful edge by the water

The French philosopher-psychoanalyst Michel de Certeau, in an essay on glossolalia, says that as language approaches an other, in conversation, it becomes more and more fragile. Jean’s poetics of intimacy, a poetics based on dialogue, is fragile in the way that conversation is fragile, heading into the unknown but toward an other, heading toward an other but into the unknown. 4. Silence One day Jean writes in her notebook, quoting Celan: “La poésie ne s’impose pas, elle s’expose.” One day she says: “Silence is almost saying more than you can say . . . it’s the opposite of reticence. I am de‹nitely not a poet of reticence.” One day she says: “The kind of silence I want to talk about is so much more full than language, so it’s hardly holding anything back; it’s that you cannot give it voice because voice is so much less.” 15

One day she says: “Saying what can’t be said, period, is what I’m interested in. What literally can’t be said.” One day she says: “If I could, I’d write in silence.”

5. Friends, Understand—You’re Dreaming Me (Tsvetaeva) Jean has been translating Marina Tsvetaeva’s work for the past year. (In fact, on a recent trip, when Jean was asked who else she wished were traveling with her, she said, in her dry lovely wit: “Tsvetaeva.” ) One of Tsvetaeva’s poems reads: “Free me from the day’s chains, / Friends, understand—you’re dreaming me.” In the Russian language, in terms of grammar, the person or thing dreamed is the subject and the dreamer is the indirect object. I think this grammatical fact helps explain the way dreams, and even reality, function in Jean’s poems, where so often the speaker is less an agent and more a listener, a receiver, a witness.

6. On Wanting a Translator A few years ago, after coming back from giving a reading in Ireland, Jean said she wished she could have a translator translate her work so that people would be able to understand it. The Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao had been reading at the same event, and Jane Hirsh‹eld had translated his work into English as he read. “It’s not that I don’t want to explain,” she said, “it’s that I’m helpless to. I’d like to have a translator translate the poems back into English.” Julia Kristeva says “the excess of affect has . . . no other means of coming to the fore than to produce new languages—strange concatenations, idiolects, poetics.” Jean reinvents language through her radical fragmentation, her ellipses, through bringing to light an “inner speech” that trusts in contradiction, nonrecoverable deletions, and song. Jean uses what Celan (and Heidegger) call “primordial language,” a kind of “inner speech.” In inner speech, a term coined by the Russian psycholinguist Lev Vygotsky, the normal rules of grammar aren’t applied because the thinker doesn’t have to “explain” what he’s thinking. Instead, he simply thinks in an intimate

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shorthand that would probably seem simultaneously mysterious and ‹lled with feeling to anyone listening in. One of the ways Jean tries not to explain but lets us feel along with her, expresses “the wild ladders of longing,” and shows us how “to love the un-become” is to coin her own words. When I asked her once about the compound words she’s invented, she insisted she doesn’t make up words. Perhaps she feels the neologisms—the shutmouth mother, the milk-house, crayonbones, seedword, the sorrowfence—already exist because they are necessary. What’s wonderful about these words is that they don’t need de‹ning; they enter straight into our bloodstream. The best way to “understand” Jean’s poems, the best way to “translate” them, is to follow Celan’s example. When some students came to ask him to explain his poems so they could write about them, he just read them again: the pen The sandy road, the bright green two-inch lizard little light on the road the pen that writes by itself the mist that blows by, through itself the gourd I drink from in my sleep that also drinks from me —Who taught me to know instead of not to know? And this pen its thought lying on the thought of the table a bow lying across the strings not moving held

17

LEE UPTON

Dream Barker Preoedipal Fusion and Radiant Boundaries in Jean Valentine

Most often, Jean Valentine’s poems are not structured as quarrels nor do they have the ligature of narrative. Rather, they move through shifting images, often within the medium of dreams or in the ‹rst moments of her speaker’s awakening. The progression of Valentine’s books re›ects her experimentation with constructing a new lyric that conveys some of the power that she ascribes to dreams. Selecting her ‹rst book, Dream Barker, for the Yale Younger Poets Series Competition, Dudley Fitts described Valentine as exhibiting “a quirkily singular intelligence, a fusion of wit and tenderness, subserved by an unusual accuracy of pitch and rightness of tone.”1 The lines of Dream Barker are thick with modi‹ers, internal rhyme, unusual diction, and an elaborate syntax. References to fairy tales and sexual life are prominent, and much of the volume’s tone is that of anticipation. Her choice not only to evoke dream imagery but to use the medium of the dream as point of reference would seem to be a surrealist inheritance that opens her poems to charged, nearly inexplicable situations. Appearing four years after Dream Barker, Pilgrims (1969) presents a stylistic departure with a stripped-down style, excised context, and more ambiguous syntax. The poems are less often clotted with modi‹ers than those of Dream Barker and more stark in their pronouncements. She records a curious receptivity on the part of her speakers, particularly in the midst of domestic catastrophe. In Pilgrims her speakers send out bulletins that describe their embattled positions, and the poems’ styles re›ect a conceptual shift, moving from the metaphors of social and sexual discovery characteristic of Valentine’s ‹rst book to a dispiriting vision of marriage that is re›ected in spare, frequently brief, nearly enervated poems. After Dream Barker, Valentine’s poems suggest tenuous psychological states through unexplained contextual references and ex18

panded use of white spaces and staggered lines. Increasingly, she has thinned connective passages and omitted logical connections in her poetry as if she were seeking to re›ect the vagaries of selfhood in psychological transition. The poems evince what she calls “a pull against the poem as a sort of ‹nished, well-wrought statement.”2 As one of her best critics, Philip Booth, points out, her poetry “is composed of the most complex permutations and combinations of silence and sound, of variantly paced line-ends and caesurae, and of a brilliantly individual syntax.”3 Although some of her poems are given dates of composition, the events described in them seem to occur out of time or appear as if they are cryptic reworkings of her essential themes cast in a highly subtle, idiosyncratic poetic. As Steven Cramer puts it, “Unlike typically surrealist poems with their stock footage of . . . Chiricoesque landscapes, Valentine’s compact lyrics inhabit the thought of the unconscious—its paralogistic reasoning and dislocating jump-cuts.”4 Often her poems are infused by a personal voice that refuses the rather dour oracular overtones common to deep imagists. Nor are the voices that she assumes the sort that re›ect autobiographical convention, as she pointed out in an interview: “One thing I feel sure of about the use of the self is that while there are poems [of her own] that may use the ‘I’ with very little sense of the ‘real self’ in them, there are no poems that present the ‘real self’ precisely, ‘as is,’ as one would try to in, say, an autobiography.”5 Helen Vendler’s remarks on the signi‹cance of stylistic change in poets cast light on Valentine’s own experiments in style: It is still not understood that in lyric writing, style in its largest sense is best understood as a material body. When a poet puts off an old style (to speak for a moment as if this were a deliberate undertaking), he or she perpetrates an act of violence, so to speak, on the self. It is not too much to say that the old body must be dematerialized if the poet is to assume a new one.6 In the body of Valentine’s writing we see a “thinning out” of textual materiality. After Dream Barker her poems increasingly appear to ›oat in white space, as if about to be lifted from the page. If we attend to Vendler’s analogy between the body of the poem and the poet’s bodily self, we see Valentine as lightening and diffusing her sense of corporeality, rendering an ethereal poetry that revolts against the materiality of the body and the text and their combined gravity. 19

As we shall see, stylistic change in Valentine’s poetry is linked with one of her primary themes: abandonment. In Vendler’s conception, stylistic revision is motivated by the implications of abandonment: “The fears and regrets attending the act of permanent stylistic change can be understood by analogy with divorce, expatriation, and other such painful spiritual or imaginative departures.”7 In other words, Valentine’s commitment to stylistic change, to a progressive puri‹cation of her body of work, is inscribed on her poems through her overt subject of abandonment. Stylistic change— as a form of abandonment—is reinforced by Valentine’s thematic exploration of domestic and cultural desertions. Valentine is a poet of departures, especially of the desertion of women by men, of separation and divorce, and of the death of friends and family members. She began her career speaking from the position of a woman who experiences a sudden and painful abandonment. The cause of this desertion is not acknowledged; it is the fact of abandonment itself that marks her early poems. The speaker’s losses, however, would seem connected to a primary loss, a traumatic initial wound, and the task of the poems, particularly the later poems, has been to avoid occluding or denying such a psychic wound even while moving outward to consider the manifold losses of others and thus defeating solipsism. In some of her most important poems Valentine presents the essential drama of desertion by a beloved and offers a clarifying perspective of both abandonment and the partial remedies for the traumas that threaten to overwhelm her personae. As such, she offers a vivid example of a poet who directly takes impetus from imagining and responding to a state of being severed from crucial affective ties. Questions of origin are complicated by the affective ties to the maternal in this poetry (to be discussed later)—ties that complicate assertions of individualist identity and that foreclose on any possibility of ultimate mastery over self and others. Valentine’s ‹rst collection is immersed in a young woman’s thwarted love quest. The poems of Dream Barker deal in part with initiation into sexuality, which is presented as a language to be learned, as in the poem “Sex”: “And the thing itself not the thing itself, / But a metaphor” (70). The opening poem, “First Love,” mourns lost intimacy founded on bodily pleasure “before the world began” (41). Here the sea bottom is a turning world without boundaries, a sort of preoedipal seabed. The persona insists that she alone witnesses the

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withdrawal of a seductive other, a near second self whose animalistic features are varied to the point that we cannot entirely identify the creature: Gone your feathery nuzzle, or was it mine, Gone your serpentine Smile wherein I saw my maidenhood smile, Gone, gone all your brackish shine, Your hidden curl, your abandoned kill, Aping the man, liebchen! my angel, my own!

This “glue-eyed prince” is internalized as heart, love object, and as “dearest black nudge.” The self and the other seem to be re›ective doubles, monstrous in the way that mermaids are monstrous: otherworldly, both animal and human. Implicitly, the poem’s drama involves what used to be called sexual de›owering with the violated virgin now an “abandoned kill.” But the poem’s insistent metaphors convey a womblike state of initial security, con›ating mother and lover, and the de›owering male with a trickster angel, a representative of sorts of the symbolic order who, as we shall see in Julia Kristeva’s formulations, disrupts the mother-child relationship. The title poem of Dream Barker reveals in more overt form the qualities that ‹rst brought Valentine attention in 1965. In the poem a woman arrives with a man in a watery underworld in which they will make a marvelous purchase: What’ll you have? you said. Eels hung down, Bamboozled claws hung up from the crackling weeds. The light was all behind us. To one side In a dish of ice was a shell shaped like a sand-dollar But worked with Byzantine blue and gold. What’s that? Well, I’ve never seen it before, you said, And I don’t know how it tastes. Oh well, said I, if it’s bad, I’m not too hungry, are you? We’d have the shell . . . I know just how you feel, you said And asked for it; we held out our hands. Six Dollars! barked the barker, For this Beauty! We fell down laughing in your ›at-bottomed boat,

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And then I woke up: in a white dress: Dry as a bone on dry land, Jim, Bone dry, old, in a dry land, Jim, my Jim. (71)

In the phantasms of the unconscious the couple discovers and agrees to buy the shell. The dream barker puts into language their desires: “Six dollars!” barked the barker, “For this Beauty!” In his cry the barker links the shell to materiality and ›esh. At the center of the dream, the shell is “shaped like a sand-dollar / But worked with Byzantine blue and gold”; it is formed as if it were of determinate value. It is, at the same time, “worked with,” an object reminiscent of crafted art, speci‹cally of Byzantine splendor. Yet after the happy laughter of the lovers as they consider the shell in “Dream Barker,” the woman is abruptly abandoned. Given that the man and the woman’s emotions and perceptions had been uni‹ed, the disruption of such intimacy is mystifying. The concluding stanza’s partial stops and repetition of dry (four times within two lines) underscore the suddenness with which the dream ends. An abrupt shift into the daytime world occurs, a daytime that is as extreme as the dream world in its opposite evocation of dryness and sterility. In this and other poems, including “Miles from Home” (42), “Déjà-vu” (45), and “Asleep over Lines from Willa Cather” (46), Valentine recreates a psychic journey that most often ends in failure and dissolution. Union between individuals is followed by expulsion or abrupt departure—a movement from fusion to disunity and a recognition of what seems like lethal difference, as if cycles of connection followed by disunity must be reenacted perpetually. At the same time that Valentine writes in what she considers to be the “landscape” of dreams, we cannot ignore the gendered dynamics of the dramas she presents. The moments of desire that end in disappointment are most often stories of womanly love. Her speakers’ greatest psychic apprehensions occur in dreams in which the same situation repeats itself: a heightened feeling of unity is experienced with another, followed by stunning and inexplicable abandonment. To the protagonist, abandonment seems inexplicable, somewhat like a mysterious and implacable force of nature. How are we to make sense of Valentine’s poems in which such abandonments ‹gure prominently? The puzzle at the heart of many of Valentine’s poems is uncomfortably close, I shall argue, to a daughter’s assimilation to the symbolic order and concomitant 22

mother-loss, as the process is described in Julia Kristeva’s writings. It is not the actual death of the mother in the early poems that is registered, but a daughter’s inevitable psychological separation from her mother, amounting to a ‹rst wound that is felt again with each subsequent loss. Valentine’s personae are abandoned in manners that appear unfathomable, just as the daughter’s ‹rst movements away from her mother as she enters the symbolic order may appear unavoidable and yet a cause for mourning. Subsequent loves are seen in Valentine’s poems through the scrim of maternal love. Dream Barker is a highly accomplished ‹rst book, and Valentine’s preoccupations are clearly marked in it: a ‹xation on bodily process and a keen connection to what seems to be preoedipal memory evinced by womb imagery and fusion dramas. After her ‹rst book, her poems increasingly appear telegraphic, like faint trail marks, each with its connections and contexts partly sutured, just as the self that the poem presents in dots and dashes seems cut from a bene‹cent source that in its doubleness and insistent womblike imagery appears allied to the maternal. Valentine’s imprinting of the maternal performs as a ‹rst level in the poems. In her poetry, “‹rst love” is maternal love; later loves bring to the surface the most archaic of desires for fusion, which may be founded in the motherchild relationship. In Black Sun Julia Kristeva discusses the dif‹culty of separation from the maternal, illuminating similar elements in Valentine’s poetry: The Freudian notion of psychic object . . . is a memory event, it belongs to lost time, in the manner of Proust. It is a subjective construct, and as such it falls within the realm of a memory, elusive to be sure and renewed in each current verbalization, that nevertheless is from the start located not within a physic space but within the imaginary and symbolic space of the psychic system. . . . Such a linguistic and temporary phenomenology discloses . . . an unful‹lled mourning for the maternal object.8 Valentine develops a poetics that explores relationships between men and women through the lens of maternal loss—as if maternal loss were a vague memory—or partly sensed, partly intuited. As Kristeva suggests in more general terms, such a “memory” is “elusive to be sure and renewed in each current verbalization.” Valentine’s poems are predicated in part not only upon englobed womb23

water images that suggest preoedipal experience as in “First Love” but in traces of an inchoate memory of the presymbolic that is re›ected in some of the very dif‹culties of Valentine’s style, with its elided or opaque references. As Kristeva notes: [I]n any poetic language, not only do the rhythmic constraints, for example, perform an organizing function that could go so far as to violate certain grammatical rules of a national language and often neglect the importance of an ideatory message, but in recent texts, these semiotic constraints . . . are accompanied by nonrecoverable syntactic elisions; it is impossible to reconstitute the particular elided syntactic category (object or verb), which makes the meaning of the utterance undecidable.9 In her examination of “the mother-child relationship” Kristeva asks that we “consider what this presymbolic and trans-symbolic relationship to the mother introduces as aimless wandering within the identity of the speaker and the economy of its very discourse. Moreover, this relationship of the speaker to the mother is probably one of the most important factors producing interplay within the structure of meaning as well as a questioning process of subject and history.”10 For Valentine, the memory of the presymbolic, the preoedipal that infuses experience between lovers, is inscribed in the linguistic “cells” of her poems and played out in images and narratives. As such, the question of abandonment is larger than an issue of heterosexual relations; it would seem backlit in Valentine’s poems by a felt quality of absolute abandonment, a sensation of desertion by the maternal that is devastating. The poems would act like thin membranes stretching over the bottomlessness of primary human need. Yet ‹nally this abandonment is transpersonal; among individuals she would suggest similar needs founded on the common loss of preoedipal unity. Valentine’s poems’ contrary impulses involve vigorously imagining relationships beyond the vaguely felt perimeters of a primary identi‹cation. The conceptual burden that she assigns herself in poems lies in imagining psychological boundaries between individuals that reveal difference. Boundaries in her poems by her midcareer tend to be framed as light, as radiantly permeable visual phenomena, marking out but not isolating one realm of experience or being from another.

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In Pilgrims there is little hope of vital relationships between individuals. After the poems of disrupted fusion in Dream Barker, Valentine’s second book records disillusion and isolation; any resonant feeling is menaced. The self here seems as if it has been “skinned”—alternately left raw and vulnerable, or immured to feeling. In contrast to Dream Barker, Pilgrims, as its title suggests, is a more penitential book in which the primary persona has seemingly lost her way. The sensuality of Valentine’s ‹rst book appears to have been deliberately expunged, as if the poet were to remake a poetic selfhood in her second book, beginning only with the most bare rudimentaries. Her ‹rst book had absorbed confessionalist in›uence in its somewhat bold dealing with sexual feelings and bodily images. Pilgrims subsequently divests the lyric of much of the sensory richness that her ‹rst readers had come to expect. Pilgrims opens with exhaustion and boredom in intimate relations, recasting Valentine’s theme of abandonment: even you, Prince, gray around the mouth and tired of calling, tired of briars, tired of them, had ridden away. (75)

Her couples re›ect not smugly but rather sadly on their similarities. Now even good manners amount to censorship: “Out of decency no one spoke.” There is little insistence on the prominence of bodily pleasure for her “dumb, / dressed, affectionate” couples. Such characters are distanced from their own desires: “Archaically cut off. Antarctic miles” (98). Crisis informs the poems, but each contingency is met with simple gestures of tenderness or baf›ement. In “Fireside” (75) Valentine plays upon fox‹re as the “organic luminescence from decaying wood,” the “light” of marriage. Yet marriage and domesticity offer a tranquility underwritten by ambivalence and stulti‹cation. The fox referred to in the poem—living, quick, symbolic of cunning and sexuality—is pointedly not of the house, and while a husband and wife are “nicer than God,” their inertia and passivity hardly seem attractive. In “Turn (2): After Years,” Valentine re-presents the gestures she establishes as intimate in “Orpheus and Eurydice.” Recognition of the other, now in Martin Buber’s terms, means that some

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new understanding between women and men may be made possible. She records the process of differentiation, allowing identities to break from fusion and dependency: Now I can turn, —now, without want, or harm— turn back to the room, say your name: say: other say, thou. . . . (151)

It is telling that this poetry continually thwarts attempts by personae to possess the objects of their desires or to be possessed by them. Valentine’s lovers, grateful for the smallest warmth, must discover a means beyond possession of the other. Often, however, her speakers are neglected or rejected by those with whom they had been intimate. Their desertion is especially painful because their sense of being is inscribed by a vision of psychological and physical oneness that is only possible with the maternal; they are at least vaguely aware of feeling states of ultimate union that are irrevocably lost to them. Ordinary Things (1974) continues stylistically in the vein that Pilgrims established, but here Valentine more overtly works with the motif of separation and loss of meaning after the breakup of a marriage. She would illuminate common motives and daily acts, yet her catalogs of objects and actions are characterized by a light-infused, otherworldly Rilkean sensibility. This emptying-out of meaning causes anxiety that must be met with quiet words and a tentative groping beyond the isolation that was established in Pilgrims. The tone of desperation that we hear in Valentine’s poems is modi‹ed by her attempt to ‹nd spiritual meaning in the ordinary, as her title, taken from Huub Oosterhuis’s “Twenty Days’ Journey” (113), underscores. In Ordinary Things Valentine investigates elementary notions of physical boundaries as these suggest cultural boundaries. When her poems re›ect politics—notably in reference to the Vietnam War— events are experienced as personal and textual, through the speaker’s reading of newspapers or viewing of television. The poems are saturated with a nearly depressive silence, and just as the Vietnam War is viewed from a distance, that is, from newspaper and televised reports, the book suggests distance in personal intimacy, observing personal collapse in the midst of cultural collapse. 26

At the periphery of many of the poems lurks an impulse toward self-destruction, and with The Messenger (1979) it becomes clear that Valentine writes of self-destruction more often than many poets in her generation. A number of Valentine’s poems throughout her body of work refer to suicide, among them: “For a Woman Dead at Thirty,” “He Said,” “Susan’s Photograph,” “What Happened,” “Still Life: In the Epidemic,” “Ironwood,” and “To Plath, To Sexton.” Her speakers do not consider any sort of exile from the psyche of the threatening self-destructive complex or the menacing other. Rather, they prescribe faith in the psyche’s ability, over time, to absorb and transform threats to survival, particularly those threats that emerge from internal compulsion. The notational character of many of the poems intimates that Valentine is intent on calming a troubled spirit; the poems are prayerlike minims for survival. Like her contemporary Charles Wright, Valentine is drawn to intimations of divinity. Yet her divinity, unlike Wright’s, is not transcendent. Instead, divinity is sought through physical responses, a longing for what seems to be a lost realm of paci‹c, mammalian unity, a refuge against the danger of self-destruction that appears on the edges of her poems. In this context, it is instructive to compare Valentine’s early poetry to Sylvia Plath’s last poems. Plath, of course, is a poet of a very different order, but wittingly or not, Valentine in early career is shadowed by strategies that are familiar from Plath’s work. Although Valentine did not read Plath’s work until after Plath’s 1963 suicide,11 the image of “SS men’s heels” in “New York, April 27, 1962” from Dream Barker recalls us to Plath’s use of Nazi imagery in her ‹nal poems. The bracing, nursery-rhyme-like rhythms and the juxtaposition between the image of tender babies and the solemnity of an archetypal bell ringing “in thin air” (55) are also reminiscent of Plath. Another poem, Valentine’s “Déjà-vu,” contains direct accusatory lines echoing Plath’s “Daddy”: “And now You! . . . / Now You let me know it was always You” and “I’d laugh, but I never, never loved You” (45). More fully, Valentine’s “For a Woman Dead at Thirty” forces an inevitable comparison to Plath’s suicide, for in the poem a young Plath-like suicide is presented in a “side mirror”; this suicide’s vision is a product not only of romantic individualism but of “bungled fever”—of something akin to genius, but a genius that mistakes psychic suffering for poetic resonance. The poem essentializes its Plath-like subject as a “blazing / Negative” and a “wavering light in water, / Water I stir 27

up with a stick: wavering rot.” For Valentine, Plath would seem to be a sister of sorts: a fellow contemporary and countrywoman, and yet Plath is not only blazing but wavering, and suicide is symbolized as a descent into decay, an ef›orescence of confessionalist selfdestruction. Valentine’s most direct description of the confessionalist legacy takes place in the penultimate stanza of the poem, running through to the concluding lines: O my sister! even if I’d known, All I could have said was that I know. (DB 4)

The suicide of this young woman is met with comprehension, the poem makes clear. Yet the ‹nal lines suggest helplessness in the face of despair’s clarity; they announce solidarity with the woman who commits suicide but they do not suggest a remedy. The poem thus offers both recognition and a declaration of difference. Plath’s images of destruction and exorcism are avoided by Valentine’s lights—by virtue not only of temperament, perhaps, but by virtue of another sort of reasoning. That is, Valentine does not consider psychic material destroyable, and the hope of nullifying such material strikes her as naive. For Valentine, the identi‹cation of psychic trauma is possible, however, which amounts to an act of receptivity that may make positive psychological transformation possible. Plath’s visceral sense of threat, of the feminine under siege, and Plath’s display of sexuality: from these Valentine has surely learned. Certainly, she absorbed Plath’s externalization of psychic dynamics. Yet while Valentine works with images of extremity, she handles them with a sense of the combustible nature of her materials. As we have noted, Valentine has written a number of poems that overtly deal with suicide, but she writes “away” from the self-destructive impulse. A survival instinct, however tenuous at times, can be perceived in most of her poems. Plath, however, must have seemed to be uttering a negative mantra, while Valentine sought a psychological security that did not violate her integrity as a poet. After her ‹rst book, Valentine expunged even brief reminders of the violence that we may associate with Plath from her own poetic and increasingly presented an effaced speaker. The “I” in her poems is muted, intent on entering into the same ordinary space of 28

comprehension as the reader. Such gestures convey a disbelief in the absolute centrality of the ‹rst-person pronoun. Already in “Sunset at Well›eet,” from her ‹rst book, nature assumes its own self-referentiality, whereas the self notes an essential “emptiness” that differs markedly from confessionalist display: The rattling bay runs night and day I, I, I, Over and over, turning on itself: there, Where it curls on emptiness: there I sing. (46)

Valentine’s references to the confessional poets in an interview makes clear that not only their poetry but their lives deeply in›uenced her. “I used to be scared by the writers who went ahead of me—so many of them were alcoholic or mentally ill or suicidal.” Initially, the role of the artist seemed linked for her to self-destruction. “I had a deep feeling, a deep fear about being an artist, that it would lead me right off the edge of a cliff into death, not just into alcoholism or mental illness, but that I wouldn’t survive.”12 Despite such an inhibiting anxiety, she allowed herself to be affected by confessionalist methods but not confessionalist solutions. Valentine’s “Anesthesia,” for instance, focuses on a woman who is visited after childbirth by contemporary versions of evil fairies—a plot that would surely interest both Sexton and Plath. But Valentine modi‹es the fairy story in which the birth of a child draws down a jealous fairy. Here her irreal creatures are marked by arti‹ce, masked and themselves self-destructive. Immediately the poem’s title, “Anesthesia,” accomplishes at least two tasks. It suggests the dreamlike and numbing effects of anesthesia on the speaker after she gives birth, her vision prompted by the strangeness of her drugged state. In addition, the title refers to the drama of many of these poems: the temptation to deaden or destroy responsiveness fails and proves only to be a form of anesthesia that cannot successfully accompany a “surgery” to remove the intimidating threat or subsequent evils. The quietness of Valentine’s concluding lines with their prose-like rhythms may seem more horri‹c than her nearly gothic earlier drama of women imaged as suicides/trees in the lines: not-women they were suicides, trees, soft, pale, freckled branches bending over her—

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I knew them as my own, their cries took on the family whiskey voice, refusal, need,—their human need peeled down, tore, scratched for her life—

Her response to these ‹gures had been like that of a prince in “Sleeping Beauty” (a fairy tale particularly resonant in this context) who must make his way through a barrier of thorns: I hacked and hacked them apart— then who knows when you murder things like that who comes in and takes over (105)

In murdering rather than in understanding these ‹gures, Valentine notes that their evil in›uence has not been conquered. Her speaker may have only allowed some other power to “take over.” The poem’s resolution, a refusal of malevolent glee or open challenge, points up the inadequacy of confessionalist gestures that would make a show of extracting negative psychic complexes. Valentine’s is a profoundly recursive poetry; guilts and shames return, and the slaying of past demons fails; ultimately those malevolent forces are ready to rise again. Early trauma is not excised (although it may be metamorphosed) and the attempt to eliminate inner demonic forces opens the way to conceivably worse forces. The Messenger clearly announces its link to Ordinary Things. “Susan’s Photograph” and “Outside the Frame” are reprinted in The Messenger from the previous volume, emphasizing at the book’s opening the survival of at least one aspect of Valentine’s persona and the defeat of self-annihilating impulses. What accompanies the more expansive vision that follows is a notable stylistic change: Valentine’s willingness to entertain in the lyric a larger repertoire of techniques. The Messenger is a breakthrough book, signaling a broadening of theme and a greater inclusiveness of voices—a recovery from the vague inertia and overly puri‹ed sensibility evident in her previous two books. She experiments more fully with prose passages, infusions of quotations, and a patterning of white space within lines and between unevenly sized stanzas. This is a more plentiful vision than can be seen in either Pilgrims or Ordinary Things, and the book centers less often on despair than do Valen30

tine’s earlier books; instead, it attempts to ‹nd sustaining potentials: the solace of meaningful solitude counterpoised by meaningful friendship. In this collection more than any other, she considers the discipline of friendship as it demands imagination and understanding rather than psychological fusion. Friends are portrayed as offering opportunities to evade the lure of projection and fusion that is more immediately tempting in romance. “Writing was like having an imaginary friend,” Valentine has commented in an interview.13 In “What Happened” she addresses her crossed desire for both meditation conducted alone and for warm friendship in which the other is not mastered or possessed: “To wait. To imagine” (149). Otherwise she suggests “not seeing each other; seeing instead some mask / or sign; consenting to be some mask or sign.” The Messenger offers a strategy that had only been implied in earlier poems. She explores more fully the gradual development of meaning and the possibility of a bene‹cent vision of the future, in which the messenger of the title is not only symbolic of the future as it discloses itself, but a welcoming spirit of the present. The Messenger makes more clear Valentine’s attraction to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, whose perception of emotional homelessness is similar to Valentine’s. In an interview Valentine called Bishop’s poetry “both simple and endlessly resonant with meaning.”14 We have already noted Valentine’s early absorption of Plath’s in›uence, and it is possible to see in Valentine’s poetry unmistakable signs of an Emily Dickinson–like concern for spiritual sustenance, telegraphic syntax, omission of context—and even terror. (In Bishop such characteristics are muted; we must, in a sense, bend to hear them in the quiet economy of her lines.) What Bishop offers Valentine, in contradistinction to Dickinson or Plath, is the example of a recent predecessor who explores ways of comforting and forgiving the beleaguered psyche. Bishop reveals the poem as labor toward survival rather than self-destruction; the poem serves for imaging an ordered sanity that nevertheless acknowledges threats to sanity. That is, the Bishop that Valentine appropriates for her own purposes is a benign elder of sorts and, more fully, an imaginative force for self-integration. When Marianne Moore characterized Bishop as “spectacular at being unspectacular” she might have been describing a certain element in Valentine’s poetry, especially her ability to create unassuming authorial presences. Yet while Bishop is an intensely visual poet, Valentine prefers to suggest the invisible. She explores the ar31

bitrary and tentative ways that meanings accrue, the way “the water-lit, dotted lines of home start coloring in” (129). She renders contingency and disintegrating presence more often than does Bishop. The details of landscape, the grains of her descriptions: there is seldom the illusion of anything leisurely about accumulations of details in Valentine. From their inception, moments are bound toward heightened psychological signi‹cance. As Valentine remarked in an interview: “I don’t think that poets are that interested in recording things. I think they’re interested in going through them, going through them like doors. Maybe it is to a world we’re seeking, not a world we already know.”15 Her statement underscores her propensity for imagining beyond immediacy into the “interior” of an event. Valentine’s sixth book, The River at Wolf (1992), opens to greater grief than any of her earlier collections. With the progression of her books—from the early bridal and motherhood poems of Dream Barker, to contemplations of dif‹cult marital separations in Pilgrims and Ordinary Things, to her new concentration on friendship and salvi‹c meditations in The Messenger and, in more recent years, an explicit summoning of the elegiac—she has returned as well to her ‹rst issues. In The River at Wolf she allows for the images of intense physicality and unexplained departure that marked her ‹rst book. Yet the poems seem less evanescent than much of her previous work and exhibit some of the earthy quality of her debut collection without sacri‹cing the spiritual intimations of later volumes. Poems in The River at Wolf are generally shorter than much of her work in The Messenger—as if Valentine were to gain immediate, telegraphic access to unconscious thought. In particular, The River at Wolf may prove to be her strongest collection because the maternal, so often sotto voce in other collections, is projected more fully in elegies that take their momentum from the death of Valentine’s mother. The maternal is embodied in an actual woman but one whose being extends into larger dimensions as a friend, philosopher, teacher, and a source allied to the divine. Valentine has brought to bear all her aesthetic lessons from previous volumes by recognizing an initial wound that is formed by a source of sustenance’s abandonment. In contemplating AIDS in several poems she indirectly re›ects on her own experiences with isolation and depression—and with a failure to name and identify and thus to objectify experience in a way that might allow for a release from suffering. Frequently she writes of threshold states of being or of psycho32

logical and spiritual containment, states re›ecting her shifting relation to the maternal. Valentine’s mother is externalized in elegies as the political state and internalized as ultimate sanctuary and part of the body, “spine in my spine.” The mother herself is the “original garden,” and later loves are seen as founded upon the ‹rst Edenic union between mother and child. Particularly in this collection, Valentine’s God is bodily invested, a God enwombed—or God as womb, as in “Ikon”: “Swim in you, sleep / in you, let me, / Mother Lord” (186). The poem is a prayer, and the self is a cavity to be ‹lled with spiritual intimation. Increasingly with The Messenger and with the new poems of her selected collection Home. Deep. Blue, but most emphatically in The River at Wolf, her personae are endowed with a sense of God that is, as such, linguistically linked to the maternal: “Teacher, spine in my spine: / the spelling of the world / kneels down before the skate” (215). “Seeing You” explicitly links the love of a mother, and the inheritance of a mother’s fear and affection, with original knowledge and with later sexual relations. “That was the original garden: / seeing you,” she writes of her mother (192). In part 2, “Lover,” she echoes this assessment, now applied to a lover: “Oh that was the garden of abundance, seeing you” (193). Like the mother, the lover similarly reveals orality, fear, and bene‹cence. The poem unmistakably unites the experience of adult sexual love with the experience of love for a mother. In “Butane,” Valentine’s speaker imagines an airship crashing and sparking ‹re, when suddenly a dwarf appears: “The dwarf says, Hold it! walking up between my legs / into my body: I’d better see the ‹re skin” (209). This disturbing poem images the mother initially as a hovering presence that, in death, must crash and cause further destruction. The dwarf would seem to be a surveyor of damage who enters the daughter’s spiritual womb. In its puzzling compressions the poem intimates the manifold deaths experienced by this daughter. The death of mother means the death of originary home (the womb) and symbolizes the speaker’s own impending death; death becomes an inheritance delivered from the womb and its “‹re skin.” In the poem, the mother is linked to the genitals, and the self and the mother are symbolized as a burning airship. Valentine connects the mother to previous and future generations as the means of transmitting death as well as life. The daughter, a mother herself, must recognize her own position within this chain of births and deaths. 33

In “At the Door” we operate with a reversed lens, for the daughter of the other poems is, in “The Door,” a mother. She sees herself in one moment of penetrating awareness as the maternal inhabiting a role that rays out beyond herself. The sense of self that the poem projects is as transparent as the white of an egg, a stretching gel covering but not obscuring vision. In the poem the mother views her daughter in lamplight and recognizes that, for her daughter, the mother must ‹ll in the imaginative and conceptual position of the maternal: It is not I, it is Mother. (But it is I.) It is the ‹rst tableau, the ‹rst red wellspring of I.

Through the mother as “wellspring,” the child learns her own identity; through the child, the mother’s experience of identity enlarges and radiates outward. The role of mother and daughter overlap, even as the instinctual needs and desires that Valentine writes of are so basic as to seem animal-like: Chimpanzee of longing, outside the light, wrap your long arms around the globe of light, hold your long haunches wide open: be ungodly I. (212)

The expressed wish of the poem is for an all-encompassing embrace of such animal-like selves with their embarrassing, unboundaried reactions (the chimpanzee as a ‹gure of longing, frenetic, ungainly, only mimicking the accepted social order). The mother yearns to be human, an “ungodly I,” to return from ethereal spiritual realms and, as such, to be part of an antitranscendent earthly realm. Valentine’s speakers hope for a sanctuary against the ravages of alcoholism and sexual violence as these are coded in the poems as having occurred in earlier generations. In “Spring and Its Flowers” 34

the ‹rst speaker, sounding as if prompted by a psychiatrist or a lover, imagines trading places with her partner in a tranquil fantasy. The poem’s womblike Edenic moment is shattered, however, as the ‹nal lines deliver the rough shock that Valentine is often capable of delivering: “We didn’t know / we were so close / to the world’s mouth, the drunk bear’s ashy thing” (183). The poem points to the terror of alcoholism, about which Valentine has spoken in interviews,16 but also the threat of being devoured and sexually violated. The startling ‹nal image appears unboundaried: “the bear’s thing,” seemingly its sexual organ with all its vital suggestiveness, is modi‹ed by the sign of destruction: ash. As we move backward along the track of modi‹ers we see that drunkenness renders the bear as humanlike and shameful; here Valentine likens the overriding need for warmth and security, such womblike comfort, to addictive desires for fusion. A central concern in this poetry revolves around the establishment of boundaries between individuals, as the poems battle an impulse toward oblivion of self through absorption into another that mimics the preoedipal. Indeed, the raw strangeness of the poems emerges from the fact that they have not entirely acquiesced to the symbolic order. Selfhood at points is undifferentiated, and Valentine’s doubles stand for undifferentiated feeling, a blurring in which feelings and sensations are not localized but spread across an environment. The challenge for this poet has been to preserve the sensitivity of this unboundaried self, its vulnerability, rather than to project an armored persona, a more stable force surely, but a persona less marked by psychic material. Often Valentine writes of the desire for liberation from obsessive materials. Deliverance into something similar to an inspired spirituality distinguishes most of her more supple poems after Pilgrims. Valentine already revealed hers as a search for “the lightest lines” in her ‹rst collection’s ‹nal poem, “To My Soul.” Playing on her own name and in homage to the poetic examples of Emperor Hadrian and Pierre de Ronsard, she begins: “Scattered milkweed, valentine” (72). The scattering and dissolution of varied images and references toward selfhood marks her poetics. Almost ‹fteen years after “To My Soul,” she writes in “The Messenger,” “Now I could scatter my body easily / if it was any use” (139). Images of fragmentation and self-dissolution occur as notations on experience and suggest the momentary transformations into ephemerality that her speakers undergo. Identity as such is aerated 35

or diffused. In times of psychic peril, Valentine’s speakers experience themselves as unlocalized. In more positive, transformative moments, such ephemerality and self-scattering is transformed into a radiant diffuseness, lightly boundaried or outlined. No matter how seemingly open, such a sense of selfhood is not entirely permeable. Over twenty years after “Dream Barker,” Valentine returns to the desolation of that early poem, revising the meaning of its youthful dynamics in “Redemption.” In the later poem she reconsiders the relationship between the woman and the man of “Dream Barker.” She places her speaker in the territory of the earlier poem, with its underwater cave, the character Jim, and her memory of an abrupt departure, but, as we shall see, with an essential difference. The poem begins by noting that another poet “saw the word ‘Con›uence’ in her sleep.” The observation prompts Valentine’s images of line and pattern as these emphasize discriminations, the telling details of difference: hair on a man’s arm, a crease in a shoe. She then de‹nes con›uence as “two rivers joining, / or, the longing to return.” She strikes again at what increasingly has come to be an important element of her work, a wish for ultimate union that takes its origins and its peculiar patterns from preoedipal experience: “Con›uence”: two rivers joining, or, the longing to return: because Jim, we parted on either side of this green island, Christ! it seems it was a hundred years ago. But now there is no inside wall: all down our bodies, from our heads to our feet, there’s only a line like light, and all around us a line like an eggshell of light. (192)

Valentine’s speaker moves from the purchased shell that was central to “Dream Barker” to the newly illuminated, spiritualized body, graphing the movement from matter to spirit. She remembers a past love relationship’s destructiveness, but now she imagines

36

boundaries as lines that resemble light, a psychological differentiation that is not coarsely de‹ned but explicitly framed as luminous. We might recall that in the early poem, “Dream Barker,” the couple are separated after they decide to purchase a mysterious shell. Given the often negative link in Valentine’s poems between false love and currency, a connection that becomes more clear after her ‹rst book, we can now see that the couple’s attempt to buy the shell in “Dream Barker” is foredoomed. In Valentine’s poems, purchases, even in dreams, are nulli‹ed or suggest a negative symbiosis, as she writes in a later poem: “This is / true desire, it lets you be. / It says, ‘No money here’” (189). Similarly, in “My Mother’s Body, My Professor, My Bower” she argues, “you can’t protect yourself / there is nothing to get” (209). As we noted earlier, Valentine’s poetry throughout her career takes much of its primary impetus from dreams. But her poetry has changed as her dreams have changed, enacting not only points of crisis but strategies for surviving deprivation. She transforms the bewilderments of abandonment into efforts toward individuation and a vision of relationship without possession of the other. Valentine’s spiritual yearnings are salted with secular considerations, including the desire to return to a greater awareness of the body and, at moments, a liberation from either dependency on or mastery over another. In “The Free Abandonment Blues” her persona no longer is swayed by the demands of another, although she remembers clearly the temptation to succumb to such demands. She casts the one who gives love conditionally as a “blue-robed” mock priest. Rather than return his call for binding relations, she turns, in the third stanza, to the same sort of saving potentials that she assumed at the time when she wrote The Messenger: nature, friendship, and sensuality without possessiveness. The voice that enters at the close of the poem advises patience. “Listen, it’s only a little time longer to wait / When you have taken this path you need just a little more time to wait / Maybe not today the amazing loveliness but it won’t be long for us to wait” (193). The poem moves from the present to the past to the future, concluding by anticipating “amazing loveliness.” As we have seen, Valentine has worked the tropes of abandonment through multiple dimensions. The woman who is left behind initially experiences the self as despised. In the course of midcareer Valentine then projects a psyche that moves beyond the individual

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ego. “I am trying to move into an other, into others,” she told an interviewer, “to move out of the private self into an imagination of everyone’s history, into the public world.”17 She accomplishes what amounts to a remarkable progression beyond the boundaries of the self without leaving behind a sense of the self’s own interiority, the embattled private with its preoedipal trace memory. However lightened or emptied of expectation, such a provisional self nevertheless must learn to meet the embattled privacy of others.

NOTES 1. Dudley Fitts, foreword to Dream Barker, by Jean Valentine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), vii. 2. Jean Valentine, “The Hallowing of the Everyday.” In Richard Jackson, Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983), 29. 3. Philip Booth, “On Jean Valentine: A Continuum of Turning,” American Poetry Review 9.1 (1980): 4. 4. Steven Cramer, “Self-Defense,” Poetry 161.3 (1992): 161. 5. Jean Valentine, “The Hallowing of the Everyday,” 29. 6. Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1. 7. Ibid. 8. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 60–61. 9. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 134. 10. Ibid., 137. 11. “An Interview with Jean Valentine,” interview by Michael Klein, American Poetry Review 20.4 (1991): 41. 12. Ibid., 39. 13. Ibid. 14. Jean Valentine, “Hallowing of the Everyday,” 31. 15. Jean Valentine, interview, 40. 16. Ibid., 39, 40, 42. 17. Jean Valentine, “Hallowing of the Everyday,” 29.

38

LEE BRICCETTI

Pilgrims

Jean Valentine’s earliest books revealed a thinking voice that was new, disjunct, and functionally counter to the passive reader. From the beginning, the poems had the intimate sound of a woman’s privacy. Though it is not fair to say that her ‹rst books were unknown—Dream Barker won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1965 and Pilgrims was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1969— it took years for a wider audience to give her a deep hearing. It is easy to forget how different these poems were in the time in which they were born. Like Eleanor Ross Taylor, whom Jean Valentine read and admired from early in her own writing life, the making of this voice occurs in a woman’s body, in time. The setting is domestic, in a politics, in a mind trained for observation of spiritual immanence—the latter of which is also experienced by the speaker through her voice as it builds from the interior. In our current poetry climate, excited by gusts of experimentalisms, it is also easy to forget that writing from a woman’s domestic experience was radical, and that a cultural path was opened by writers like Valentine who created a new way of speaking about reality. That her poems travel well through time to us is a credit to the integrity of their making and to the way they have built audiences, quietly over many years, readying readers for their own dynamics. (Surely the world has also changed around the poems, preparing readers for simultaneous, multiple demands on their attention.) All the signature elements that we recognize as Valentine’s trademarks are present in her second book, Pilgrims. The thinking mind is rendered musically in its sonic habitat of back talk and jokes. The engaged use of the poetic “turn” causes the tonal register and attention to perpetually shift. (Turn is also one of her preferred verbs.) Most importantly, Pilgrims articulates the project that will characterize Valentine’s entire oeuvre—both thematically and structurally— as the poet/speaker shapes a path of spiritual witness, frequently allowing the boundary between self and other to collapse. 39

Unlike the medieval poet lost in the woods because the direct way was mistaken, this poet/speaker/pilgrim is traveling in relationship to family. There is no guide, but her marriage, her household, and all that she has read are carried with her. Pilgrims begins with “The Couples”: One night they all found themselves alone, their ‹rst force gone. No law.

From these ‹rst notes, a sonic ‹eld of assonance and alliteration ticks through the collection, growing by accretion as each poem is made and binding the book together as a complete work of art. (Alone, gone, found; ‹rst force gone.) Indeed, Pilgrims uses all the conventions from the inherited tradition—repetition, caesura, full and slant rhyme, enjambment—but it shifts the contract with the reader, forcing us to experience multiple times and feelings simultaneously, foreshortening foreground and background. fireside The fox went under the garden thinking. The watersnake never moved, or the sun. —Night, and everyone’s straight out longing; the cat’s in the woods, the children lie loose in stories tall as this world could be if we could run for it Lord Fox. Fox‹re will, we thought, out, you and I, blue glass at the ‹reside side by side, word for word, wood for wood, desire for desire, nicer than God. (75)

In “Fireside” we can hear Valentine as she hears Dickinson, Hopkins, Lowell. The sprung rhythms and slant rhymes give us the essential nouns that will be stitched throughout the book: 40

Wood. Word. World. God. In contemporary poetry, Valentine has an unmatched, sensitive ear. And her listening operates both as technique and as the agency of spiritual practice. As in the earlier Dream Barker, the poems in Pilgrims are set on a lyric axis with an occasional narrative ligature of myth and dream to drive the storytelling. In later books, mythic armature disappears as it becomes wholly integrated into the strangeness of the world of the poem. Pilgrims, however, consciously positions “Orpheus and Eurydice” at the center of the book: A hissing second, not a word, and there it was, our underworld: (81)

The poet-speaker—a woman—experiences calamitous loss: “Fear / has at me, dearest.” But because she speaks, she cannot be that which is singularly lost. Valentine’s lyrical gifts were tempered in a time of personal and societal rupture: Slowly, slowly our exploding time gives off its lives: —“The Torn-down Building” (95)

The assassinations, the Vietnam War, and segregation are present in Pilgrims, and they are consciously connected to personal terrors. While we may hear Valentine tuning her ear to Lowell or Ginsberg, she goes her own way. The personal material is not a microscope slide of the historical process or a Whole Earth Catalog of the self. There is no platform. A younger generation will recognize the personal risk of these poems, even if they are unable to remember the circumstances that made a woman’s movement necessary, or to know that it was never a fait accompli. Fifty years later, nothing seems anachronistic or ›at in Pilgrims and it is completely and only Valentine: my step, a way back in the dark to where I go without telling lies or leaving anyone, will take a lifetime, and it’s going slowly, —“The Child and the Terrorist, The Terrorist and the Child” (98)

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A ‹nal point. A fragment of the epigraph from Orpheus and Eurydice—“What we had, we have”—becomes Pilgrims’ refrain, appearing in variant forms in a number of poems. That this fragment of wisdom is literally the epitaph for another couple, the twelfthcentury Duke of Devon and his wife, connects the couples through time and imagination. Years later in her fourth book, The Messenger, it appears again as the antiphonal voice in “Turn (2): After Years”: What we had, we have. Now I can turn, —now, without want, or harm— turn back to the room, say your name: say: other say, thou . . . (151)

As a young reader, I had my ‹rst real sense that poems in a single volume, and throughout the ‹eld of a poet’s career, could be in perpetual conversation with each other. And I had—and still have—gratitude for the articulated reality of the episodic nature of a person’s thinking relationship to herself as she makes her own life and a path through the world.

42

KATHLEEN FAGLEY

Orpheus and Eurydice and Gestures of Turning Palimpsest in the Poetry of Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine writes in her poem “To the Memory of David Kalstone,” “here’s the letter I wrote, / and the ghost letter, underneath—that’s my work in life.” These “ghost letter[s]” underneath Valentine’s poems often shadow forth the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. These lovers haunt many of her poems and seem to linger on a threshold—what Ann Lauterbach calls a “hinge”—between being here and not being here (3). These “ghost ‹gures” embody her major themes: abandonment, death, eroticism, relationship with the Other/other, and transcendence. The dream serves Valentine’s lyrical intelligence well. In an interview Valentine stated, “the way another poet might write from an outer experience is the same way I write from a dream” (“Interview” 39). Valentine presents three dream sequences in “About Love.” The images (“white running water,” “milky light on water,” and “beads of water”) in each of three respective stanzas give this poem its focus and power. Against the backdrop of spare language, white spacing, the absence of connectives, and missing grammar, images assume foreground, as they do in a dream. The poem contains a series of verbal slippages and a chain of associations. As Philip Booth points out, this is all “part of the central strategy . . . to preserve the mystery: to illuminate, not to explain” (5). The poem “Dearest” begins with white space Dearest, this day broke at ten degrees. I swim in bed over some dream sentence lost at a child’s crying: the giant on her wall

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Notice how the narrator addresses the particular logic of the dream with the phrase “dream sentence.” And this poem begins at the juncture between sleeping and waking—fertile time for the occasion of her poetry—the “5 a.m.” of the poem “March 21st.” The narrator, suspended between two states—the unconscious dream state and the semiconscious waking state—thinks differently; fragments of dream linger, coalesce, and dissipate. Identities become interchangeable in “Sleep Drops Its Nets,” where she writes, “Sleep drops its nets for monsters old as the Flood; / You are not you, no more than I am I . . . And then day sweeps the castle dry.” Valentine’s creative process and preoccupation with relationship and dream enlarge and transform the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Like recurring dreams and déjà vu, the myth returns in many of Valentine’s poems in different guises, echoing the broad theme of being lost, then saved and lost again. The gesture of turning becomes a manifestation of the relationship with an other. The narrator turns to dream, to wakefulness, turns to an “other”—whether a lover, God, or mother—turns inward, turns toward, turns away, turns into something other than what she was—as in a palimpsest. This process of transforming one text into another was addressed by Derrida: “Above all it is necessary to read and reread those in whose wake I write, the ‘books’ in whose margins and between whose lines I mark out and read a text simultaneously almost identical and entirely other” (qtd. in Leggo 188). Valentine’s insistence on connection with the other reveals itself in the last stanza of “Silences: A Dream of Governments”: Then, day keeps beginning again: the same stubborn pulse against the throat, the same listening for a human voice— your name, my name (137)

The myth itself is full of turnings backward, forward, and turning inward. As Sherod Santos writes in A Poetry of Two Minds, “At the crucial decisive moments of its drama, this story looks inward on its own creators, and that painful self-re›exiveness reminds us of the twofold nature of those truths. . . . as the scholar Elizabeth Sewell has observed, ‘In the Orpheus story, myth is looking at it44

self. This is the re›ection of myth in its own mirror. . . . Orpheus is poetry thinking about itself’” (24–25). These turnings make the myth indeterminate in some of its identifying characteristics. For example, who is Orpheus’s mother? The recursive quality both of Valentine’s work and of dreams predicts that some elements of the myth will reappear throughout her books, whether it is the idea of threshold, darkness, light, death, leave-taking, redemption, turning, or border. Themes recycle throughout her poems and some poems reappear in new versions. “For a Woman Dead at Thirty”—the second poem in her ‹rst book—reappears thirty-‹ve years later as “For a Woman Dead at Thirty (2)” in The Cradle of the Real Life. Poems correspond with each other within a book: “Turn” is followed by a second version, “Turn (2): After Years,” in The Messenger. “Still Life: in the Epidemic” repeats the ‹rst ten lines of the previous poem, “Still Life for Matisse,” then expands the reach of this poem from a pure image to a lyrical meditation on suicide. As readers we are thrust into the middle of a conversation that has already begun before the poem starts and which continues in the imagination after the poem is done. Borderline regions of Thrace are cited in most versions of the myth as the homeland of Orpheus. In Robert Graves’s retelling, Eurydice is walking along the valley of the river Peneius when she is attacked by Aristaeus (112). Other examples of transitional places are the mouth of a cave, the line where forest and meadow meet, the intertidal zone, a tree line on a mountainside, and other natural thresholds. In addition there are physiological, psychological, social, and architectural thresholds. Orr sees the threshold as a “place of transition, a place where a person might pause. Imagine yourself for a moment: you are departing and stop brie›y on the threshold with the door open. Before you, the wild and varied scene of the outer world unfolds. Behind you . . . is the interior architecture of the room you are leaving—its reassuring stability . . . as Rilke says, ‘all is known to you’” (Survival 52). These transition zones have particular similarities that are both actual and metaphoric. They signal hesitation and uncertainty and/or places that are in the state of “becoming” other than what they are. Poets have been intrigued with these borderlines. H.D. attempted “[t]o live constantly at the juncture of such forces, inner and outer, to inhabit constantly the borderline,” recognizing this area as conducive to creative energy (Martz xiv). Likewise, Valentine with her lyrical impulse and 45

dream sequences inhabits this unknown territory and forges a new version of the myth. Thresholds appear in many of Valentine’s poems. Angels stand at a door in “Waiting,” from Dream Barker. In “September 1963,” from the same book, she writes: “I hover at the door”—in this case the door of a schoolroom where the narrator is about to leave her child. Both mother and child are in transition, the child and mother separating for the ‹rst time. In “March 21st,” the doorway is metaphorical—the time between sleeping and waking—the time of the poem is 5:00 a.m. and the place is “the room the clearing in the trees moving.” In “After Elegies (3),” the narrator is “[h]alfway between sleep and waking.” And then we ‹nd that this in-between state could be in the midst of the day, with a protagonist at a window, staring outside, daydreaming. “Turn (2): After Years” opens with “January. At the window / wet-dark twigs and branches of young birch.” In an earlier version of “Turn,” a pregnant woman rests with a cup of tea and enters into a dream state: Was peacefulness ever what we were after? She thinks of the child, who wants the tea, who wants her eyes, her mouth, her hands, who pulls her out to the ‹eld to the thick of things away from the thick of things. (151)

In “October Premonition,” the narrator addresses “my leaving mother / leaving my door open a crack / of light crack of the depression world.” Steven Cramer writes, in his review of The River at Wolf, “Valentine’s are the interior voices we hear when we drift off to sleep. Her poems often arise from the ebb and ›ow of semi-consciousness, then effortlessly dive back below the surface between wakefulness and sleep” (163). In the absence of logic, the associative, nonlinear mode of thinking takes over. This process allows for the raw, uncensored expression of emotion. The deep image is discovered within each poem—the impulse to impose meaning and connection having been suspended. Anne Carson, in her introduction to If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho, writes about her use of brackets in translation. Brackets represent missing matter similar to the erased material of a palimpsest: “] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of 46

letters not quite legible somewhere in the line . . . an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it” (xi). The papyrus becomes an artifact, similar to the text(ile) produced by interweaving or erasures in a manuscript—the result of the process of transforming one text into another. These breaks in the text signal the place where the reader supplies the missing words and intuits meaning. Carson later writes: “Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, there is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes . . . brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure” (xi). Threshold represents a break also—a transition zone between two distinct entities. This gap functions in much the same way as Carson’s “free space of imaginal adventure”—fertile ground for leaps in imagination. In the reading of the text, the narrator and reader supply the missing words in order to pass over or through this interstice or gap. Valentine exploits this idea of threshold in her dream-laden meditations on relationship, and her language re›ects this: words repeat and stutter, single intense images return, pronouns remain unassigned. These elements enact the slippage from one state to another, as the narrator stands poised on a threshold. This slippage re›ects also the instability of dreams themselves as well as the narrator’s uncertainty—whether to stay still, advance, or go backward. And this slippage in language is a dynamic process; as Leggo writes, “language is always slipping and sliding as it works, and is worked, rhetorically to create meanings” (187). The white space in Valentine’s poems provides breathing space and allows the language to ›oat freely, detaching it from grammatic and syntactic constrictions. Valentine often replaces a sentence with a line of nouns. Syntax dissolves in mere naming, as in the title and line of a poem, “American River Sky Alcohol.” The lack of logical connections and structure can cause some of her poems to become too diffuse, particularly if the image is not strong or focused. Then its strangeness and telegraphic quality seems self-indulgent, and the poem too private. Yet in her more successful poems, and “Orpheus and Eurydice” is certainly one of them, white space represents an opportunity for reader and poet to listen together. As Valentine writes in “What Happened” from The Messenger, “Am I the unknowable one? Does my listening make just a white / place, like the space a person who is growing blind sees growing on / the page?” 47

In “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Valentine gives an idiosyncratic slant to the myth, beginning in the ‹rst line with the second-person address and its repetition: “You. You running across a ‹eld.” The repetition functions as a stutter, which re›ects the confusion and violence of the scene unfolding. The onomatopoeic word “hissing,” in the second line, functions as a perverse musical cue presaging violence from that point on. The setting is an open meadow, not the more familiar cave, leaving Orpheus and Eurydice more exposed and vulnerable. In her version, the physical threshold is absent. In the third line of the poem, Valentine places her iconoclastic stamp on this myth: “and there it was, our underworld.” “Our underworld” refers to their shared fate and clari‹es their relationship. Eurydice is not a dependent lover, mutely following Orpheus. Valentine gives her a voice. With the choice of “our”—one more example of how small words like pronouns ‹gure largely in her poems—Valentine expands dramatically the implications of this poem with its themes of loss and retrieval. orpheus and eurydice “What we spent, we had. What we had, we have. What we lost, we leave.” —epitaph for his wife and himself, by the duke of devon, twelfth century

i You. You running across the ‹eld. A hissing second, not a word, and there it was, our underworld: behind your face another, and another, and I away. —And you alive: staring, almost smiling; hearing them come down, tearing air from air.

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ii “This dark is everywhere” we said, and called it light, coming to ourselves. Fear has at me, dearest. Even this night drags down. The moon’s gone. Someone shakes an old black camera-cloth in front of our eyes. Yours glint like a snowman’s eyes. We just look on, at each other. What we had, we have. They circle down. You draw them down like ›ies. You laugh, we run over a red ‹eld, turning at the end to blue air,— you turning, turning again! the river tossing a shoe up, a handful of hair.

The repeating image is the “face” of line 4, appearing behind Orpheus’s face, “behind your face, another, and another.” This face behind or “underneath” the other suggests palimpsest. To whom do these faces belong? Are they the Maenads, the Thracian women in Virgil’s Georgics, who “deeming themselves despised by such devotion / Amid their Bacchic orgies in the night / Tore him apart, this youth” (643)? Edith Hamilton writes of them: “They rushed through woods and over mountains uttering sharp cries, waving pine-cone-tipped wands, swept away in a ‹erce ecstasy. Nothing could stop them. They would tear to pieces the wild creatures they met and devour the bloody shreds of ›esh” (58). Do these faces refer to the “they” of line 21? Here, again, she writes, “They circle down. / You draw them down like ›ies.” Whatever it is, “they” are the cause of his dismemberment. The reference remains ambiguous. In this same vein, it is interesting how Valentine isolates the word “away” in line 6. Surrounded by white space, the word gives the appearance of ›oating between the “I” and “you.” There is a dash beginning line 7, “—And you alive: staring,” perhaps suggesting the narrator’s disbelief of what she is witnessing. From what vantage point are we viewing this scene? Is it from the

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underworld itself? Is Eurydice viewing Orpheus’s murder by the Maenads? Has the action moved from a ‹eld to the underworld, or is this the same scene? Exact meaning is elusive. Valentine is collapsing space and time. The poem creates its own dream logic—everything is present, and at the same time past. The poem occupies a lyric moment, but what a horri‹c moment! Within lyric moments, Francis Blessington writes, “The world of action is suspended, and we are in the eternal moment of thought. The speaker is suspended in the vacuum of timelessness, freed from the necessities of cause and time and space and required to communicate a chain of apprehensions and images connected by the power of association” (5). The second section opens in darkness: “‘This dark is everywhere’ / we said, and called it light.” How can darkness be light? Does this backward logic re›ect the disintegration of the scene and dismemberment of the body of Orpheus? Or does the darkness mean the light of their reuniting as expressed in line 23? Valentine subverts language and logic, and it is a signal from the poet to look elsewhere for meaning. If not in the words of the poem, perhaps meaning is located in the images. “Black camera-cloth” is draped over the protagonists. Then the image of the “snowman’s eyes” appears in the midst of this darkness—as ephemeral as these ghost ‹gures who will melt away momentarily. These images also supply scaffolding in the absence of linear development. The “almost smiling” you of the ‹rst section is laughing in the second section. This is the most radical departure from the myth as traditionally told. Is the shared fate of these lovers the reason for the laughter? The phrase that opens the last stanza may be key: “What we had, we have.” There is confusion in time here—past and present collide. But the phrase “we have” indicates that they have each other at the end when they are reunited in death. Valentine imposes order on this poem with the sectioning devices, stanzaic arrangements, and sound patterning. There are parallels between the ‹rst and second sections. The ‹rst is characterized by spare language and a single, bleak image of “faces”; then later these faces reappear, “tearing / air from air.” The second section has denser language and less white space. It expands upon the images and questions raised in the ‹rst section. Both have single words isolated on their own lines, “away” in the ‹rst section, “fear” in the second. In the ‹rst part the lovers are separated; in the second part, they are joined in darkness, “coming to ourselves” in 50

a shared underworld. The ‹rst two lines of section II read like a reversal of the creation myth in Genesis. Instead of “Let there be light,” here, in Valentine’s retelling, “‘This dark is everywhere’ / we said, and called it light.” In this poem’s universe, Orpheus and Eurydice are creators of a new relationship between man and woman and of a new language. Full and slant rhymes provide structure amid the chaos of the scene unfolding. Immediately, with the slant end rhymes in lines 2 and 3, “word/underworld,” the poet sets up a linkage in sound and visual similarity—“word” could be misread as “underworld.” And even more signi‹cantly, it is not a word—just a hissing sound that accompanies this violence. In lines 7–10, there are slant rhymes: staring, hearing, tearing, and air. These rhymes anchor the words, which could easily dissipate into white space surrounding them without having any impact. They force the reader to listen, to “hear” the sounds at the same time that the protagonists hear the creatures descending upon Orpheus. In section II, there are more liquid “r” sounds: “Fear / has at me, dearest. Even this night / drags down.” Internal rhyme occurs in “fear” and “dearest.” Plosive sounds appear in lines 15–16: dearest, drags, down, and gone. The repetitive phrasing in the last stanza: “What we had, we have,” contains a clumping of whispery, voiceless, “w” sounds, like the faces appearing out of nowhere, borne on air currents. Note the repetition of the word “down”: “Even this night / drags down” and “They circle down. / You draw them down like ›ies.” Without the physical representation of the “underworld” in this poem, as it exists in other, more conventional poems about Orpheus and Eurydice, the repetition of “down” creates the sensation of being psychically located in the underworld. Orpheus and Eurydice are running through a ‹eld in the beginning of the poem—by the end, this ‹eld is described as “red” and located in the underworld. The emotional state of the protagonists is confused at the close. The “smiling” and laughter of Orpheus seems irrational and dissociative in light of their fate, as we know it from the myth. Coupled with the equally confusing sentences that also appear in the epigraph (“What we spent, we had. / What we had, we have. / What we lost, we leave.”), there is intimation that the two lovers have triumphed, a feeling of continuity despite physical death. The last two lines, “You laugh, we run / over a red ‹eld, turning at the end to blue air” is prescient of the “second life” that appears in Valentine’s later book and poem of the same title, The River at Wolf. 51

The gesture of “turning” appears for the ‹rst time in the ‹nal lines, interrupted by punctuation, “you turning, turning again! the river / tossing a shoe up, a handful of hair.” This interruption by exclamation point is quite dramatic and strengthens the alliterating, plosive sounds of “tossing” and “turning.” Binary opposites create interesting contrasts in the last stanza. In the midst of faces circling “down,” there is the action of tossing a shoe “up” in the ‹nal line. Orpheus and Eurydice turn “at the end to blue air,”—“blue the most fugitive of all the colors,” according to Valentine in “The Under Voice.” In the end, we are where the story began—at river’s edge, where the snake bit Eurydice. Despite the distance Valentine has traveled from the original narrative of the myth, she sets up a correspondence with it by mentioning the “river” in line 25. It is instructive to compare Valentine’s poem with her translation from the Dutch of Huub Oosterhuis’ poem “Twenty Days’ Journey.” The translation is similar to her original poem, re›ecting Valentine’s aesthetic. The translation is more direct and less elliptical, but contains the same vague sense of mystery. It begins, “I thought it’s only a thin threshold / a step scattered with straw.” Images are surrealistic: melting keys, “a veined marble vest,” and “you beaker ‹lled with ‹re.” The setting, as in “Orpheus and Eurydice,” is an open ‹eld, with “broken / ‹eld grass.” And the poem ends, in section 10, at a coastline—another border region. Inverted syntax and white space appear in section 3, the language re›ecting the narrator’s confusion: “and then stops tries to think runs on / across an island am I.” Some lines consist of series of words: “hard, heavy, metallic.” The “I” and the “other” metamorphose into each other, in section 6, with rich and physical imagery: “You are splintered into me / bits of soft denture / biting into my lips.” And her use of binary opposites is evident in these lines: “my body turns to mist but still stays alive,” “Much became little,” and “Nowhere now— / my sense of you everywhere.” The snowman’s eyes of “Orpheus and Eurydice” become the “blown-away footstep / in the snow / the voice that called me.” The choices that Valentine makes in translating from the Dutch reveal much about her aesthetic and how she uses elements of language, sound, and image to convey her preoccupation with relationship, and aspects of relationship—ruptures within relationships, the dependent nature of relationships, and the sense of abandonment in failed relationships. Later poems will respond to the pain expressed in these lines from section 6: “As if I never was 52

/ you cut your way out through every part of me / I become ›esh of your ›esh / bone of your bone.” In The Messenger, Valentine translates “Orpheus” by the same poet. Orpheus “found in a dream the wound the damp / place where the earth / quivers like a windpipe,” and follows it underground. Lee Upton writes, “In her translation Orpheus eventually is without any sense of bearings or boundaries as he continues to walk ahead of Eurydice” (84): Running on stripped nerves I have not looked around he calls and we shall dearest see the earth until our second death. Over the water sunlight blows before the wind the grass is dark creatures pass by He walks and no longer knows whether or not he did look back and where the earth is underneath above. (143)

In this poem is Valentine’s ‹rst mention of “our second death”: “we shall / dearest see the earth / until our second death.” In Ordinary Things (1974), the end of “Revolution” recasts the ‹nal line of the ‹nal poem in Pilgrims (1969) (“Why are we in this life”). Both poems correspond with each other—the “letter” and the “ghost letter underneath” that she references in “In Memory of David Kalstone.” Also, in these ‹nal lines of “Revolution,” echoes of the “tearing” gesture from “Orpheus and Eurydice” return with the same emotional intensity: o come and out of nothing whiteness they come, tearing their shirts off alone, together, touching, not touching, friends, who are the living who were the dead? (109)

“Turnings,” one of the hallmarks of the myth, occur on multiple levels. There are turnings of angels and individuals, the turning of the narrator toward another person, a turning to dream, “turning 53

our backs toward home,” and images turning back on themselves. In the “Night” section of “A Bride’s Hours” from Dream Barker, Valentine writes: “You turn your back in sleep, unmanned.” Such turns and reversals function as dislocations, enacting breaks in rational logic where the narrator instead slips into dream logic. Like Orpheus and Eurydice, the poet slips into these border regions— places not easily de‹ned, yet places of great lyric potential. “Culled from dreams of consciousness, these poems have little narrative tracking and almost nothing happens, yet with the gleaming precision of an acupuncturist, she locates great energy with each word, each image. Fragments, magnetized, shimmer on the page and inspire a charged silence”(Carter 122). In another of her poems from this ‹rst book, “Sunset at Well›eet,” Valentine comments on her relationship with language and demonstrates how it turns back on itself, particularly with the end rhymes of the ‹rst three lines. She seems stuck on the stuttering “I,” later described as “turning on itself,” then “curl[ing] on emptiness.” The ego is emptied of signi‹cance. It is on the shoreline of a bay, another transition zone, where she sings her lyrics. And again, another turning gesture—this time the I “turning on itself”—reveals the ego betrayed by its own insigni‹cance. These words I tell you smoking in my eye: The tree-frog is the tree-frog. The sky is the sky, The rattling bay runs night and day I, I, I, Over and over, turning on itself: there, Where it curls on emptiness: there I sing. (46)

In “Asleep over Lines from Willa Cather,” the language of the underworld is evoked in the ‹rst line, which mimics a children’s prayer: “Now I lay me desolate to sleep / Cold in the sound of the underground ›ood.” Later in the poem, the underground is transformed into Paradise. But when the narrator reaches for her Other, he is clay. She is rewriting the Creation myth: When my love bends to speak, it is a language I do not know: I answer and have no voice, I am deaf, I am blind, I reach out to touch his face And touch a spot of spittled clay, my eye, Hiding the garden, the river, the tree. (46)

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The Messenger, her fourth book, is rich with references to turning and relationships. In “Turn (2): After Years,” the narrator meditates while looking out a window. An image of branches making “a road map, a map of rivers” focuses this meditation. The narrator sees stars in the drops of freezing rain. Within this reverie, the other changes from a “light-eyed, noticing child” to “a tall man, restless, faithful, your light eyes always / not-here; always here . . .” This is an example of her use of opposites and an allusion to Presence and Absence—a theme at the heart of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Using opposites keeps the poem ambiguous and off-balance. Punctuation also works to this end: for example, the ellipses open possibilities of interpretation. In lines 14 and 15, Valentine writes, “I think of our lives / different the same.” This placement of opposites in one line adds to the fragmentation of logic and enacts in language the dissolution of a relationship and the psychic gap between the two protagonists. Unlike the ‹rst “Turn” poem earlier in The Messenger, the second version ends on a conciliatory note. Now I can turn, —now, without want, or harm— turn back to the room, say your name: say: other say, thou . . . (151)

This ending is prescient of the tone and address in her later books, where the “turning” becomes a listening and waiting for the Other. In her increasing use of white space and minimal language, the poet is attempting to create a ‹eld in which this communication may occur. This new relationship with the other/Other is not marked by dependency or violence. The relationship between the narrator and the other and thou is clearly de‹ned, and clearly separate, based on mutual respect. From Ordinary Things, “Revolution” begins in narrative then veers into fragmentary lyric. Actually, as the poem progresses, it becomes more elliptical. Valentine begins with sing-songy, repetitive lines: “Here is a man. / Behind him / dark, in front of him / dark.” Then, in line 5, the subject of the sentence is missing: “Blows up / his son who holds by him.” She adds syntactical changeups. Grammar is missing in line 9: “his learning his wanting / late now to be touched to touch.” By the second stanza, line 16 and 17, white space replaces punctuation and 55

lines dissolve to mere naming: “fox bird woman and man / o come and out of nothing whiteness.” Valentine’s lifework is listening; listening dominates the spare poems in her last four books: The River at Wolf, Growing Darkness, Growing Light, The Cradle of the Real Life, and Door in the Mountain. Each poem, with the exception of the more private and fragmentary examples, functions as a bridge between life and death—Presence and Absence. Eurydice becomes a bridge between these two opposites in the poem “Orpheus and Eurydice” and in later poems where reference is made of the “second life.” So too Valentine the poet is seeking a new paradigm: “to move out of private self into the imagination of everyone’s history, into the public world” (Valentine qtd. in Upton 96). Like the underground without boundary that appears in “Orpheus and Eurydice,” she is progressing beyond the boundaries of self, from self-absorption into the lives of others. She becomes the narrator in “The Free Abandonment Blues,” who writes in triumph, “Now if I want to warm myself I look up at the blue sky / Now I look to a number of people here and also to the round blue sky / To feel the sun, your free mouth on my mouth, not the ‹re that is gone by.” Her sense of connectedness with others culminates in her latest book, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003. Several new poems highlight her empathy with prisoners and victims of hate crime. Matthew Shepard becomes an Orphic ‹gure in “Two Poems for Matthew Shepard.” But what about the blue dory—the soul —Thief the sun

Thief the rain

Into love the size of a silver dollar [the soul] disappeared to a pencil point then nothing. Left his nails and his hair.

Gates replace the doors and thresholds of earlier books. In “Once in the nights,” she writes, “now / gates in the dark at thy name hinge.” And the gate is described in the next poem, “Under the 56

gold,” as a “blue // twine-tied gate / into the river grass.” In this latest book there is a merging of the soul and body. In the ‹rst poem in the collection, “Annunciation,” the narrator sees her “soul become ›esh breaking open,” and later, “my life breaking open / no one to contain it my / pelvis thinning out into God.” She speaks of her body becoming “a ladder of sunlight.” Perhaps this is “[the] path through death,” or “vertical stairway” she alluded to in “Twenty Days’ Journey.” In an interview with Michael Klein, she insisted: “For me it’s that the body and the soul are the same. So, if it’s imprinted on our body, it’s imprinted on our soul” (“Interview” 41). The body is “thinning” out in these poems—a lightening. The image of phosphorous comes to mind. The idea of “our second life” is consistent with this preoccupation with relationship and transcendence. The friends, family, and mythic ‹gures that die in her poems embark on journeys to lightened places over the water or into blue sky. This is the hope expressed in the last lines of “The River at Wolf”: This close to God this close to you: walking into the river at Wolf with the animals. The snake’s green skin, lit from inside. Our second life. (197)

And so, we return to where we began—the white space of the written page. What has come before has been erased. We have arrived at this place by the gesture of multiple turnings. We have been given the gift of space and time to listen to each other and to listen through the silence. In this process we co-create new text. This text shadows forth the text of Orpheus and Eurydice, which is in itself a palimpsest. Their journey of becoming becomes our journey from life to death. We are poised on a threshold and the door is open.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blessington, Francis. “Is There a Lyric Center?” Sewanee Review 107.2 (1999): 216–27. Booth, Philip. “Philip Booth on Jean Valentine: A Continuum of Turning.” Rev. of The Messenger, by Jean Valentine. American Poetry Review 9.1 (1980): 4–6.

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Carson, Anne, trans. “Introduction.” If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage, 2002. Carter, Michael. Rev. of Growing Darkness, Growing Light, by Jean Valentine. Provincetown Arts 12 (1996): 122–23. Cramer, Stephen. “Self Defense.” Rev. of The River at Wolf, by Jean Valentine. Poetry 161.3 (1992): 159–65. DeVoll, Matthew. “Emerson and Dreams: Toward a Natural History of Intellect.” ATQ 18.2 (2004): 69–87. Doolittle, Hilda. “Eurydice.” H.D. Collected Poems 1912–1944. New York: New Directions, 1925. Durant, Will. The Life of Greece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. London: Penguin, 1992. Grimal, Pierre. Concise Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Trans. A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop. Ed. Stephen Kershaw. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: Time Warner, 1942. Hirsch, Edward. “The Duende.” American Poetry Review 28.4 (1999): 13–21. Lauterbach, Ann. “Night Sky IV.” American Poetry Review 26.4 (1997): 35–42. Leggo, Carl. “Open(ing) Texts: Deconstruction and Responding to Poetry.” Theory Into Practice 37.3 (1998): 186–92. Martz, Louis L. “Introduction.” H.D. Collected Poems; 1912–1944. New York: New Directions, 1925. Mitchell, Stephen, trans. “Notes.” The Selected Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke. New York: Vintage, 1980. Orr, Gregory. “The Edge as Threshold.” Poetry as Survival. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Rilke, Rainer Marie. “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York; Vintage, 1980. Santos, Sherod. “A Story of Poets and Poets.” A Poetry of Two Minds. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Upton, Lee. “Dream Barker: Preoedipal Fusion and Radiant Boundaries in Jean Valentine.” The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998. Valentine, Jean. The Cradle of the Real Life. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000. Valentine, Jean. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Valentine, Jean. Dream Barker and Other Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1965. Valentine, Jean. Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Pittsburg: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997. Valentine, Jean. Home. Deep. Blue: New and Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Alice James Books, 1980.

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Valentine, Jean. “An Interview with Jean Valentine.” Interview by Michael Klein. American Poetry Review 20.4 (1991): 39–44. Valentine, Jean. The Messenger. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Valentine, Jean. Ordinary Things. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Valentine, Jean. Pilgrims. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Valentine, Jean. The River at Wolf. Cambridge, MA: Alice James Books, 1992. Virgil. “Georgics.” Trans. L.P. Wilkinson. The Norton Book of Classical Literature. Ed. Bernard Knox. New York: Norton, 1993.

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PHILIP BOOTH

On Jean Valentine’s The Messenger

Some years ago, when she visited a poetry workshop I was teaching, Jean Valentine gave this preliminary praise to a student poem: “Even on ‹rst hearing, I like its strangeness; it’s wonderfully strange.” And she all-but-embraced the author with an across-thetable smile. The terms of her response, the quiet immediacy of her emotion, are native to her own poems. Where strangeness invites wonder, Jean Valentine ‹nds mystery come close to home. Over and over, her poems tell how strangely familiar the mysteries are— if only we let ourselves embrace them. None of this is entirely new in her work, but it comes newly clear in The Messenger, the title poem of which, like the dust jacket, is drawn from Blake’s sense of Gabriel. The titles of her earlier three books, Dream Barker, Pilgrims, Ordinary Things, suggest to what extent her imagination has been (and continues to be) informed by the insistence of the subconscious, the ordeal of the pilgrimage, and the dailiness of mystery. To recognize that the ‹rst two poems in her new book are all-but-direct reprints of two of the last poems in her previous book is to begin to inhabit the continuum of her work. And this continuum seems only the more vital when a reader sees that the words that end one of these poems, “Susan’s Photograph,” are the very words that immediately thereafter begin “Outside the Frame” in the more open rhythms of a new lineation: It is enough, now, anywhere, with everyone you love there to talk to.

As they have increasingly moved outside the frame of closed forms, Jean Valentine’s poems have come to “talk” more and more quietly. In marvelously strange new rhythms, they talk intensely to everyone she loves: to each of us who knows to listen not only to words but to “human silences”; to all of us who have come of age even as children do: “growing into their lives, in their sleep.” Her poems “talk” with the profoundly intuitive awareness of a woman 60

who has taken a walk before breakfast, has been newly awoken to the world, and then returns to a strangely familiar table: You sitting at your table looking at the postcard. Green day lights the windows; everyone still asleep. Taut lines. Day, with its hours, and buildings; people start, around you. You wait a minute more in the white room— white tent against the snowed-over path, the wind, familiar voice—one life— Every day you move farther outside the outlines, kinder, more dangerous. Where will you be going. Who will the others be.

No voice raised to a question mark; rather the intensive tone that repeatedly lends both depth and immediacy to her work. Think, for contrast, of Yeats in one of his last essays: “A poet writes always of his personal life, in his ‹nest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table.” Yeats goes on to insist that the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” Whatever the tragedies of Jean Valentine’s life may be, her ‹nest work, even in its self-completion, is in no way born as “something intended.” Born to a world of ‹eld theory rather than gyres, she sits down to write or to breakfast in a morning where intention is as uncertain as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is sure. Yet one of the lovely mysteries of Jean Valentine’s poems is that (with a “thumbed line of daylight . . . / ‹nding the room”) they continually feel for transcendence in a world that science thinks to de‹ne. Jean Valentine’s poems understand tragedy, loneliness, uncertainty, as given; the joy of her work lies in how she turns to transcend anguish by writing not merely “out of” tragedy but (in a Freudian sense) through it. The issue is survival, the survival of all the human spirit can in itself realize. Consider, as if after a night when “the earth’s bright rim / is ›oating through an indifferent 61

blank, without / color, without consolation,” the fourth and last strophe of a poem indeed called “Turn”: The ‹rst day’s quiet. The second; the second year. I’m taking up my life. If you were here who I am honest with I’d have to think a long time to say the simplest thing: nothing like anything I know.

The language of “Turn” is, typically, as word-by-word simple as breakfast-table talk. But Jean Valentine’s total language, simple as it may seem at ‹rst glance, is composed of the most complex permutations and combinations of silence and sound, of variantly paced line-ends and caesuras, and of a brilliantly individual syntax. The ‹rst two lines of “Outside the Frame,” as I’ve earlier quoted them, might serve as a Valentine primer for any caring reader. Become that reader: balance out in your own reading how “now” and “anywhere” work as apposites in the ‹rst line, yet how, by contrast in the second line, “. . . where” becomes “there” (a place for love as well as talk) even as “any . . .” is ful‹lled by “every. . . .” Now, “Turn” again for its doubleness, for the ways in which individually simple words reverberate, in context, to ambivalence that requires resolution. For instance: the apostrophe in “day’s” signals both a simple contraction and the quality of quiet that the day possesses. The primary use of “The second” by parallelism contracts the “‹rst day’s quiet” to an instant that the repetitive use of “the second” (after a heavy caesura that sets up a suspensive runon) extends to no less than a year. Against and within such a relativistic sense of time, “taking up” more than casually reverberates: just as one might be “taking up” a new vocation, or “taking up” the slack in one’s present life, so might one be “taking up” the old sidewalk (or whatever) that gave false direction to one’s earlier experience. The words, in order, in syntax, in context, simply make present the very ambivalence of the persona’s emotion. Echoing “year,” the postcard-tired phrase “If you were here” seems fatally pathetic until lent redemptive substance by “who I am honest with.” Given how ›at that line sounds as prose, let your ear listen, in context, to how improbably Jean Valentine leads down to it and then (almost impossibly) extends it. If, as I ‹nd myself believing, the ‹rst ‹ve lines of this strophe deeply measure the suffering they 62

survive, so am I sure that the last line de‹nes, and measures, the radical innocence that is Jean Valentine’s great strength. Jean Valentine’s innocence has long been too radical for a good many readers. Her poems are, phrase by phrase, so apparently transparent that it takes a most caring kind of close reading to honor their emotional and spiritual depth. Coming to even a small constellation of poems that are “nothing like anything” we’ve been prepared for by Yeats and other Newtonian poets is, after all, a humbling kind of excitement. Readers remain mysti‹ed because, in part, they are too sophisticated to embrace the very mystery of the poems: that the poems themselves immediately embrace the mystery of human existence. The poems speak, and speak for, our human need to sense our own being and our own meaning, even if only momentarily. In their stretch for immediacy, Jean Valentine’s poems are seldom (even for a moment) linear in their progression; they do not, as Frost would have it, begin in delight and end in wisdom. They begin in medias res and become, much as Stevens would wish, the cry of their occasion. To the time and place of that occasion, the reader may well be stranger; Jean Valentine’s poems ask a lot in asking that a reader’s response be as totally open as her own: “it’s wonderfully strange.” Insofar as she presents poems with little context and even less introductory exposition, she risks much. And she knows the cost of that risk: in an interview on Pilgrims, she acknowledged that since she found her own poems “utterly lucid,” she was doubly disturbed to get the public reaction, “over and over again, that they’re incomprehensible.” In fear of becoming “blatheringly sentimental,” she admitted, “I’ve sometimes economized myself away.” True. But that was years ago. Whatever her continuing impulse toward the hermetic, her poems in Ordinary Things became increasingly open, as if in response to her supplication that climaxed the poem “Forces”: “God break me out / of this stiff life I’ve made.” A “stiff life” might be a life too in›exible to admit to the constant ›ux in which humankind lives; to acknowledge that “I’ve made” such a life is indeed to begin to reshape that life and the poems that that life informs. “Outside the Frame” insists (I repeat as she repeats), “It is enough, now, anywhere, / with everyone you love there to talk to.” In an Einsteinian multiverse, “anywhere” is enough and is all, as long as we inhabit its constantly unique “now.” “Now” is when, if ever we’re to grow, we must embrace the mystery of our presence among everyone else who is equally 63

present. That Jean Valentine’s poems have, in her young middleage, realized such change is one great measure of the long arc through which her poems have continued to turn. To Jean Valentine’s poems and the space-time continuum they inhabit, time is strategically important. Tactically, her poems involve the space that surrounds them on a page; within themselves they are full of the typographic space that is a notation for silence. But it is time, rather than place/space, that provides context for, or perspective on, the immediacy with which Jean Valentine’s poems present themselves. The designedly unpunctuated title “Here Now” speaks de‹nitively for all those other poems in The Messenger that are titled simply “December 21st” or “February 9th” or “March 21st” or that directly begin as simply as “Dawn, . . .” or “January” or “5 a.m.” Whatever the symbolic valence of such a date or such a time, the time that is primary in Jean Valentine’s work is the moment of the poem itself: the moment through which the poet seeks to come to terms with experience, and the moment (all but coincidental) when the poet means to make the experience present for her reader. A lot of Jean Valentine’s poems are meditations in progress; many are dialogues between one aspect of self and another (sometimes between self-past and the emergent self-present). A beginning like “New Hampshire / January 28th” (the ‹rst words in “The Burden of Memory”) typically implicates a person (real or imagined) with whom Jean Valentine is (in all senses) corresponding. Fortunately, her new poems are less and less burdened by such enigmatic dedications as “for W.A.,” “for S.T.,” “for F. and P.L.,” dedications that tend to disinclude the reader in their privacy. In most Valentine poems the addressee (so to speak) is carefully unspeci‹ed, yet is addressed with a moving intensity that includes any open-spirited reader. Even more than an open mind, it is an open spirit that Jean Valentine’s poems repeatedly want. Repeatedly, her poems share a correspondence, a correspondence that reveals a relationship, a relationship that in spirit transcends place and time. Memory may be a burden for Jean Valentine, as “The Burden of Memory” says it is; but memory is also, through the very process of revival, transcendent access to the present. “What Happened” (as that title, too, tells simply is as much Jean Valentine’s concern as, say, it is Elizabeth Hardwick’s in Sleepless Nights (the resemblance between the latter’s more lyric passages and the former’s more paragraphic poems speaks for the nature of the imagination 64

both share). But because poet and reader come to a poem with basically disparate memories, a reader’s access to a Valentine poem depends more on what is happening in the poem than on what happened (in Jean Valentine) to catalyze the poem. Beyond accepting the poems’ impressively straightforward titles, a reader’s access deeply depends on a reader’s willingness to regard apparently transparent language as being, in fact, substantial. Nothing less than an entire poem will suf‹ce as an example: december 21st How will I think of you “God-with-us” a name: a word and trees paths stars this earth how will I think of them and the dead I love here-with-me

and all absent friends

and table: hand: white coffee mug: a northern still life: and you without a body quietness and the infant’s red-brown mouth at the star of a girl’s nipple . . .

a star

Word by word the poem is perfectly transparent. The parallel between “God-with-us” and all that is “here-with-me” is obvious enough; but how will we think of the poem unless and until we recognize the quotation marks around the ‹rst phrase as calling us to remember (the burden is worth it) that this is the literal meaning of Emmanuel, “a name: a word” that recalls Christ who is Jesus— who is celebrated in the grace of one of the year’s holiest days: the winter solstice when a virginal mother ‹rst gave her infant her nipple. No, not gave; gives: one of the marvels of the space, pace, and syntax of this work is that Jean Valentine makes immediately present the tenderness that moves the poem from its pagan beginnings 65

to its Christian import. In the words that the poem embodies, Mary’s spirit is given substance. Save for the supplication in “Forces,” God is rarely named in Jean Valentine’s work. But the transcendent aspects of her poems seem more and more clearly to owe to Christian sources. Perhaps they owe, too, to Catholic practice: as in her earlier books, The Messenger includes her translation (after a transliteration by Judith Herzberg) of the Dutch poet Huub Oosterhuis, whom she has notably identi‹ed as “a radical priest.” This much is certain: her concern for the life and death of the spirit, as well as of the body, is part of her poems’ continuum. Just as, in Ordinary Things, the end of “Revolution” (“who are the living / who were the dead?”) is in direct line of the title poem of Pilgrims (“Why are we in this life”), so both poems predict her choice of “Orpheus” as her new translation from Oosterhuis. Her other translation in The Messenger, from Mandelstam, includes a strophe that might well be said to apply directly to her own poems: It is their calling to accompany those who have died; and to be there, the ‹rst to greet the resurrected.

The Christian calling implicit in Jean Valentine’s newest poems is probably most apparent, if less than entirely clear, in the poem of three major sections (“The Father” / “The Messenger” / “The Hill”) that lends the book its most dramatic deep focus as well as its title. The poem is full of ‹lmic cuts and cross-cuts; its deep focus involves a reader in both foreground and background action all but simultaneously. Since poetry functions in time just as photography of any kind functions in space, the totally simultaneous presentation of images is, in poetry, impossible; words are inevitably sequential. But Jean Valentine’s ability to foreshorten the space-time between the foreground present and the background past is impressive. Two ‹lmically related passages, for instance; in the section of the poem dealing with the death of “The Father,” the ‹rst subsection opens: In the strange house in the strange town going barefoot past the parents’ empty room

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I hear the horses wings your voice.

the ‹re

the wheel

bone

And the beginning of the fourth subsection both revives the persona’s wonder in such strangeness and newly brings into the foreground her psycho-spiritual state, which—if I understand the poem—opens her being to intimations of The Messenger’s eventual annunciation: Every night the freight train crossed the grown-over road at the foot of the Neilsens’ ‹eld, trailing its rusty whistle. The ‹re, the wheel; ‹re›ies. The wall of stars. Real horses. I could go anywhere. I could go to where you are. I lie under the bank, my face on the wall of wet grass. I can’t go anywhere, No such thing my dear.

Even in the handsome whole-page printing that the New Yorker originally gave this poem, it was dif‹cult to identify the multiple voices (who speaks the ‹nal ‹ve words, above?), and to follow the poem’s implied narrative. Dispersed as the poem now is on six pages of the book, it is even more dif‹cult to keep straight. But to look too hard for the narrative vein in Jean Valentine’s work (as, say, that vein exists deeply in Elizabeth Bishop’s) is to miss the variant imagery, the recurrence and modulation of image that derive from ‹lm techniques. Repeatedly, as if with a deeply focused macro or telephoto lens (which condenses perspective in ways typical of much visual art), Jean Valentine excises from her work every abstract element that might detract from the absolute essence of the experience her poem presents. Her cropping of context, her disinclination to provide introductions, or to locate the reader, are all part of the central strategy of her work: to preserve the mystery: to illuminate, not to explain. When I wonder if I understand “The Messenger,” or whatever Jean Valentine poem, I don’t ask that the poem explain itself away; I only wonder if the poem shouldn’t provide more access to its own mystery. I think back to the speci‹c criticism Jay Meek once brought to one of my own poems: ‹rst suggesting that I should cut 67

a line, he then wrote, “or maybe, instead of cutting, you could extend the ‹gure by the singular detail that would secure its literal presence.” Such criticism makes sense to me still, and I could wish for more “literal presence” in such Valentine poems as her elegy for Lowell (“Working”) or her “Lines from a Story,” a poem that confounds me from its disproportionate epigraph from Robert Coles to its climactic assumption of a “we” that the “story” never makes present. Jean Valentine’s poems can be severely limited by her failure to “secure [some] literal presence” when that presence would, in fact, serve to illuminate her sense of mystery. In “bracketing” (as the phenomenologists would say) to the extent she does, Jean Valentine tends to limit a reader’s access to her poem in almost direct ratio to the mystery she intends the poem to illuminate. The risk she takes is high; where she fails she fails honorably (true imagination, however true to the word, is never merely “literal”); where her poems make good on her risk, the “singular detail” is inevitably revealing. But how much relationship must be present in a poem as prerequisite to revelation? How much communication before whatever communion? The answer depends, poem by poem. My own feeling inclines to believe that mystery this side of miracle, annunciation without (necessarily) angels, are what give Jean Valentine’s poems their most profound strength. Jean Valentine’s poems take strength from many sources that are not speci‹cally Christian. And one of the lovely virtues of her work is, in fact, how variously its spirit is available to us pagans for whom poetry itself is the True Church. Whatever Jean Valentine’s private devotions, her poems are never (thank God!) either publicly confessional or philosophically programmatic. They are, rather, lowercase catholic in all that they assimilate and take unto themselves. Observing Pound’s dictum, Jean Valentine openly acknowledges her debts and covers her thefts entirely. The poem “February 9th,” for instance, speci‹es Tranströmer, Milosz, and Emily Dickinson as being among its sources; Blake is variously obvious from the book’s front jacket to its ‹nal poem; Freud is deeply present, well beyond her prose-poem “‘Love and Work’: Freud Dying.” Her work, as I have suggested, is permeated by ‹lm (especially documentary) techniques; her use of parataxis and meiosis probably comes less from literary sources than from ‹lms such as Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and possibly (she has called it her favorite ‹lm) Zero for Conduct. Beckett is somewhere in the background; tactically, there is good evidence of George Oppen’s in›uence, and perhaps one or two of 68

his (and her own) lesser contemporaries. But most of these “sources” seem to reach her by osmosis rather than design; what is remarkable is that, in taking so much unto herself, she makes it so much her own. Her poems are innovative in all sorts of highly individual ways. That they make their tactics seem so organic as to be instinctive is, after all, one measure of her ‹nely tuned ear and her profoundly intuitive intelligence. Intuition is everywhere in these inscapes, hospital hallways, breakfast rooms, interiors. No matter from what perspective her poems seek to illuminate the mysteries they ‹nd there, Jean Valentine is utterly serious about the search; she knows at heart both the possible darkness in which all is lost, and she knows the redemptive joy her poems are written to share. Perhaps because these poems are written from such deep necessity, perhaps because they’re in every way self-demanding, there simply aren’t as many poems to The Messenger as its spirit and theme would seem to ask. Jarrell would say that the book’s fewer than two dozen new poems “was too few.” But he would also know how wonderfully strangely Jean Valentine’s poems give the lie to Frost’s old insistence that: The present Is too much for the senses, Too crowding, too confusing— Too present to imagine.

In addressing “You who I don’t know,” asking “What is it like for you there?” and giving her own strong sense of here/now, Jean Valentine both senses, imagines, and makes a present of the moment her poems illuminate. Years or centuries ago, people spoke of a poet as being “gifted.” Jean Valentine is. Confusing as her work still sometimes can be, poems like “Turn,” or “The Forgiveness Dream . . .” or the Valentine poem for “February 9th” or “What Happened” or the thematically climactic “March 21st” are gifts. Gifts in all truth. Gifts worth any reader’s thanksgiving. Over and over, Jean Valentine’s poems reach for “the hidden way of each of us.” They are (as we become with them, reading) part of “the play of the breath of the world.”

69

MICHAEL WATERS

“Through Such Hard Wind and Light” Jean Valentine’s Elegy for Elizabeth Bishop

snow landscape, in a glass globe in memory of Elizabeth Bishop

A thumb’s-length landscape: Snow, on a hill in China. I turn the glass ball over in my hand, and watch the snow blow around the Chinese woman, calm at her work, carrying her heavy yoke uphill, towards the distant house. Looking out through the thick glass ball she would see the lines of my hand, unearthly winter trees, unmoving, behind the snow . . . No more elders. The Boston snow grays and softens the streets where you were . . . Trees older than you, alive. The snow is over and the sky is light. Pale, pale blue distance . . . Is there an east? A west? A river? There, can we live right? I look back in through the glass. You, in China, I can talk to you. The snow has settled; but it’s cold there, where you are. What are you carrying? For the sake of what? through such hard wind and light. —And you look out to me,

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and you say, “Only the same as everyone; your breath, your words, move with mine, under and over this glass; we who were born and lived on the living earth.” (175)

In the year following Elizabeth Bishop’s death, Jean Valentine praised her as a poet who is “both simple and endlessly resonant with meaning” (“Hallowing” 31). Her elegy for Bishop, “Snow Landscape, in a Glass Globe,” included in the section of new poems in Home. Deep. Blue: New and Selected Poems (1988), is anticipated by her earlier elegy for her grandmother, Frances Valentine (1880–1959), “To Salter’s Point” (43), included in her ‹rst volume, Dream Barker and Other Poems (1965): “Maybe our mortal calling / Is, after all, to fall / Regarded by some most tender care.” This coupling of seriousness of purpose (“mortal calling”) with trust in the bene‹cence of an unnamed witness (“Regarded by some most tender care”)—either the traditional God aware of “The barest sparrow feather’s falling” or the poet herself who must “imagine Heaven” when the world cannot—occurs again, two decades later, as another death compels the “Looking” that might lead to consolation. Also, the pentimento of these lines suggests another reading, “our moral calling / Is, after all, to fail,” reminding us not only of the futility of engagement but also of the limits of empathy. What the poet offers is a way of seeing, then a way of seeing again: “And the thing itself not the thing itself, / But a metaphor,” she insists in “Sex” (70). Richard Jackson has noted that “the process itself is the subject, not the fact of the ‹nished poem. . . . [T]he poem is always emerging.” Valentine’s sparse vocabulary, as well as her use of language, its constant doubling, functions always as an extension of her (re)vision. God, light, angels, hands, sleep, friends, summer, dreams, and even white, the cancellation of colors, all contribute in their repetitions to the dreamscapes of her poems, while bits of dialogue, those human voices that wake us, often intrude. In “Silences: A Dream of Governments,” she writes: “Then, day / keeps beginning again: the same / stubborn pulse against the throat, / the same / listening for a human voice” (137). Jackson has remarked that her poems seem to be “based upon fragments, shifts in perspective, traces, frayings . . . a world of deferrals, discontinuities, differences, gaps.” Marc Chenetier, writing in Beyond Suspicion about another master of limited vocabulary, Raymond Carver, notes that “his 71

short stories are the site of absences, hollow presentations, kingdoms of ellipsis,” and “tend to be organized around an initial hole, an absence of explicit cause, an ambiguous, undeveloped fact.” These “territories of the inde‹nite” also situate Jean Valentine’s poems, and afford them the simplicity and resonance she so values in Bishop’s oeuvre. Bishop’s characteristic restraint and decorum translate, in Valentine’s work, into what Chenetier calls “the art of the unsaid.” The elegy for Bishop clings to a narrative thread, as if the poet in her desire to praise is afraid of losing her way, of being too easily distracted by light and language. Like the smile of “that blind child on the train” in “Night” (98), her poems seem always “a little to one side of straight ahead,” but “Snow Landscape, in a Glass Globe” attempts to strike a balance between eyesight and vision, and its signature repetitions call attention to its making, its process of becoming, as well as the struggle, always, to labor in the knowledge that completion remains impossible. The glass ball encompassing its landscape allows the poet both her precise measurement (“thumb’s-length”) and telescopic view (“Snow, on a hill / in China”). Her concern here is with the act of seeing, from without and within, and the back and forth—“I . . . / watch,” “Looking out . . . / she would see,” “I look back in,” “And you look out”—echoes the swirls of snow falling around the miniature ‹gure. The repetitions throughout the poem’s thirty lines (of “snow,” “hill,” “China,” “glass,” “ball,” “over,” “hand,” “pale,” and “light,” as well as several personal pronouns) reinforce this whirlwind effect. The various rhymes in the opening stanza (snow/blow, hill/ball, work/yoke/thick, and house/glass, for example) cue the ear for the chiming that occurs throughout, and allow the language its foreground so that the af‹rmative progressions (“alive/live/lived/living” and “unearthly/breath/earth”) underscore the text. Finally, the poem’s six questions, in their yearning to establish a moral landscape and to accept the self-discipline of artistic responsibility, enable the narrator to assume her burden of grief just as the Chinese woman and the dead poet carry their “heavy yoke” and continue their journey “through such hard wind / and light.” The poem begins by establishing a connection between the narrator, who watches the woman “at her work,” and the woman in the snow globe, who, if she were “Looking out,” “would see the lines of my hand.” Since the poem’s dedication announces its func72

tion as elegy, it would be hard not to read Bishop into this stanza, and “her work” references her poems, just as “the lines of my hand” suggest the elegy itself in the process of creation, the lines of poetry put down on the page. Nothing in the description of the woman—no mention of her dress, for example—or the landscape indicates that the setting is China. Is the yoke on the woman’s shoulders enough to pinpoint the country? If not, then why does the narrator claim China as the globe’s setting? More important here, however, is the “snow” that makes the outer landscape in which the poet resides seem “unearthly,” its trees “unmoving”—this outer landscape corresponding not only to the snow globe’s cold scene, but also to the emotional territories of the narrator, who is searching for language that might express her grief. The next stanza reinforces the burgeoning sense of community as the snow falls both inside the globe and outside on the Boston streets. “No more elders” seems a sigh of resignation. As the trees disappear in snow, so “the lines” of poetry begin to fade, as suggested by the ellipses in the ‹rst three stanzas, due, in part, to the sense of loss triggered by the death of Bishop, one of the “elders,” gone now like Frances Valentine and other, spiritual foremothers. Her absence is palpable (“where you were”), yet the trees, though veiled, remain, “alive.” In the third stanza the snow has stopped, and the narrator imagines an extended landscape, both inside the globe and beyond the grave. Her questions (“Is there an east? A west? A river?”) recall the titles of several of Bishop’s books, North & South, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, as well as Bishop’s famous villanelle about loss, “One Art,” in which she loses and misses, among other objects, “two rivers.” The stanza’s ‹nal question, with its italicized “There,” means to rouse belief in a place where we can “live right,” and strengthens the narrator’s resolve not to allow her lines to dissipate. She again turns her attention to the globe in her hand, addressing “You,” now both the glass ball’s ‹gurine and the dead poet: “You, / in China, I can talk to you.” It’s obvious now that China, in its “distance” and foreignness, functions as a metaphor for death: “it’s cold / there, where you are.” Again, in its simplicity, “there” assumes resonance, becoming the solitude in which the creative process ›ourishes, the territory Bishop inhabited and now continues to inhabit, not only through her death but through the “‘living’” body of her work. 73

The narrator knows the answers to the questions (“What are you carrying? / For the sake of what?”) posed in the ‹nal stanza. The “heavy yoke” is the burden of artistic purpose, a “mortal calling” and moral responsibility to take part in a community that provides “most tender care” as well as a vocabulary, “‘breath, / . . . words,’” that helps us to endure. The anonymous Chinese woman and the late American poet beckon the narrator by triggering the creative process, then receive her, “through such hard wind / and light,” into that community of the dead and the living “‘under and over this glass,’” this globe, a community not only of those “‘who were born / and lived on the living earth,’” but also of those “‘who were born[e]’”—lifted—by words, by poetry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Valentine, Jean. Dream Barker and Other Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Valentine, Jean. “The Hallowing of the Everyday.” In Richard Jackson, Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Valentine, Jean. Home. Deep. Blue: New and Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Alice James Books, 1988.

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JONATHAN BLUNK

Jean Valentine’s Spontaneous Mythologies

When I ‹rst tried to set down what is so distinctive about Jean Valentine’s poems, I sat looking out a window in midcoast Maine, and by chance a fox on the hunt appeared in the sodden, late-winter meadow. Here, I thought, is the image I’ve been looking for. It is her clarity of attention, something instinctive, that I cherish in Valentine’s work, the agility of her intellect and sensuous engagement with the world. Her poems are marked by the calm but passionate focus found in a Vermeer painting, or in the work of the poet she perhaps resembles most, Tomas Tranströmer. Her voice is by turns intimate, shrewd, and unyielding. With the title of her ‹rst book, Dream Barker, Valentine announced what has become a central provenance of her work. There persists a cultural bias that disregards the cunning of the dreaming mind; comparing a writer’s work to dreams is often meant to disparage it as a kind of willful surrealism. Valentine’s poems, however, are meticulously crafted; if their surfaces ‹rst conceal this, then Horace, for one, would be pleased. James Wright likened the craft in poems to the work of making something with your hands, and this sense of the poem as a human, made thing feels apt when we read Valentine. It takes a peculiar sort of courage to handle dream material and descend into the muck of desires and emotions to track the movement of images attentively. As Heraclitus knew, the essence of the imagination is a ›owing river. Like the images of which they are made, dreams resist our need to assign values or limits; they remain elusive. The two poems here exemplify Valentine’s work with dreams; each in its way is an ars poetica, with correspondences to other poems throughout her career. Many of her poems, such as “Listening” or “The Pen,” or even “First Love,” the poem that inaugurates Dream Barker, can be read for what they reveal about Valentine’s re75

lationship to her art. While “The Power Table” and “Silences: A Dream of Governments” are representative of her work, what is often most striking about Valentine’s poems is the sense of unique encounter each conveys. Through a rigorous economy of language, they reveal glimpses of scenes in ›ux and fables that continue beyond the boundaries of the page. Through the resoluteness of her voice, her poems gain not just coherence but radiance. There’s a passage from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space that could function as the unstated epigraph to Valentine’s poem “The Power Table”; it might even serve to describe her work as a whole. If such a document had its source in some remote mythology, we should ‹nd it more readily acceptable. But why not take the poet’s verse as a small element of spontaneous mythology? Why not sense that, incarnated in the door, there is a little threshold god? And there is no need to return to a distant past, a past that is no longer our own, to ‹nd sacred properties attributed to the threshold. the power table You, lying across the wide bed, vertical, I, horizontal, you, I, in a green ‹eld two green paths ›owered with xxxx’s and xxxx’s you, I, lined inside with pre-historic quarrels old black cuts in a wooden kitchen table the table where you sit down with your older brothers the table where things get settled once & for all the cow’s hip shaved down to the brand her body divided into zones Yes I am standing in the doorway yes my softness & my hardness are ‹lled with a secret light,

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but I want world-light and this-world company. (From The River at Wolf, 1992)

“The Power Table” is, like much of Valentine’s work, a distillation of narrative into images, a kind of pure story with past and present commingled. The movement of images through the poem’s eight couplets reveals an interpenetration of the concepts of “inside” and “outside.” These perceptions are not set in opposition, but are instead conjoined, with the speaker standing at the threshold where they meet. The poem arises out of necessity, from an internal pressure, though framed by a domestic landscape of bed, kitchen, and doorway. The speaker and her lover, perhaps, are ‹rst lying across one another in a bed, and this initial image of “x’s” unfolds in the poem as a mingling of “interior” and “exterior.” Past pains and present desires are interwoven. The speaker’s longing for union and community becomes clear, and the progression of images enacts this coming into clarity. The emphatic choice made in the poem’s conclusion casts a unifying hold over the images in the poem, as if it were possible to resolve the dislocations and oppositions it contains. The subtle craft in this brief poem unites eight couplets of dissimilar line lengths, each clustered around a separate image. Knots of stressed syllables compete for attention: “you, I, in a green ‹eld two green paths”; “old black cuts”; “cow’s hip shaved down,” while the poem’s central stanza is built upon repetitions: the table where you sit down with your older brothers the table where things get settled once & for all

There is metrical tension but no clear pattern. Only the image of the table affords some certainty, becoming both object and place, almost a patriarchal character in itself. Valentine slows the poem’s movement by focusing attention on the separate images and their interrelationships. Repeated words or phrases form connections that point toward the poem’s emotional center like spokes on a wheel: two “green paths” in a “green ‹eld”; “old black cuts” and “older brothers”; “sit down” and “shaved down”; “secret light” and “world-light / and this-world company.” Pairings usually set in opposition seem

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instead to mark places of contact: vertical/horizontal, softness/hardness, even you and I. Abstract ciphers become emblems of ›owers, and the natural world comes alive in the mind by this subterfuge, a reconciliation of abstract and concrete. Valentine’s strategy is to highlight internal linkages between seeming opposites, so that images of things “crossed” prepare for her recognition of “thisworld” as a ‹eld of interdependent likenesses. Even her body, standing in the doorway, is both blocking the light and linking the inside world to the outside, the speaker herself becoming the hyphen between “world” and “light.” While acknowledging the scars of violence and con›ict, she chooses the light of this world we share. In “Silences: A Dream of Governments,” it is dif‹cult to say where the dream begins or ends. All the action in the poem—the looking, writing, sitting, talking, gliding, listening—is surrounded by silence, each stanza a different landscape of silence. While the poem’s context expands into the outer world, it also descends toward an inner one; the speaker stands at this crossroads. silences: a dream of governments From your eyes I thought we could almost move almost speak But the way your face held there, in the yellow air, And that hand, writing down our names— And the way the sun shone right through us Done with us Then the plain astonishment—the air broken open: just ourselves sitting, talking; like always; the kitchen window propped open by the same blue-gray dictionary. August. Rain. A Tuesday. Then, absence. The open room suspended The long street gone off quiet, dark. The ocean ›oor. Slow

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shapes glide by Then, day keeps beginning again: the same stubborn pulse against the throat, the same listening for a human voice— your name, my name (From The Messenger, 1979)

The telegraphic brevity in this poem heightens the sense of the need to speak, and the words seem a lesser part of the silence that surrounds them. This is not reticence so much as conscientiousness, an awareness of breaking silence. The narrative settings of each stanza are ‹nally less important than the longing for community that haunts the speaker, the intensity of her “listening for a human voice,” her yearning (“your name”) to be reunited with a beloved other, a human presence. The poem’s title proposes an equivalence of plurals, uni‹ed by the one dream, the one dreamer. Only one oblique image seems to amplify the reference to “governments”—a metonymy of fear and authority, “that hand, writing down our names.” However, different kinds of silence seem to press in upon each stanza; a sense of struggle and a failure of communication disturb the poem. The dreamer’s thoughts begin in another’s eyes, an inversion in which it “almost” seems this other is the ‹rst to speak. In halting, incomplete sentences, the dream keeps beginning again and never quite ‹nishes. The sense of restrained movement, the inability to act or speak, and the sense of impermanence are all familiar from the shadow world of dreams. In the shared privacy of a kitchen, the dreamer’s “plain astonishment” and insistence on facts—“August. Rain. A Tuesday.”— betray her lingering doubts in her surroundings. That marvelous image of the physicality of words, “the same / blue-gray dictionary” that props open the window, becomes the locus of energy or pivot at the center of the poem, with words themselves the essential link between inside and outside. Throughout the poem there is a play of dichotomies between bodily presence and absence, between open and closed. These differences become another way to name likenesses, for only qualities similar in essence can be conjoined as opposites. As scenes of near-action appear to coalesce, the primacy of im79

ages is asserted. In the second stanza, the air “broken open” suggests a kind of violence, though the image is paired with the window “propped open,” connoting ease and leisure. The “open” room in the third stanza is marked by loss and absence, and closed in by a watery light. Each opposite contains its twin. Similarly, the longing for community, for language and substance, is heightened by the play of shadows and insubstantiality—“the sun / shone right through us.” The poem’s images gather like metal shavings around the magnetism of strong emotions, of fear and desire. A sense of release—back into the body—comes with the ‹nal stanza, a welcome return of “the same / stubborn pulse against the throat,” that familiar sensation signaling a return from the depths toward human contact. The urgency in the dreamer’s listening gathers the poem’s images together, and the sound of “a human voice” becomes an emblem of community. With the equivalence implied by the pairing of “your name, my name,” it doesn’t matter who speaks, or which name. All that matters is the speaking. Jean Valentine’s poems come into being as acts of resistance against received beliefs, as stubborn and singular acts of subversion. Valentine has praised the ef‹cacy of poetry in breaking spells and illusions, and her own poems often succeed in this way. The urgency in her voice is tempered with tenderness, and by the “plain astonishment” she feels in being here, in the world. She is able to convey with the senses what is almost beyond the senses to grasp, constructing small shelters for the sacred. What Robert Hass has written about a haiku of Basho’s could describe a poem of Valentine’s as well: “It lays claim to the world, coming and going, whole, alert, secret, common, in the way that the image does, and it doesn’t possess it, or think that it can . . . [becoming] a ‹gure for that clear, deep act of acceptance and relinquishment which human beings are capable of.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures. New York: The Ecco Press, 1984. Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

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DOROTHY BARRESI

Lost and Found Jean Valentine’s Poems of Childhood and Motherhood

Jean Valentine is one of American poetry’s great domestic fabulists, writing powerful, enigmatic poems about the darkly enchanted relationship between mother and child. While modernist path‹nder Sylvia Plath sends up postwar motherhood with the outrageous and outraged humor of “Lesbos” (“Viciousness in the kitchen! . . . And I, love, am a pathological liar, / And my child—look at her, face down on the ›oor, / Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear”), Jean Valentine kicks over the traces of Victorian sentimentality more quietly, though the effect is no less dramatic. Her portrayals of motherhood and childhood have the existential force of fairy tale: they narrate disquiet; they long for safety and a reunion of mother and child through the exigencies of poetic language. Indeed, in Valentine’s poems, mother and child are familiars, separated by birth. While each contains some lost part of the other, they must ‹nd a way to relate in a fractured world. Against this dislocation Valentine’s strange, highly intuitive vernacular functions as a counterspell of wishful becoming, of momentary unity—that possible but brief repose from desire. In The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales, Sheldon Cashdon might be writing about Jean Valentine’s work when he states that every fairy tale “begins with a step across an invisible frontier that leads straight into uncharted territory.” It is nothing less than a search into self, the most dangerous of uncharted territories that leads Valentine’s generative language across foreign borders. Her spare, seemingly pitiless lines aim straight for the heart, yet their net effect is nuanced, yielding, anything but pitiless, ‹nally, in the poet’s construction of a fertile world. Unlike Louise Glück, that other great spinner of dark domestic fairy tales, Jean Valentine does not employ sly authorial gravitas or doomed pronouncements (aphorisms) for rhetorical punch. Instead, Valentine 81

writes a poetry of resonances, echoes, rare disturbances. She creates an open ‹eld where conscious and unconscious elements play freely, as in “Home,” which conjures a sense of domestic belonging from the most unexpected associations. “Breath entering, breath leaving leaf, / the lion tense on the branch luxuriant”: that’s what lights it up, Nature, and Art: your skin feather to feather scale to scale to my skin and the airy sleep, like wine . . . two soft old children’s books with the red and blue and green crayons still warm on us.

The result reads like alchemy, not sleight of hand. At the juncture of “Art” and “Nature,” Valentine turns longing into eerie reassurance. Fairy tales, Cashdon writes, “are essentially maternal dramas in which witches, godmothers, and other female ‹gures function as the fantasy derivations of early childhood splitting.” To appreciate the originality of Valentine’s synthesizing approach to this drama, it is useful to look at one of Louise Glück’s early poems, “For My Mother,” which begins with a simple, arrested observation: “It was better when we were / together in one body.” Thirty years. Screened through the green glass of your eye, moonlight ‹ltered into my bones as we lay in the big bed, in the dark, waiting for my father.

In her moody portrayal of priorness, Glück de‹nes a mother’s body as a safe haven, wholly intact, for the waiting child-to-be who is fated to lose her innocence when she is born into the world. The speaker’s tone seems at ‹rst to be preternaturally calm, almost bored or perhaps deadened by experience. She is her own psyche’s dispassionate tour guide; she already knows everything the poem will reveal. “Thirty years. He closed / your eyelids with / two kisses. And then spring / came and withdrew from me / the 82

absolute / knowledge of the unborn.” Ironically, the loss of paradise in this poem is not a punishment for having gained forbidden knowledge. Quite the opposite: the unborn child already has “absolute knowledge.” In the speaker’s estimation, innocence thrives on order, rationality, control. But in a world ruled by Nature, birth casts her into dark unknowing, and a jungle of ominous, unbounded vegetation grows up around mother and daughter: “Thirty years. A marsh / grows up around the house. / Schools of spores circulate / behind the shades, drift through / gauze ›utterings of vegetation.” It is not putting too ‹ne a point on it, I think, to note that the marsh with its impregnating spores is a masculine image. The source of the speaker’s birth-wound and subsequent dread is her father, who brings about the eventual separation from the mother. Father is the interloper, the serpent usurper of the intimacy the mother and child once shared. And here is a new twist on banishment by patriarchy. Now, instead of a wind-torn Adam and Eve, ›ush with human knowledge and shame, walking into the storm of a perfect God’s disapproval, it is a child who must walk all alone into the storm of her own existential uncertainty. The garden that ›ourishes around her is chaotic and primeval; like the forests Snow White or Red Riding Hood must survive, it exudes a sexual foreboding that hints at future dangers for the girl child. It is a sin of omission: intimacy with her husband has superseded the mother’s sublime communion with her unconceived child. For Glück, intimacy is an either-or proposition. The mother is loyal either to the speaker or to the husband; there is nothing reconciling the scene. The mother stands passively on the “brick stoop” “shading” her eyes, in league with a man who has imposed his will on the scene simply by closing her eyes with “two kisses.” In The River at Wolf, Jean Valentine explores some of the same uneasy territory. Like Louise Glück, she traces the beginnings of anxiety back to a moment of family betrayal: My mother as a child under her father’s sexual hand ticking over her like an electric train. The household scissors to her hair. Scissors cut paper Paper covers rock Rock crushes scissors

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In the ‹rst stanza of “In This Egg,” the father “ticks” over the child (who is both child and mother at once) like a bomb, his sexual menace an “electric train” that will carry her into dangerous territory—the place where moral boundaries break down. The poem is explicitly shadowed. Clipped line breaks and the poet’s use of the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” with its violent crushing, cutting, and covering, drive home the child’s vulnerability (and by extension the speaker’s vulnerability as inheritor of this family wreckage). But Valentine takes the poem beyond blame to suggest a reifying vision of human experience. “My mother and her father, in this blue egg. / This egg, our young, gone before us: / who will brood over them? / Who will make a good roof over them.” Two generations, transgressing grandfather and wounded, obliterated mother, are placed together—above history, in a sense—where they are redeemed by one fragile gesture. In her generosity the speaker wonders who will protect these two children in the newly imagined site of possible grace. The world, after all, is cruel, but the poem’s last line, an unmarked question, answers itself as statement. The role of the poet is to brood, like Milton’s dove, over the ›awed, just-made world. In “Embryo,” from the long sequence “Her Lost Book,” Jean Valentine again explores the notion of priorness. With its purposely blurred pronouns the poem simultaneously enacts the mother’s and the gestating daughter’s experience. There is a tenderness in the tone that might be taken for nostalgia, were it not for the poem’s complicating last line: Still mermaid inside her words only half gathered her head still ›oating listening listening to the Real Life

Extended white space and withheld punctuation suggest an ambiguous, ›oating world in which embryo and mother may both be read as “Still mermaids”: the young but experienced mother is still a mermaid, a magical creature by virtue of her pregnancy, and the embryo a “still” swimmer within the mother, listening to the 84

words of the world begin to gather around her. And of course the mother is listening, too, for clues to the child’s living presence. Throughout Valentine’s poems of motherhood and childhood, we see words like magic seeds, pure potentiality, conferring something like spirit or essential (though sometimes unbidden) knowledge on an individual, bringing a body to sentience. Ungovernable, disruptive; like a primeval garden, words have a life of their own. That is a crucial point, because the capitalized last phrase, “Real Life,” can be read in multiple ways. It could be a cautionary sign: real life ahead. In that case it might suggest the free inner life of the imagination that the embryo already swims in—and stands to lose at birth. Or it could be the “cradle” of art that the speaker/poet will eventually ‹nd in the acts of giving birth and writing. The last line hints at the change that is coming, the loss and the (potentially) hard-won gain. For Jean Valentine, meaning is never just one thing. Her poems are palimpsests, layers upon layers. More than three decades ago Bruno Bettelheim famously wrote about the transforming power of fairy tale in his psychoanalytic The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. But like the Victorians who prized the utilitarian function of fairy tales as a moral primer for children, Bettelheim frequently reduces magic to imperatives, lessons learned. Jean Valentine’s postmodern fables and fairy tales are limned by loss, but they are not didactic. Instead, they offer a glimpse of a world in ›ux where all stories are just-forming—inconclusive, mutable, interwoven. In the seven-line poem “Single Mother, 1966,” from “Her Lost Book,” Valentine again introduces her notion of the limitless, transforming power of words. The mother, like the old woman in the shoe, has nothing to feed her children. “No money / —the baby birds’ / huge mouths / huger than themselves / —and God making / words / words.” In this poem of apparent maternal powerlessness, the speaker hovers unparticularized above the scene, yet we understand her to be the mother who exists both in the historical moment of 1966 (hence the nightmarish perspective of her children like “baby birds” with mouths “huger than themselves”), and in the present moment of the poem’s telling. From the vantage point of imagined memory, she understands that in the seeming absence of succor, God was giving “words / words,” a gift and a curse. Words cannot literally feed hungry children, of course, but they do form the raw material by which art trans‹gures desperation 85

into understanding, and understanding into creative vitality. In that sense, words are nourishment. Words are awareness; they bring the soul into activity and out of despair. And poems, even those lacking overt messages of hope or salvation, turn straw into gold. A fairy tale, Bettleheim believes, teaches a child how “to read his mind in the language of images.” In the original “Hansel and Gretel” published by the Brothers Grimm, a brother and sister are abandoned by a ruthless mother who discovers that she does not have enough food to feed herself, her husband, and her children. The children must learn to feed themselves. Armed with new knowledge of the world’s cruelty, they persevere in the dark forest alone. They do indeed ‹nd food, and by outwitting and killing the witch, Gretel becomes more than a daughter—she is a substitute mother/provider for herself and her younger brother. In Louise Glück’s poem “Gretel in Darkness,” the sister’s murderous (and necessary) action actualizes her autonomous self and makes her an emotional outcaste—she has done too much to survive. By poem’s end she believes she exists forever beyond her brother’s love. In Jean Valentine’s poems of motherhood and childhood, desire is likewise tied to the formation of the mature self, but it is not portrayed as an isolating condition. For Valentine, selfhood is experienced most fully in moments of acute human connection. Strange and alinear though it may be, her poem-logic always yearns toward harmony. In “Little Song in Indian Summer,” the speaker sings an existential song, an incantation of becoming, perhaps in the late, waning summer of her own life. In it, she eschews Cartesian dualities, singing instead from the multiple self. I am is my name and your name, I am is the name we are ‹nding, I am is the name who is ‹nding us, is (standing still in the high grass, in the hot sun) the one I always wanted to ‹nd, is the one I always wanted to ‹nd, not mother, not child, oh you I need who are glad I am I with our green eyes even with welcome, with letting go.

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Here, the speaker’s search for her life’s meaning (“I am”) is carried out in nature, “in the high grass, in the hot sun,” and in the free play of words seeking de‹nition: (“I am is the / name who is ‹nding us”). As in most of Valentine’s poems, this one suggests that desire, a destabilizing element, can yield joy: “the one I always wanted to ‹nd, / not mother, not child, oh you / I need / who are glad.” The breathless circularity of words and sounds in “Little Song in Indian Summer” reminds us of a song a child might sing as she twirls around for the sheer pleasure of dizzying herself. Perhaps after a game of tag. But for Valentine, this spinning language is a way of orienting the self. Language, after all, is an agent of playful desire; it yearns toward association in the same way that the speaker yearns toward a meaningful human connection that does not consume everything in its path (“with welcome, with letting go”) and that is not categorized and separated by the old titles, “not mother, not child.” In Valentine’s poems of motherhood and childhood, this is the sublime act of integration, the self made whole. Because Jean Valentine’s poetry is a pilgrimage toward the parts of ourselves that are lost and found, her poems about her mother’s death are especially poignant. I felt dizzy when I ‹rst read “The Sea of Serenity” in The New Yorker. It appeared, as I recall, without the last three lines (or did the ‹nal image simply eclipse everything that followed?), and it evoked, like Tess Gallagher’s poems mourning Ray Carver’s passing, a sorrow so intimate that the effect was at once exquisite and excruciating. The Sea of Serenity: my mother’s body: ashes: the appearance of land, and the appearance of water. Books by the ‹replace: gold brocade and silver: but love, oh love. Outside the door. Earth said, Eat. Earth said, Shame. Mother, on my hands and knees, face ›at in the leaves, I chomp after you like a horse.

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Who died? Who died? Who died?

In this poem, all of Valentine’s concerns with the synthesizing imagination (art and nature combined) and with the multiple self are brought to bear. The lost mother’s body is both serene and utterly remote: she might as well be on the moon, she is so far away in death. The speaker is variously an explorer, a wistful child remembering “Books by the ‹replace: gold brocade and silver: / but love, oh love,” and a shamed child remembering—what? We are not told speci‹cally, but it seems to involve moral and mortal lessons about the body: “Earth said, Eat. / Earth said, Shame.” The next image is so intuitive and strange in its psychological rightness that it recalls Sylvia Plath’s poetry. The adult daughter, severed from her mother by death, gets down on her hands and knees “in the leaves” like a child, but instead of merely playing she attempts to eat her way back to the womb: “I chomp after you like a horse.” It is impossible, of course, to get back to the living mother. The use of the word “chomp,” so childlike and unexpected, is a masterstroke: the loss of the mother temporarily renders the adult speaker without direction, helplessly childlike, and without the unifying redemption available in poems like “In This Egg,” or “Embryo.” In “The Sea of Serenity,” the speaker is a daughter alone; she cannot orient herself by the past or the present, “the appearance of land, and the appearance of water.” The question that ends the poem, repeated three times, is potent. The mother has died, and with her, an unrecoverable part of the speaker. Indeed, the last three lines could be read as a failed spell the speaker casts in her desire for reunion with the mother. The frontier Jean Valentine constantly enters in her poems—the shared state of motherhood and childhood—seems closed, and with it an access into self-knowledge as well: “Who died? / Who died?/ Who died?” But when death renders physical connection impossible, the act of yearning and writing creates another kind of shared space in Jean Valentine’s poems, secular, ritualized, where mother and child meet. Family as portrayed in Louise Glück’s poems is a lonely membership, full of keenly self-conscious but ultimately isolated individuals yearning for a connection that cannot be realized. For all of

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Glück’s archetypes, it is Valentine’s poems that exist in a ›uid, subconscious state. They feel “raw” to Glück’s carefully “cooked” poems, as in “The Sea of Serenity,” when the speaker “chomps” after the missing, unrecoverable part of herself that is her mother. And it is this raw, unformed, even un‹nished feeling that keeps Valentine’s poems from slipping into solipsism or despair. “You are not one in a sequence,” Valentine says, addressing a child who has died: “Let you: stay over there, with your heaven dog and your friends, / and we: drop back down into our intents.” Valentine’s work partakes of Glück’s elegant, dark fears, but it does not stay there for long. It eschews Glück’s signature aphorisms, too (“This is why you were born: to silence me”), in favor of speculative, unanswered questions, as in the poem “Where Do You Look for Me?” in which the speaker, a dead man, challenges the poet’s notion of death as an end to human relationship and possibility. “Oh my darling,” the speaker gently chides, “where do you look for me?” In “Mother and Child, Body and Soul,” an angry adolescent or young adult speaks ‹rst, accusing her mother: “You’ve boarded me over like a window or a well,” to which the mother defensively replies: “It was autumn / I couldn’t hear the students / only the music coming in the window.” It is only when the mother opens herself to extravagantly sensual imagery—“I went for a week’s journey in soft ermine. / Darling, the ovals of your hair”—that she is able to admit her emotional limitations as a parent. She has attempted to enclose the Rapunzel/daughter in her isolating care, repressing both women. “And this child, this / window in my side, / boarded over all my life, / —how can I take the boards off, in this wind?” In the poem “Soul,” the angry speaker is mother and daughter at once, body and soul, wounded and wounding. “I—as daughter—am black: / I—mother—shun her, / keep her out of everything.” The relationship is marked by psychic violence; it lurches toward isolation as the daughter asserts her independence, “I’m anorexic, / don’t think I don’t like the meat,” but catharsis comes, as it always does for Valentine, through shared experience and the agency of language—in this case, the power of storytelling, as the mother states, “She is my soul / saying / You will never know me. / Beginning to talk.” Anger is not Valentine’s métier. Her surrealism married to images of nature’s harsher realities creates something unexpected in postmod-

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ern poetry: hope, or at least hope’s possibility. “Night,” she writes in the poem “Fireside,” “and everyone’s straight out // longing”: the cat’s in the woods, the children lie loose in stories tall as this world could be if we could run for it Lord Fox. Fox‹re will, we thought, out, you and I, blue glass at the ‹reside side by side

Here, Valentine’s unpredictable syntax captures perfectly our daily bewilderment, our awestruck questions to the universe as we age: Why am I here? Where are you taking me? Surely one answer is toward death. The speaker keeps company with death. But the poem releases language’s living, generative quality. “Stories” become “tall”; the world “could” / “be” (if we could only “run for it,” or escape, which of course, we can’t); and the “Lord” becomes “Fox,” the trickster ‹gure of fables and folktales. Not even God is a ‹xed entity in Valentine’s poetry. Like everything else, God is mutability in action, and the “divine” love present in Valentine’s work is generated by human tenderness, not a distant deity. That difference is crucial. Jean Valentine is one of the few poets who can unsettle and reassure us within a matter of seconds. Her image of “fox‹re,” a light given off by the dead and decaying things of this world, combines with her unpredictable sentence structure to keep the speaker off balance. Yet “Fireside” still reads like an adult lullaby. Despite the presence of death, “the children lie loose in stories.” The speaker wishes she could be God, but “nicer than God,” protecting us “word for word,” “desire for desire.” But even this is lovely irony, for that is precisely what the poet accomplishes. Her poems of motherhood and childhood create a ›uid state of momentary grace and just-glimpsed redemption. Reading them, we are lost and found at once. Pay attention to the bread crumbs on the trail, they tell us. Anything is possible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Hans Christian. Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Anderson. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992.

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Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1977. Cashdan, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Durant, Will. Heroes of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Glück, Louise. Firstborn. New York: Ecco Press, 1968. Glück, Louise. The House on Marshland. New York: Ecco Press, 1975. Glück, Louise. The Seven Ages. New York: Ecco Press, 2001. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1945. Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. Tatar, Maria, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: Norton, 1999. Valentine, Jean. Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997. Valentine, Jean. Home. Deep. Blue: New and Selected Poems. Cambridge, MA: Alice James Books, 1989. Valentine, Jean. The Cradle of the Real Life. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Valentine, Jean. The River at Wolf. Cambridge, MA: Alice James Books, 1992.

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MARTHA COLLINS

Lit from Inside Jean Valentine’s River at Wolf

The poetry of Jean Valentine is unusually uni‹ed, cannily of a piece. Books repeat lines, even poems, from earlier collections; titles reappear in later volumes as (2) or even (3). More centrally, striking images and themes recur, sometimes after an absence of many years. Her sixth book, The River at Wolf (1992), is no exception. The most self-contained of her collections, it also looks back to earlier volumes, especially the ‹rst, Dream Barker (1965), which can be read as a kind of urtext for it. The place of The River at Wolf in Valentine’s career is important: the ‹rst book to appear after the new and selected Home Deep Blue (1989), it was also Valentine’s ‹rst full-length collection since 1979. The title poem of The River at Wolf ends: This close to God this close to you: walking into the river at Wolf with the animals. The snake’s green skin, lit from inside. Our second life. (197)

If the book itself marks the beginning of a “second life,” the image that precedes the phrase provides an astonishing emblem for it. That the “snake’s green skin” follows the daring juxtaposition of God and lover suggests a remarkable fusion of the physical and the metaphysical, the immanent and the transcendent; the passage echoes and profoundly rearranges Edenic mythology, using the tools of expulsion as a means for transcendent reentry. Valentine’s interest in Eden does not begin here: the myth is central to her ‹rst book, where its rivers already receive more attention than its trees. The association of greenness with water begins in “First Love” (41), the ‹rst poem in the book, where the lover is seen in the sea as “Blue, gorgeous in the weaving grasses,” 92

but then: “It was all so dark, and you were green in my eye, / Green above and green below, all dark.” There are Edenic echoes even here: the lover, now gone, has a “serpentine / Smile” and is also “my angel”; in his “brackish shine” there is a hint of the light that will appear in The River at Wolf. But the juxtaposition of darkness and greenness is pervasive, and the end of the poem is primordial, pre-Edenic: “How deep we met, how dark, / How wet! before the world began.” Another poem in Dream Barker recalls, for the speaker’s sister, “how we spread our hair on the sea.” Titled “Lines in Dejection” (44), this poem is even darker, in image and tone, than “First Love”: The weeds cradle me and draw me under, under. But there they are, on the pitch-black ocean ›oor, Hands out, hair ›oating: everywhere! Holding us in their charred arms like water.

The cradling and personi‹cation, as well as the dedication, suggest that this underwater world has familial as well as mythical signi‹cance; the use of dream, which will become Valentine’s most distinguishing characteristic, begins in this ‹rst book, and the poet is clearly aware of the psychological signi‹cance of moving “under, under.” But the unconscious evoked here often seems more Jungian than Freudian, with little of the uniquely personal history that will shape the dreams of later books. “Asleep over Lines from Willa Cather” (46) begins: “Now I lay me desolate to sleep / Cold in the sound of the underground ›ood.” Then, as the “reins inside my head . . . fall slack,” the speaker arrives at a rather explicit Eden, where she walks “aimlessly by a green and perfect river.” Both God, who “follows me,” and the one she loves, who “waits in the garden,” appear, but the vision ultimately disappoints: although they walk “Away from the tree towards the shining river,” in the end “I reach out to touch his face / And touch a spot of spittled clay, my eye, / Hiding the garden, the river, the tree.” Touch is also prohibited in “Adam and Eve: Poem on Folded Paper” (71), here by “this glass / pane / Pain that cuts the green world / down”; in “Waiting” (49), expulsion from Eden becomes explicit when “a burning sword / Point[s] us out of the Garden.” Con›ating contemporary scene with the book’s central myth, and obliquely refer93

encing Lot’s wife and the New Testament God as well, the poem ends: You will not be forgiven if you ignore The pillar of slow insistent snow Framing the angel at the door, Who will not speak and will not go, Numbering our hairs, our bright blue feathers.

Despite the biblical references, the theology behind the Edenic myth is uncertain throughout Dream Barker. Although the speaker can “Praise Him for His silence” in “Waiting” and present “Sarah’s Christening Day” (53) as a prayer, she doesn’t “believe the half of what” she prays, and in “Déjà-vu” (45), an irregularly metered sonnet that looks forward to many of the poems in The River at Wolf, she confronts the patriarchal God directly: No, my father here, as You said, When I asked him for bread Didn’t refuse me; but the bread was green; And now You! Now I’m dry and cold, Chattering in the corner of the greenhouse.

However attracted by river and sea, the speaker is often left “dry and cold” in the poems of this ‹rst book. In the title poem (71), near the end of the book, the speaker returns brie›y to the sea of the ‹rst poem as she and her companion arrive by boat at “a little sea-food barker’s cave.” What attracts her is “a shell shaped like a sand-dollar / But worked with Byzantine blue and gold.” This is the kind of dream image that appears throughout Valentine’s poetry: precise, compelling, unforgettable, often startlingly beautiful. Here, though, the poet ends by waking up “Dry as a bone on dry land,” making explicit in waking the irony of being offered in sleep a shell, however lovely, by someone selling food. Both the Eden myth and the green water all but disappear from Valentine’s next three books; what remains of the myth is quiescent, as in Pilgrims (1969), where “The fox went under the garden / thinking. The watersnake / never moved” (“Fireside,” 75). In these books, the Edenic longings of Dream Barker give way to

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smaller needs: using increasingly spare and dense language, Valentine often depicts, however obliquely, a daily life peopled with children and friends, the latter more often women than men. Although even the “ordinary” may itself appear as a kind of vision (“Far off, low, / a little stir begins, a word, a missed // beat, a listening: this- / world, this-world,” 108), the title of Valentine’s third book, Ordinary Things (1974), is apt for much of the work of these years. “Outside the Frame” (124), from near the end of that book, begins with these words, which also appear in the previous poem: “It is enough, now, anywhere, / with everyone you love there to talk to.” Valentine’s fourth book, The Messenger, opens by reprinting both poems. If “It is enough” thus becomes something of a mantra in these books, there is an undercurrent that includes not only the immediate dif‹culties that make suf‹ciency appealing, but also the underground dif‹culties of a past that must be examined if “this-world” is to be comfortably inhabited. Valentine continues to make poems of dreams, but dreams often lead more deeply into the past, especially in The Messenger, in which the father of psychoanalysis himself “dreamed he was walking, deep in the ocean; he was both male and female” (“‘Love and Work’: Freud Dying,” 156). In the threepart title poem (139), the poet arrives at a similar place, “going barefoot past the parents’ empty room” in dream or vision, and from thence to memory, until, near the end of the poem, a dreamvoice says: —First, you see, you must be still. Touch nothing. Here, in this room. To look at nothing, to listen to nothing. A long time. First, you see, you must open your clenched hands. You must carry your mother and your father at your breasts.

Then the dreamer herself stands “on all fours, my fur / is warm; warm organs, the male and the female,” a vision that seems to prepare us for walking into the river at Wolf with the animals. That book would not appear for another thirteen years; but in several of the new poems published ten years later in Home Deep Blue, the emotional territory is signi‹cantly altered when God appears, for the ‹rst time, as nurturer. In “The Counselor Retires, and Then He Dies” (172), Valentine describes “the way you would cradle me, if I was a dog, / or a baby, the way God cradles us.” The

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last of the new poems, “Trust Me” (180), returns to the underwater world of Dream Barker, which is ‹nally more light than dark. “Who am I? / who want so much to move / like a ‹sh through water, / through life,” the speaker asks; then: And Trust Me said, There’s another way to go, we’ll go by the river which is frozen under the snow; my shining, your shining life draws close, draws closer, God ‹lls us as a woman ‹lls a pitcher.

While these lines look back to a passage in “Half an Hour” (91) from Valentine’s second book (“Trust me! / truth- / telling ‹sh of the sky!”), they also prepare us to enter the unfrozen rivers of her ‹fth. Like her ‹rst collection, but unlike her others, The River at Wolf is not divided into sections, and the book as a whole has the look and feel of a sonnet sequence. Despite their increasingly fragmentary appearance, with uneven lines and frequent stanza breaks, threequarters of the poems are indeed sonnet length. Formally, the poems seem interested in the stanzaic possibilities of fourteen lines (33-2-3-3, 6-6-2, etc.); thematically and structurally, Valentine is working sequentially, the trajectory of the whole carrying her forward as the poems develop, counter, allude, retrieve, and deepen. The structure of the book is ›uid, like the rivers that run through it, but emotionally satisfying in the manner of a novel or play. Some poems answer others directly; others repeat earlier images, phrases, motifs. More broadly, a subject develops through several poems, and two sequences in the book are central to its structure: a trip in the western United States with the poet’s lover in the ‹rst half, the death of her mother in the second. These journeys, in life and into death, suggest the primary tension of the book. As in many sonnet sequences, love is central to life, and the often ecstatic love poems are among the book’s most moving. But other relationships, past and present, give depth and meaning to this one, and an awareness of the connection between lover and mother is one of the book’s most profound insights. The connection is made in terms that ‹nally bring together the Edenic myth of Dream Barker and the hard-earned psychological insights of The Messenger. We ‹rst meet the lovers in the second poem of the book, in conversation: 96

Then, Tell me your fantasies, you said. And I: OK; I’m lying in bed, asleep, a child, and you, you’re sitting in the rocker there, knitting, like a mother bear. (183)

The fantasy, coupled with the lover’s own dream, takes the speaker back to the green and blue of “First Love,” as well as the Edenic garden that pervades the early poems: “Waking up we wished we could have lived together / in a green and blue walled garden forever.” The garden next appears in what might be seen as the pivotal poem in the book, “Seeing You” (192). One of two double sonnets that move toward the visionary (the ‹rst, “Foraging,” moves from “The Room” to “The Luminous Room”), the poem presents ‹rst “Mother,” then “Lover,” repeating several of its lines and phrases exactly and thus equating the two ‹gures. “Mother” begins in the watery “underworld” of so much of Valentine’s poetry: “I was born under the mudbank / and you gave me your boat.” Boat becomes hand (“I made my home in your hand: // your hand was empty, it was made / of four stars, like a kite”), and then, as “Out of the river sparks rose up,” the poem makes its way to “the original garden,” a phrase that explicitly con›ates the mythical language of Eden and the psychological source of the myth: I could see you, your fear and your love. I could see you, brilliance magni‹ed. That was the original garden: seeing you.

The second sonnet begins by repeating, exactly, the “empty hand” couplet of this one, and then repeats its movement as well: I dove down my mental lake fear and love: ‹rst fear then under it love: I could see you, Brilliance, at the bottom. Trust you stillness in the last red inside place. Then past the middle of the earth it got light again.

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Your tree. Its heavy green sway. The bright male city. Oh that was the garden of abundance, seeing you.

Profoundly, Valentine here discovers the deepest source of love for the man in the “original” relationship with the mother. At the same time, it is through the lover that she is able to make the journey “down my mental lake” and get to the “bottom,” to the “last red inside place,” which simultaneously suggests the mother’s body, the “mud-bank” birth image from the poem’s beginning, and an archetypal journey like Dante’s. Having made that journey in one couplet, the poet is able, in the poem’s last image, to transform the Edenic myth in a new way. For the moment, at least, the phallic tree rather than the river is celebrated in a “garden of abundance.” That both parts of the poem are lit by stars, by “brilliance,” by “my eyes’ light in // [the lover’s] eyes’ light”; that “it got light again” after the journey: all of this suggests a profound difference between this poem and the early “First Love,” where even the compelling greenness of the watery love world was dark. That poem was set “before the world began”; this one, moving back through primordial mud, ends after it has been remade. Although the green male tree appears elsewhere in The River at Wolf, as in the poem where the speaker’s “ex” starts “to paint the trees / and the ground and the telephone poles / grass green” (184), the dominant image is again water, often associated with both greenness and light. The travel sequence moves from river to river, including “The River at Wolf” (197), where the lovers walk into the water and the image cited earlier appears: the “snake’s / green skin, lit from inside.” Other versions of this astonishing image appear throughout the book. Later, when the mother is the primary focus, “Every rock was a green womb, lit from inside” (“At Cullens’ Island,” 205); earlier, two poems (“Still Life, for Matisse,” 184, and “Still Life: in the Epidemic,” 185) begin with ten identical lines that densely link tree, sea, greenness, light, and even the ‹sh and bone of the Dream Barker poems: Light old leaf spine ‹sh spine bone green under-theocean light

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big gold ‹sh my new little father only a boy breathing on the window COME ON OUT

That light should shine through, and that greenness and water should mark it, suggest a remarkable reversal of the traditional language of visionary enlightenment, which moves from outside in, from above to below. Both the density and reversal are even more pronounced in the ‹rst “Still Life” poem, a slim sonnet whose last four lines add bird to ‹sh, blue to green: “you carry me I carry you / light wave after wave / swim cockatoo / green, blue.” Another remarkable con›ation of life-forms appears at the beginning of the more explicitly Edenic title poem, which ultimately encompasses both a physical existence with the animals and a metaphysical existence that might be seen as a realization of the serpent’s promise in Genesis: “then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The poem begins: “Coming east we left the animals / pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake / their hair and skin and feathers.” An apocryphal beatitude (“Blessed are they who remember / that what they now have they once longed for”) makes explicit the poem’s connection to the past and at the same time moves it from myth toward vision. Exactly halfway through the sonnet, the poet says, “A day a year ago last summer / God ‹lled me with himself, like gold, inside, / deeper inside than marrow.” This recalls the image that concludes the “new” section of Valentine’s previous book, “God ‹lls us as a woman ‹lls a pitcher”; but it also leads to the more startling lines that precede the image of the green snake: “This close to God this close to you: / walking into the river at Wolf with / the animals.” The lack of punctuation in the ‹rst line and the connecting colon that follows mark the place where Valentine most uniquely lives in this book: to be “with the animals” is to be “as gods”; the physical is the metaphysical, and the transformed serpent’s “green skin, lit from inside” is the source of enlightenment. Other love poems in the book similarly yoke the erotic and the visionary. Recalling Michelangelo in “The Summer Was Not Long Enough” (184), the poet declares that “it’s time to take off our clothes, / . . . to touch our ‹rst ‹ngers, / you and I, like God,

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across everything”; near the end of the book, the image recurs: “God’s hands trembled when he / touched my head, / we are so much in love” (“The First Angel,” 212). Earlier in the book, “The Year of the Snake” (187) arrives at a similar vision, but begins by referencing the very different “old God” who had also appeared in Dream Barker, a “you” who were so much older, you knew so much. You used your words like bricks, whole leathery old books black with words, to wall me out, words gold as booze, to leave the room, leave me, leave us.

The displacement of the biblical gold leaf to “booze” suggests an equation of the old God with the father, who in “American River Sky Alcohol Father” (206) counters the ›uid movement of the other rivers in this book: “Your hand. I wouldn’t swim. I wouldn’t ›y.” The “new little father” and “swim cockatoo” lines of “Still Life, for Matisse” resonate against this one, but the gender references in “The Year of the Snake” are more complex. The second stanza connects the language of God and the language of Eden: “Now my friend happy as God I sit down and comb your hair. / Your hair shines like honey like sex like the current in the river.” Valentine had used “happy as God” in her second book, in which a stone “where the Buddha was” was “happy as God” (77); here, the vision is ultimately an erotic one that con›ates male and female: “Your unspeaking mouth shining. / Shining lifesnake drinking at my lips milky with life.” A similar synthesis occurs in what might be called the book’s theology. Although the “new” God referenced throughout the love poems is referred to, if at all, as “he,” he shares qualities with a godlike mother ‹gure. She is introduced in “Ikon” (186), which reads as a prayer: “Swim in you, sleep / in you, let me, / Mother Lord.” The speaker de‹nes herself as “your cloth of gold / swaddled ‹rstchild,” inviting comparison with the Christ child; but the poem ends with both an implicit confrontation of the biblical God and a remarkable incorporation of this maternal one: “There is no book / and my name is written in it, my heart makes / an earth crib for your heart.” However richly visionary, the “ikon” has a “bending neck” and a “black breast” in this poem; later, what seems to be the same ‹gure has “Wings, oh / my black darling” in “Wish-Mother” 100

(204). These physical characteristics are not explained in The River at Wolf, but seem to have a source in Valentine’s previous book, where “God the pelican” speaks: “Light as milk in a child’s cup, I will hold you, at my lips I will feed you,” said the soft black pelican about love, the mother, God the pelican, the mother, stem of all our tenderness. (176)

In The River at Wolf, the black pelican and the green snake seem to be complementary emblems representing, respectively, the mother and the lover, though both are subject to the kind of metamorphosis that make gender identi‹cation dif‹cult. Both pelican and snake appear in the catalog of Edenic animals that opens the title poem. Throughout The River at Wolf, the connection between mother and lover is both complicated and deepened by the fact that the mother appears mostly in elegy: the sequence in the second half of the book that balances the travel sequence begins “The Morning of My Mother’s Death.” In fact, the entire book is as conscious of death as it is of life. In addition to the mother poems, The River at Wolf includes six poems “in memory of,” one appearing in the beginning of the book and two in the travel sequence, where the landscape-speaker in “The Badlands Said” (196) announces: “I am the skull / under your hundred doubts,” and invites: “Come lie down, / tooth and bone.” The poems that focus on the mother’s death are mostly poems of dream, or poems of vision. The distinction is increasingly dif‹cult to make, and the death poems are ultimately poems of enlightenment. Much as the love poems con›ate or reverse male and female characteristics, so these poems transform the roles of mother and child, as well as the terms of life and death. The ‹rst image of the mother, in “The Morning of My Mother’s Death” (206), is of “an embryo”; a “midwife or a companion” accompanies it, and the last line also incorporates the language of birth to describe death: “her silk spirit is leaving the crown of her head.” “The Sea of Serenity” (208) is the ‹rst of three poems that begin by cataloging metaphors, or dream images, for the mother’s body, which undergoes a remarkable transformation. In the ‹rst 101

equation, the mother has become both less and more than embryo: “The Sea of Serenity: / my mother’s body: ashes: / the appearance of land, and the appearance of water.” In the second, “My Mother’s Body, My Professor, My Bower” (209), the images have become both more precise and more resonant: Who died? My mother’s body, my professor, my bower, my giant clam. Serene water, professor of copious clay, of spiraling ‹nger-holes in the clay.

Like the “mother” section of “Seeing You,” the catalog con›ates earth and water; like that poem, it includes containing metaphors (bower, clam, sea) that re›ect the mother’s nurturing role. Several pages later, in a passage that both echoes and rivals the richness of “Light / old leaf spine / ‹sh spine bone / green underthe- / ocean light” in the “Still Life” poems, “Skate” (215) offers a third catalog, which transforms clam to skate, professor to teacher, and, perhaps most importantly, container to contained: Now a year after your death, ‹sh-mother, skate, you swim up off the surface of the earth: your other-worldly face not saying anything face I can never meet inside the inside face not since the land came wet out of the water, face under all the pieces of light, how could I get to you? Never leave you. Please you! Teacher, spine in my spine: the spelling of the world kneels down before the skate.

If “Skate” transforms the buried “somebody” to something (“spine of my spine”) that becomes a permanent part of the speaker, other poems near the end of The River at Wolf lay claim to what “Death Asphodel” (211) has referred to a few poems earlier as “parts of myself”: “I feel like I’ve buried somebody inside of me / Parts of her 102

/ I don’t remember yet / Parts of myself I don’t remember yet.” Shortly after the mother brings “Green ›owers soon to bloom” in this poem, angels appear “carrying sheaves of straw / to the graveyard” in “The First Angel” (212). This poem references the lovers for the ‹rst time in many pages, and then the angel says: “It is time to leave your past life, leave your plumb-line, your trowel, / your layers of habitation, your perfect ‹nds-tray.” These lines provide an apt metaphor for what Valentine has done in the psychological explorations of this and earlier books; that the lesson is learned is suggested in “Yield Everything, Force Nothing” (213): “The contest is over: / I let my hands fall, / and here is your garden.” Though not explicitly Edenic (the poem in fact references Job’s daughters), this transformed garden can’t help but recall the earlier gardens of Valentine’s poems; and when the “Guardian Angel in New York” (215) stands “in the doorway in the snow” as the Edenic angel had stood in Dream Barker, we know that we have come back to that book’s place of longing, now both inhabited and transformed. But it is ultimately not angels but people who stand in the doorways of The River at Wolf. The ‹rst poem envisions “X” (183), the unnamed AIDS victim who gives the poem its title, “standing there in the doorway, / whether dead or whether living, real.” The last poem of the book, “The Power Table” (216), rearranges and transforms the language of this one, with the poet (“horizontal”) and her lover (“vertical”) making an X on the bed, itself a ‹eld “›owered with xxxx’s and xxxx’s,” suggesting living kisses as well as recalling the “X” of elegy. Though the lovers are “lined inside / with pre-historic quarrels,” there is no suggestion here of submergence in a watery underworld of psychological exploration, and in the end it is the speaker herself who stands in the doorway: “Yes I am standing in the doorway / yes my softness & my hardness are ‹lled with a secret light,” she says; “but I want world-light / and this-world company.” Here the light that has shone through the book’s green snake, stones, and ocean has, like the mother-skate’s spine, been incorporated by the speaker, who now desires neither the unattainable garden of the ‹rst book nor the “this-world” that is merely a “little stir” or “word” in her third (108), but rather a lit and peopled “this-world” that includes and transcends both.

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MARK DOTY

Ghost Sonnets

Jean Valentine’s poems feel less like a replica of a thought process than like thinking itself, somehow become available on the page. She’s shaped a record of an internal activity, an artifact of meditation so deftly that the poem feels effortless. Here’s a good example of what I mean. yield everything, force nothing Years circling the same circle: the call to be ‹rst, and the underlying want: and this morning, look! I’ve ‹nished now, with this terri‹c red thing, with green and yellow rings on it, and stars. The contest is over: I turned away, and I am beautiful: Job’s last daughters, Cinnamon, Eyeshadow, Dove. The contest is over: I let my hands fall, and here is your garden: Cinnamon. Eyeshadow. Dove.

Like all Valentine’s work, “Yield Everything” is committed to interiority; the ‹rst stanza of “Yield Everything” remembers a state of ambition any artist might recognize: the drive to success, and the sense of lack that underlies such a drive, a longing for validation that seems insatiable. Thus there’s something pleasingly funny about the line that follows it: “and this morning, look! I’ve ‹nished now” as if one could come to that sort of ful‹llment, and the satis‹ed artist could stand back and dust off her hands. The made 104

thing here (which might be a version of Yeats’s golden bird singing on the boughs of Byzantium, or Stevens’s “jar on a hill in Tennessee”) sounds delightfully like a school project, and in truth the speaker thinks it’s just “terri‹c.” And thus years of being caught in circle of ambition and unful‹lled desire are dismissed in a stanza, brought to a close. This is such a sweet pleasure, this feeling, that the speaker must tell us twice, “The contest is over.” No more competition, so now the action of “forcing” the title points to falls away in Valentine’s last two stanzas, and what is the result? Beauty and mystery, no struggle, not trying to do anything. “I” cease my striving and suddenly there’s a “you”—“your garden” now contains these mysterious daughters, with their splendid names bringing to the poem attributes of fragrance, ›avor, shading, the song and movement of the dove. Job, of course, struggled and suffered, but now his daughters occupy the second half of the poem, named once (in italics, as proper names) and again, in plain type, as nouns of pleasure and delight. Valentine’s poem has no grounding in external situation, nothing of the speaker’s context, and yet its line of thinking seems perfectly clear. Perhaps one of the qualities that earns the reader’s cooperation with its mode of thinking is purely formal. This is a fourteen-line poem, after all, with two tercets followed by two quatrains; it looks like a sonnet, and indeed it’s clear that there’s a palpable turn after line six, so that the remaining eight lines describe a state of consciousness transformed from the striving mindset of the ‹rst six. And there are the darting echoes of rhyme everywhere: circle and ‹rst, want and stars and daughter, over and dove, along with the more ‹rm rhymes that the two exactly repeated lines create. Perhaps the oceanic quality of Valentine’s meditative process, the sense that the poem could lead anywhere, that any sort of psychic adventure is possible here, calls for some sort of container, a limiting shape to enable a depiction of immensity—in the way that Joseph Cornell’s boxes provide a container for a sense of enormous depths and distances. Outside the frame of the box, his star-charts and empty perches wouldn’t have nearly the same power to conjure the in‹nite. It’s just this sense of a large view opening out of a small frame that has lent the sonnet such staying power in English, its compressive force fueling many a dynamic engine. Jean Valentine’s name wouldn’t come to mind, of course, when one thinks about recent American formalism. But I think that in 105

fact the ghost of the sonnet is an abiding structural principal in her poetry, and many of Valentine’s poems are apt illustrations of the fact that the last century’s greatest poems in traditional forms are broken vessels, the spirit of the form surviving and informing content while the outer trappings fall away. The sonnet is famous for pushing down on the poet’s material, pressuring, turning coal into hardened light. Certainly Valentine feels at home with compression, the resonant minimal gesture, but the ghost-sonnet also offers her something else: the energetic surprise of the volta, that point where the narrow window of the form suddenly opens out. Here is a stunning example. the under voice I saw streaming up out of the sidewalk the homeless women and men the East side of Broadway fruit and ›owers and bourbon the homeless men like dull knives gray-lipped the homeless women connected to no one streaming no one to no one more like light than like people, blue neon, blue the most fugitive of all the colors Then I looked and saw our bodies not near but not far out, lying together, our whiteness And the under voice said, Stars you are mine, you have always been mine; I remember the minute on the birth table when you were born, I riding with my feet up in the wide silverblue stirrups, I came and came and came, little baby and woman, where were you taking me? Everyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive.

The poem opens with a vision of a part of Broadway (I can’t help but see it as Valentine’s own neighborhood, the Upper West Side near St. John the Divine), seemingly viewed from some height. That initial “I saw” places us immediately in the territory of the visionary, with its echoes of biblical prophets and of “Howl.” From this elevation, the ubiquitous homeless of those blocks seem to have been translated into light; without the anchoring human

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contexts of home and relation they’re a vibrating ‹eld of fugitive color, trembling in their motion like urban neon. They could only be perceived in this decontextualized way from a distance, and it’s that distance that allows the speaker to turn her gaze toward herself and, presumably, her lover, since the couple are “lying together,” probably undressed, since their white and naked skin seems held in contrast to the streaming blue of the unhoused ones below. The couple in this tiny pivotal stanza are fortunate, connected. Placing them beside the disconnected hurry of people below “streaming no one to no one” prepares us, somehow, for the extraordinary leap the poem’s about to take. It’s as if the camera eye of the poem has been pulling back and back, and so the next step, to enter into the voice that lies beneath all things, engaged in each life but also perfectly detached, the watcher within us—well, that step feels somehow a big leap and an inevitable movement at once, which is perhaps the signature of Valentine’s idiosyncratic genius: that her associative, unexpected way of developing her poems has about it a deep structural logic, often elusive, sometimes baf›ing, but always bearing a mysterious authenticity, a vatic force. The “under voice” calls the human beings he or she or it is addressing “stars,” a term that suggests this divinity’s regard for us and also a sense of human presences as phenomena of light. An implicit dual reading—that the stars above have also “always been mine”— reminds us of the greatness of this voice, its godhood. This undersoul rides in the mother at the convulsive moment of birth, with its erotic ecstasy of arrival, and rides in the newborn, too. Where were you taking me, asks the under voice, suggesting that this is no Old Testament divinity, center of all power, but a soul carried forward into experience, into a great diversity of being, by all the disparate “stars” who bear that soul through the world. Everything, the under voice reminds the speaker, is fugitive; like the blue neon of human presence, the intimacy of the couple in stanza 2 is ›eeting as well. But whatever moves on and away from us, the under voice will not, because it is us, in the deepest sense; it is the presence that has disguised itself in the world of forms. The vision of another of Valentine’s quasi sonnets is a far bleaker one, though it too makes use of multiple speakers. Whereas the under voice concluded the poem, above, here a chorus of baby rabbits speak the poem’s opening stanza.

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the baby rabbits in the garden —Our mother laid us there in grass and hair. The tunnel fell, the farmer’s boot arrived and put us out, too poor to stay alive. —And now the farmer too with his large white head backwards or forwards by a belt is led down the black hall hungerless to bed and soon will the reader too my listening head be laid to bed, the tunnel fall . . .

This chilling poem echoes the structure of “The Under Voice” in that it moves to increasing degrees of distance, from the doomed infants to farmer to reader and writer, and in each instance the “tunnel” itself seems larger and more horri‹c. The scariest moment in the poem, to my mind, is the second stanza, where the farmer is powerless in the face of a malevolent agency; there’s something truly creepy in “backwards or forwards by a belt is led” that suggests torture, punishment, or murder. In the universe of this poem, there is no escaping the boot or the belt. The orderliness of the poem—it’s six-line opening followed by two quatrains, the ‹rm end-rhyme of the opening two lines, other end-rhymes popping up along the way—and the initial focus on the group of little bunnies lend an odd kind of tonal register to the poem, almost a nursery rhyme quality, which pulls against the darkness of the vision, introducing a note of tension that makes the poem both more memorable and more troubling. This sonnet-ish quality of Valentine’s work often appears, too, in poems that depart from the fourteen-line rubric. You can feel the tension as the poem posits an image, then pressurizes it, feeling its way toward the moment of the turn, where heightened distance, shift in voice, new context, or a new set of associations corrects or complicates the initial perception.

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home Breath entering, leaving the leaf, the lion tense on the branch luxuriant, the ten-foot drop to the water-hole, the God-taste —that’s what lights it up, Nature, and Art: your skin feather to feather scale to scale to my skin and the airy sleep, like wine . . . two soft old children’s books with the red and blue and green crayons still warm on us. (Door in the Mountain 229)

The poem opens with an evocation of the natural world, the cycle of respiration, and an expectant lion poised to leap either to the divine taste of water or of blood. These aren’t lines one would expect to follow the title “Home.” Instead of domestic stasis, the “home” represented here is a place of dynamic exchange, where leaves give and release, the lion consumes, and both these images suggest a kind of ‹ercely intimate contact. The ‹rst turn of the poem, at the opening of stanza 3, is phrased in such a way as to suggest that the speaker’s all along been preoccupied with a question; “that’s what lights it up” has the sound of an arriving epiphany. Nature and Art are both ‹red, she’s seen, by the same thirst for contact, and the breathing of the leaves, the thirst of the lion and the skin-to-skin contact of the speaker and her lover are all instances of that same ‹ring connection. The “God-taste” is the same, in the leaves breathing, in water and in ›esh and in lovemaking. But a second turn brings the lovers, after their illuminating congress of feather and scale, to a position of tranquility, the domestic comfort suggested by the poem’s title. This is a postcoital ease. How surprising that it should entail those old fabric children’s books, with their soft pages. After the rough merger in the stanza above, here there’s a kind of tender relation between the past and the present; those old books are far away in time, but the crayons are still warm on them, the gesture of making still new. Where the couple’s skin was scale and feather, now it’s that soft old papery

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cloth, with its connotations of childhood and play, safety and intimacy. “Home” is a single sentence, albeit a dilated one, with drifts and lacunae. This singularity allows its moments to be held together, to feel simultaneous, so that these metaphoric and meditative elements all seem to occur at once, as a ›ash of thinking. Like all of Valentine’s best poems, it has the quality of an almost unparaphrasable rightness, an interior motion of apprehension that feels familiar, even while it strikes us as strangely new. These poems are, in other words, recognizable utterances of the never-before-said.

110

FANNY HOWE

Incarnational

A poem in Growing Darkness, Growing Light by Jean Valentine is like a problem set out in the light. She wants to ‹nd where the failures in her own thinking are. When she knows this, then the poem is done. In some ways as cryptic as Plath, she is simultaneously pierced with Blake’s bitter pity. By the wall, by a ‹re, Mandelstam was reciting, in his yellow leather coat, the criminals were listening, they offered him bread and the canned stuff, which he took . . . (225)

Acts of sacri‹ce, eating, exchange and torture continue through this book, which ‹nds its resolution in a very visceral redemption (the soul as baby). “And this child, this / window in my side, / boarded over all my life, / —how can I take the boards off, in this wind?” (237) I think that fallen innocence is an underlying theme in Growing Darkness, Growing Light and that the poet’s method—seeking the weak spots in her own thought—is a way of undoing the fall. What does the title mean? The poet is growing a patch of darkness as a gardener grows plants, and also the end of her life is approaching. If the two occur simultaneously, there is hope for joy regained. That is, the dark and abandoned soul ›ourishes as the end of the life closes down. The triumph of the soul is only gained in acknowledgment of its existence on the point of its owner’s extinction. (This is, in some ways, the same innocence that Simone Weil described when a person, in pain, cries out, “Why is this happening to me?”) 111

One part of her “Mother and Child, Body and Soul” sequence reads: I—as daughter—am black: I—mother—shun her, keep her out of everything . . . She is my soul saying You will never know me. Beginning to talk. (237)

For Valentine the inner spirit-life is an actual entity, not to be separated from the body itself. It lives with you. But it may be stunted in growth, locked away, never acknowledged, a neglected and entire infant being—in fact, this is what has happened in the case of this poet—she has “forgotten her soul” until the soul itself speaks, saying “you will never know me.” Valentine’s poems have the look of quotidian poems. Notations crushed into lyrics and immanent melody. She jots, records, adds, subtracts. But I imagine her real life only from small pieces of evidence because she doesn’t throw down a lot of furniture or personal matter. Winter, water, glass, and gold embroidered together. For the inner eye alone. It is writing that is a drawing away from the world in order to manage some interior of‹ce. Sun and moon shine into our glass room, two countries, two cities, two glass houses: a shotgun is hanging on the wall. (229)

Over years her poems have remained as particular as they always were, and have more sparingly prepared themselves for a nearly brutal resolution. Fierce echoes of fairy tales accompany her movements into the night. Surgery and cruelty, bones eating bones, parents, illness, a world pocked with holes. As Valentine looks back into the time of her life, she seems to see natural (including human) history as did Ernst Becker, who grimly said of it: “This bone-crushing, blood-drinking drama in all 112

its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms” (1–2). Valentine’s poetry has proceeded from charmed articulate narrative stanzas composed in the Lowell days when that was the way. But always there was a slant, a silence that “the confessional poets” did not share with her. Over time she has become anti-narrative. She is not obscure, but self-protective. What she has always chosen to show is a trace of what she has seen, not all of it. The haunt of an experience, its outline. Her gradual exclusion of more and more speci‹c reference from her poems could be seen as inevitable, given the trajectory of her previous work toward a shedding of attributes. In a forest ‹re you make a ‹re the size of yourself, let it go out, and lie in it. I am hungry for my own heart. Heart’s work is normal harsh and sweet: throw out the hospital bracelet, the hiding sheet. (225)

I think her birth before World War II has put her a little too soon for the sixties rave, but her consciousness of recent history is palpable. (There seems to be a signi‹cant rift between those born in the thirties and those in the forties, a genuine difference in sensibility.) None of the irony of postwar poetry is in her writing, but a morbid wit, a probe and disruption of narrative laws. She ›oats over her story with half of her face averted. Snow family: big snow father, coal eyes, coal teeth, small snow mother, no mouth, smaller and smaller snow daughters, and over them, a red felt banner: I LIKE MY WOMEN’S VOICES SOFT. And who were the child wife, husband, Mother Father? King Queen? Brother? Never

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to know. The snow streamed upward into the scree . . . (224)

She is following in the wake of the poets we love from between the wars, but soon she is isolated with her own eye, ear, tongue, and project. By the midseventies, it is she alone we are treated to. Her poetry is at once recognizable. The lion retreats from the cage we can see to the cage in the back, dragging the boy who climbed in. Bone case inside bone case. Oh sane daylight sidelight these four, the lion the boy myself the night. (241)

In some of her poems she asks herself questions and replies with a simple negative. In this way the poems face their own irresolution. Sometimes she begins it all with a metaphor so the world can be seen backward from the perspective of what it is not. . . we see its results ‹rst, its intentions last. This process mirrors the way things are devoured by other things, the uroboros eating itself from the tail up. Or the way that you cannot understand what a person is doing until she has gestured or moved. Only then can you read back to ‹nd the intention. In the case of this set of poems, Valentine concludes that it is—for her—a fate to be a poet. . . . I was made for this: listening: “Lightness wouldn’t last if it wasn’t used up on the lyre.” (243)

Her awareness of the dif‹culty of a religious view of existence (since all that is physical disappears) is settled in this poem, just as it is in an earlier one, where a bit of spilled rice comes to this: What will be left here when you die? Not the rice not the tea left somewhere when the monk

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knocked over the cup not not (234)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, Ernst. Escape from Evil. New York: Free Press, 1975. Valentine, Jean. Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997.

115

JAMES HARMS

Remnants and Recognition

When my son wants to be Batman he never needs the whole costume, which is convenient since it exists, if at all, in several undiscovered hiding places throughout the house. In fact, he usually just wears the cape, a black nylon cape that fastens at the neck with Velcro strips. Beneath the cape might be kelly green shorts and his orange Converse All Stars, or his favorite suspender pants that ride two inches above the sandals he sometimes wears with them. Occasionally it’s just a ›annel shirt and jeans, but whatever the case, no one asks who he is. Everyone knows. “Hey, Batman,” the teller calls out when we walk in the bank. “Are you Batman?” the bagger asks at the grocery store. The authority is that cape, which, in the context of my son’s motley manner of dress, is a fragment. Jean Valentine’s context is more tonal than situational, but her leaps from fragment to fragment are every bit as authoritative as Batman’s cape; they embody that central energy which makes art life-af‹rming, even when it is inhabiting grief, and her poems are always memorable, always emblems of recognition. It’s rarely popular culture that we recognize in her work; rather, it’s usually something seemingly incidental, domestic, some ›eck in the weave that reminds us of everything and nothing, of being and not being. There is not a shred of nihilism in her poetry, but there’s a whole lot of nothingness. In many ways her work is a reconciliation of several experiments in American poetry (deep imagery, surrealism, minimalism), one that places a plainspoken vernacular at the service of highly essentialized imagery, to the point that narrative is a vague scaffolding: barely there, sometimes suggested, usually inconsequential. What is left is the remnant, like a cape on a little boy’s shoulders . . . or better yet, a scrap of ›ag waving from a scorched pole after the explosion: we know exactly what it was, what it was for, even if we don’t know who put it there, what country it represented, what happened to those who believed in it. It is cloth and a few colors. And a thousand stories. So what do we call such spareness, a lyric compression that often 116

results in a sort of nonce syntax, a radical version of in medias res? Well, for one thing we could call it mindful of silence, but even that seems evasive, since Valentine’s silences control meaning much like a dream’s dislocated narrative suggests a coherence that rarely persists beyond the ‹rst few minutes of wakefulness; in other words, Valentine’s silences seem less like the unsaid and more like the unknown (“we don’t know what is happening to us, / no more than the dumb beasts of the ‹eld”—“Open Heart” from Growing Darkness, Growing Light [Door in the Mountain, 241]). Which brings us back to fragments. When Louise Glück talks about the power of broken statuary in her essay “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence” (she is discussing Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”), she is referring primarily to what can’t be known about the once-whole statue, and how this silence enacts an existential drama via the orchestration of fragments: in the case of statuary, there is a strange valorization of broken beauty that occurs when a maimed and partly recovered relic is mounted on a pedestal in a pristine setting (the Getty for instance, or even the Uf‹zi Gallery).1 We walk through rooms of relics collecting inferences and suggestions, and if we’re experienced at this activity we reach less for a sense of the vanquished whole than a sort of faith in the received remnant, which seems to reverberate with beauty, to echo with whispered meaning. But if there is an architecture to poetry, it is intensely immediate and dislocating; we rarely notice the bright red Coke can hovering in the hand of a tourist on the far side of the museum exhibit, rarely feel a need to reconcile it with the display of marble torsos and busts. But in Jean Valentine’s poems it is impossible to reside in the rooms of her stanzas without feeling the gravitational pull of discordant fragments, disrupted narratives, truncated glimpses. As Cole Swenson has written, “A glimpse suf‹ces to trigger an entirety.”2 Swenson is addressing the fragmentary nature of what some have called elliptical poetry, a recent literary movement that is so vaguely de‹ned and so youthfully delimited that its originators would probably not think to address the problem an older poet like Valentine represents to any tidy descriptions of stylistic evolution in recent American poetry. In other words, where does Valentine ‹t in when so much of what a new generation of poets is doing looks like a less authentic—a problematic word, I know—version of what she has been writing for decades? A poem vaguely suspicious of full articulation and closure; a poem privileging both voice and fragmentation; a poem in the service of the unconscious; a poem 117

unconcerned with narrative coherence. The difference, of course, is in the degree of self-consciousness; there is almost none in Valentine, almost nothing but in the elliptical poets, or whatever they are. Swenson goes on to talk about how the fragment seems an outgrowth of a sort of negative capability, that we have, as a culture, learned to read the fragment with less frustration, just as the writer employing them has learned, as Keats wrote, to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”3 In other words, we’ve caught up with a poet like Valentine, who places enormous trust in the remnants of dreams and memories. She leaves them alone and/or lays them alongside others, certain they belong that way because, in fact, that’s how they arrived in the poem, which suggests something about her process. And, in fact, her poetry often resembles surrealism, even if it never quite commits to that, or any, program. How else to describe the following lines from “New Life”: “B. walks around with a ‹re-box inside his chest. / If you get near him it will burn you too. B. says // Don’t let the women go out of our lives like the swallows / leaving only the crows’ liquid leathery reign, domain, stain” (221). Valentine’s is, very nearly, a purely visceral poetry, dictation from an emotionally fueled unconscious; the intellect will be defeated time and again by the sudden drop into dream from a deliberately narrated dramatic situation, the equally disorienting presence of a matter-of-fact voice speaking in clipped, even nonsequential, phrases. But then again, several of Valentine’s poems have nothing to do with disruption, fragmentation, or ellipticism. Occasionally her severely compressed narratives sustain a single focus and plot for the duration of the poem. Occasionally she drifts suddenly into statement with the forcefulness of Adrienne Rich: I want those women’s lives rage constraints the poems they burned in their chimney-throats The History of the World Without Words more than your silver or your gold art. (266)

But more often we have the suggestion of narrative, the suggestion of statement, and the assertion of something else, some sort of par118

allel reality that exists alongside our own, that veers off its track now and then to intersect with the path we’re pursuing: call it the afterlife, the past life, the unconscious or the imagined; whatever it is, once it mingles with what we recognize as our actual life, it becomes the real life of Valentine’s poems. And whatever distance we hope to keep from it is collapsed; we are forced to feel this real life we’d rather not live, where no narrative can contain the sudden, concrete presence of those we’ve lost, of how we’ve dreamed them, of what the past becomes when broken to pieces by memory. Here is “The Church” in its entirety: “Thank you for the food,” we said, it was mashed potatoes, gravy, this was the place the regular people came, to go through the regular funnel. Leaving I saw ——and his red candle of “‹nd it.” My life. (269)

As in so many of Valentine’s poems, we begin in medias res, are introduced to a physical place and situation, are confronted with tenor-less metaphors (the funnel) and eventually ‹nd ourselves at some sort of linguistic and/or situational point of disorientation. Valentine allows both syntax and narrative to break down. Time and again there is a feeling of incompleteness, as if where the poem might be going and what it could be saying are truncated in favor of a more immediate, if inchoate, recognition. I’m reminded, ‹nally, of prayer, how such speech, if we can call it that, seems so unnecessary, since we are inevitably trying to communicate with something that knows our minds, that has no need for our words. And yet we struggle to catch up with what we intend to say, even if the prayer ends up only partly complete, the rest issued like a bat’s ping toward an invisible target lost in the universe. We actually don’t need to say anything, yet the utterance is an act of ritual and faith, even if incomplete, and what is left out is not completely knowable, even if somehow it is intended. Jean Valentine’s poems are products of enormous will and intention, even as they are models of acceptance and trust. All good poets know that the poem is smarter than they are; they know when to stop explaining things to themselves. The great ones trust their readers enough to let them in on their silences, to stand around with them not knowing. 119

So what is it? What is it that is so compelling about Jean Valentine’s increasingly compressed poetry? The longest poem in The Cradle of the Real Life runs twenty-one lines; most are much shorter. And why do these poems feel so much like remnants, pieces that seem to contain and represent enormous truths, none of which are easily available through traditional methods of explication. It’s more than a newfound negative capability in the audience for poetry that’s created such interest in and love for Valentine’s work. Simply put, her poems are haunted from within. She is one of those rare artists who takes the world personally, then somehow ‹nds a way to reshape it into the universal. Her poems speak for those who can’t, and not simply the dead who are so often her subjects. Jean Valentine’s confrontations with silence address the almost unbearable silences most of us can’t talk our way free of; they leash themselves to the black dog of depression, grip the empty glass of alcoholism, pray to the lost god of forgiveness, and stand with the inconsolable and innumerable ghosts. And they do so without the tedium of explanation and confession. They accept so much that they exist in pieces that don’t need the larger wholes. And we accept the pieces like broken hosts, spiritual synecdoches, remnants: more than enough.

NOTES 1. Louise Glück, “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence.” Proofs & Theories (New York: The Ecco Press, 1994), 73–85. 2. Cole Swenson, “Elliptical Poetry: A Response.” American Letters & Commentary 11 (1999): 67. 3. W. Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 249.

120

SUZANNE CLEARY

Be Still and Know Silence in the Poetry of Jean Valentine

I sit cross-legged on the pink-dust-ruf›ed twin bed, in the room I share with my sister. Two hours after school, I am still dressed in the plaid skirt and maroon blazer of Catholic Central High School, a uniform that my friends and I detest, and routinely personalize with rhinestone pins and basketball tube socks. Any other day, the uniform would be thrown (literally) over the chair, but today I have been waylaid by a slim volume of poetry. Over thirty years later, this memory is palpable: I sit perfectly still, my ‹ngers poised to turn the page. But I cannot turn it. I ask myself, “Why can’t I turn this page? It’s mostly blank, after all. Why am I not through reading? Why can’t I turn this page?” I can ask this out loud because my sister is not yet home from school. “What is happening to me?” I wonder. I soon discovered that our local Carnegie-built public library had a surprisingly good collection of contemporary poetry: Ashbery, Wright, Tate, Merwin. Jean Valentine’s Dream Barker (1965) and Pilgrims (1969) were on the lowest shelf, so I sat on the ›oor and read “Night”: From this night on God let me eat like that blind child on the train touching her yogurt as I’d touch a spiderweb the ‹rst morning in the country—sky red— holding the carton and spoon to her mouth with all her eyeless body, and then orientally resting, the whole time smiling a little to one side of straight ahead. (98)

Here was something that sounded like a prayer (“God let me”) yet seemed written in praise of the earthbound: a train ride, a child eat121

ing yogurt. One image, touching a spiderweb at sunrise, somehow encapsulated a trip into the country. I read slowly, and reread. The poet seemed to be commending, or recommending, the attitude of the blind child: wonder? peace? gratitude? But none of this was spelled out. The poem wanted me to experience, not to know, as in the verse “Be still, and know that I am God,” from the Bible. Perhaps the poet’s prayer was to live fully, in the moment. “Night,” as so many of Jean Valentine’s poems, makes me oddly aware of my body. I hold my breath for a moment at the end of the ‹rst line, and the end of the third. And “sky red” leads me to take several deep breaths before reading on. It casts a stillness over me, a silence. The lines seem to extend to the right-hand margin of the page, even though there are no words there. It is as if I am reading silence. And will never get my ‹ll. poetry You, poem the string I followed blind to leaf by thick green leaf to your stem milky poem without words world electric with you (268)

This ars poetica appears in Jean Valentine’s The Cradle of the Real Life, published in 2000. Perhaps she has become the blind child of “Night,” for “Poetry” takes as metaphor a nature trail marked for the blind with twine leading from path to plant to Braille signage. Poetry is both the string leading to the plant and the plant itself. Signi‹cantly, the poem is “without words,” silent. It seems to exist before the poet, without the poet, perhaps despite the poet who follows blind the string that is the poem. Where does this tautology lead us? If the poem (i.e., string) is that which leads to the poem, then poetry is discovering, not discovery. The poem is process, not product. This poem of remarkably few words portrays the poet as one who walks blind, a trustwalk into the world. “Poetry” will not allow me to read quickly. Like most of Jean Valentine’s poems, it requires me to slow down, to grow still, to change—that is, to abandon my habitual haste. “Poetry” may be a prayer not only to poetry but also to a way of 122

living, the spiritual discipline of slowness. Valentine’s “Poetry” ushers me into stillness, into the deeper regions of my life. The poem “The Pen” opens Jean Valentine’s The Cradle of the Real Life. A wonderfully vivid lizard becomes “the pen that writes by itself.” It is a poem replete with transformations, lizard to pen to mist to gourd. It is hard to say where one object ends and another begins, and all braided with silence. I cannot rush through this poem. Silent, I seem part of the poem, yet aware of the page itself— largely free of punctuation, the words suspended on the page, held in suspension as my reading is held in suspension by the few, carefully chosen words. When Valentine inserts, “Who taught me to know instead of not to know?” I jump, the question’s lizard-quick appearance a startling moment made more so by the fact that the next line reestablishes the poem’s stillness: “And this pen its thought.” Habitual hasty reading habits nearly overtake me as I think, I don’t have time for this, but the poem overtakes me. The last three lines stop time. The ‹nal image, a bow lying across strings, is a portrait of the moment before song, or perhaps just after song. The bow is still, but still held inside the spell of song. Or perhaps it is the spell of silence that holds the bow poised and ready, full of the tenderness and latent power that is the power to create song from silence. The silence is palpable, and powerful, welcoming and frightening at the same time. Nowhere is Valentine’s use of silence more daring than in the second half of The Cradle of the Real Life. This section is entitled “Her Lost Book,” forty pages of, mostly, seven-line poems. The pages are physically striking. These short poems a›oat on a sea of white remind me of those ›ip-books made of a series of drawings of, say, a woman incrementally lifting a cup of water to her lips; when you rif›e the book’s pages, the static image becomes dynamic, ›uid, and the woman can drink. The charm of the ›ipbook is that it gives readers the illusion that they themselves create this movement, which in a limited sense they do. But actually this movement must be credited to the designer who captured on paper these points in the arc of this particular life, the designer who compels us to return and return to the pages, entranced. It strikes me that the silence-‹lled poems are formally apt for telling the story of a woman’s life, with its struggles to be heard, to ‹nd a voice within society and within oneself. These thirty-some years after my discovery of poetry, I have another perspective on that library shelf, ‹rst ›oor, just behind the Reference Desk: I 123

wonder why there were no books by Adrienne Rich. Where were the books by Denise Levertov? by Muriel Rukeyser? In 1972, Jean Valentine would seem to have been the only living American woman poet. And I wonder why she was chosen for—or, was not excluded from—those shelves. I have no answer. Silence answers. My favorite Jean Valentine poem is from the 1992 collection, The River at Wolf: the ring The ring was three times too small for a ‹nger, even a piece of string could not go through it! So I asked her, Woman, why have you sold or given me this ring? Nunlike she bobbed her white head-scarf chastisingly, black eyes, black under her eyes, she said, Something is being taken away. You must keep seeing: everything must be turned to love that is not love. Mother, going in to death, can you do it: love something that was there that is being taken away. (197)

I love that I begin this poem as if running a race and by the phrase “black eyes, black under her eyes” the poem has taken over my body, slowed me down so that I must breathe these lines. A mysterious nunlike woman gives the speaker of the poem two mysterious gifts, a ring and a cryptic message. This woman may be the speaker’s mother or she may have turned the speaker’s thoughts to her mother, or become identi‹ed with her mother, for this is how the speaker addresses the ‹gure in the powerful last four lines: “Mother, / going in to death, / can you do it: love / something that was there that is being taken away.” Every few months I need to return to the spell of this poem. The story seems at once very old—a fairy tale, or myth—and yet sharply focused on the present, how to live one’s life in the present, at the brink of the disappearing. The speaker is given what feels to be a holy charge, to “keep seeing: everything / must be turned to love that is not love,” even, she suggests, that which is “being taken 124

away.” I love the implied question mark at the end, before the rich silence. Silence is where Thomas Keating and other practitioners of centering prayer say that we ‹nd God. In that capacious, welcoming silence. I do not know what the nuns and priests of Catholic Central High School would have said if I had been bold enough to tell them that I thought I had encountered God in poetry, or in some silent place to which poetry led me. I imagine they probably would have smiled weakly, but not discouraged me. Perhaps they would have said a rosary or lit a votive candle for me, actions I do not discount even though I no longer worship in the Catholic tradition. Reading poetry deeply nourishes me in a way I have long hesitated to call spiritual for that word is too often understood as synonymous with “soothing.” (A better adjective is “challenging.”) As poet, teacher, critic, I too often read poems without slowing my pace, without letting them challenge, change, my daily self. Jean Valentine’s poems lead me to a place of deep stillness, a sustaining silence that is like a cup of water to my lips.

125

AMY NEWMAN

“This Close to God this Close to You” Incarnation in Jean Valentine Myths think in men, unbeknownst to them. claude lévi-strauss1

I. Jean Valentine’s work evokes the clarity of known life and the intangible other that is also life, that certain portion of living that is made up of interior wanderings that, because of their inexpressibility in words, seem to us more applicable to dream. Critics often note that Valentine’s poems can seem cast from the energy of dream.2 The rational component of our humanity seeks to translate all into clarity, and mystery must therefore disappear, even if whatever is in that mystery is a musky marker of the human; in rationality, something essential is missing, the term itself a recognition of something made known through absence. A. R. Ammons has described poetry as “a verbal means to a nonverbal source.”3 Language—the tool of poetry—is imperfect, words pretending to de‹ne anything and everything. How imperfect to evoke true life, the con›uence of what is known and felt, with a language that tends to pin down, locate, and identify, rather than suspend. “To de‹ne a thing,” wrote Georges Braque, “is to substitute the de‹nition for the thing.”4 Words gesture toward real experience. A poem that seeks to know the real world in all its dimensions would gesture in ways measured and unmeasured, keen and also soft, simultaneously toward knowing and toward diffusion, toward all that we know of loss. No matter the existence, it’s complicated to be alive. Valentine’s caring for the world is matched by her sense that such a place may be linguistically impossible.

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Her lost book said, “Your search to ‹nd words that will devour meaning will devour you.” (267)

“Her Lost Book,” the long poem sequence that comprises the second half of Valentine’s The Cradle of the Real Life, includes poems of interiors, separations, little exiles, incompletion. The sequence is classic in its contrast and simultaneity: porous and hidden, pervious and allusive, demanding and welcoming, like a transom, like a lighted window. Across the transom factors the world as words murmuring through walls and skin. Gaps, stops, half-utterances, and—except for a mermaid embryo still connected within the body—constant gestures toward separations, breaches, interims, limits. Unlike the others in the sequence, the embryo that listens to “the Real Life” is in a state of paradise, not yet exiled out of her garden into our world. Several other poems in “Her Lost Book” attend to the un‹nished, the layered, and the wandering: there is the woman unable to ‹nish the story in “In the Public Library”(263–64); we hear the duality of voices in “At the Conference on Women in the Academy” with “the woman talking / in the split-open room / under the room of what we say” (265) (hear both the openness and the division, and the veiled “under”?); there is the dying Margaret, holding tight to her iron bed and to empty us of every illusion of separateness (264)

Attending these divisions are implied, imperceptible attachments— invisible lines, like radio signals, between the entities. Valentine emphasizes these connections even as she maintains their mystery, conveying the phenomenon without undoing the phenomenon. The dislocation in Valentine’s work is foregrounded precisely because of the acknowledgment of an underlying coherence; Valentine is all about the tether—how these dislocations contact, link, bond, and bind, though invisible. There are ways other than visibility to be traceable, present. The ‹rst of the three sections of

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“Her Lost Book” includes “What God Said,” a poem that closes with a quote from St. Mechtilde of Magdeburg: Do not fear your death, for when it arrives I will draw my breath and your soul will come to me like a needle to a magnet. (267)

This juncture is echoed immediately in the epigraph to the second section, which reproduces a sign in Braille along a nature walk on the Miwok Trail in Muir Woods: Some of the signs suggest that you feel a leaf or other part of a plant. A string leads from the top of the sign to the plant. (267)

Imagining for a moment the transition from the conventionally sighted way of seeing the plant to this other way of looking: moving along a tether toward a different experience of leaf. We feel, seeing differently, on a strand, toward the ideal of touch and clarity of vision that ordinary looking (which is in many ways overlooking) does not afford us. The Muir Woods epigraph is articulation, vision of as-yet-unseen tethers. It’s as if one could select the “show invisibles” command in word processing, and the world would become a massive dimension of dotted lines, or spiderweb strands, connecting all things, af‹rming relationships. It’s a landscape of incarnation. From a leaf on a string to the presence the divine? Valentine has said, “If you are writing about anything you have to start with something physical, palpable. There is no other language for us. Even Rumi uses a cup or a table or a light, just because it’s our world we can speak to each other about or through.”5 “[W]hat was I?” the poet asks, early in the second section of “Her Lost Book” from The Cradle of the Real Life: I followed the string in the dark. Alone: (268)

And in “Poetry,” Valentine continues:

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You, poem the string I followed blind to leaf by thick green leaf to your stem milky poem without words world electric with you (268)

II. The substance, the means, of an art, is an incarnation—not reference but phenomenon. —denise levertov6 Eve Grubin: There is a sense in your work of an awareness of another world besides this world. Jean Valentine: Definitely.7

“Her Lost Book” begins with the embryo “mermaid” that hasn’t yet come into this world, and has words only half gathered her head still ›oating listening listening to the Real Life (263)

Within the body hums this mermaid, living in a kind of preworld paradise, a near-Edenic connection with a God. At birth, this connection will disassemble, or differently assemble. If the “Real Life” is this prebirth experience, then what we have in this life is an anteroom to that return. By the nature of this weighted world, we’ll miss that now unknown, and perhaps obliquely desire trespass and return. This is nostalgia: homesickness, its etymology “Greek nostos, a return home.”8 This is the language of the postexpulsion second world with its requisite dustings of loss, a burden of words with which the embryo has yet to reckon.

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Valentine’s 2004 new and selected, Door in the Mountain, includes “The Basket House,” ‹rst published in the journal Kestrel in 2000 with an accompanying preface. In “A Preface to Three Poems,” Valentine writes of “The Basket House”: “In the last stanza God pulls the cord that was severed at birth.”9 I’m reminded of the embryo mermaid. This severing feels like expulsion—of being cast out, left off, cut from that sense of knowing and belonging. This part of living is homesickness for the Real Life. Here is the last stanza from “The Basket House”: And he holds me near: he pulls the cord out from me, in to him, length over length. (19)

In an interview with Michael Klein, Valentine says: But I don’t think that poets are that interested in recording things. I think they’re interested in going through them, going through them like doors. Maybe it is a world we’re seeking, not a world we already know.10 Perhaps part of being human is to wander after God’s imperceptibility to the eye, inconspicuousness, failure to attend, nonappearance, disinterest, neutrality, truancy, absence, nonexistence— well, chose your signi‹er. To be human is to seek the Real Life, to know loss as essential to being. Absolute knowing is unavailable. It is not necessary to be devout to appreciate this concept; the wandering/nostalgia metaphor may have been constructed as a way to explain this very human feeling. Yet doubt is faith, according to Thomas Merton: “You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.”11 For Merton, language and its limitations go hand in hand: “God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it.”12 Valentine does not explore certainty, that one-dimensional pretender to experience. Her inquiry is with the dimensionality of being, incarnate. In an interview, Valentine recalls St. Augustine: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” And later: “I feel that all poetry is prayer, it’s just as simple as that. Who else would 130

we be talking to?”13 “Blessed are they who remember / that what they now have they once longed for,” she writes: A day a year ago last summer God ‹lled me with himself, like gold, inside, deeper inside than marrow. This close to God this close to you: walking into the river at Wolf with the animals. The snake’s green skin, lit from inside. Our second life. (197)

A Valentine poem is uttered experience, with both the incarnate and an anagogical sense of language. Anagogical vision as de‹ned by Flannery O’Connor is “the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or situation.”14 Though these writers differ signi‹cantly (for example, Valentine has expressed an interest in both Christianity and Buddhism),15 at a fundamental level Valentine and O’Connor share a métier, using language to sketch and excavate experience. Valentine’s craft acknowledges that art takes the shape that the experience demands of it and, taking its form organically, embodies the spiritual. In an interview with Eve Grubin two years before the publication of Door in the Mountain, Valentine said, “I am going towards the spiritual rather than away from it.”16 The opening poem of Door in the Mountain, “Annunciation” responds to artist Helène Aylon’s “The Breakings” series, in which paint is poured onto large paper board held diagonally, and allowed to ‹nd its own shape, ›owing slowly down, the women holding the board shifting it this way and that to let the paint move, rest, and release. In this poem titled for the angel Gabriel’s announcement of the Incarnation, Valentine writes of Aylon’s process as it happens, as creation, perceiving a soul entering the world in the movement of the paint down the paper: I saw my soul become ›esh breaking open the linseed oil breaking over the paper running down pouring no one to catch it my life breaking open no one to contain it my pelvis thinning out into God (3)

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In a video of “The Breakings,” Aylon comments about the process of the paint as it behaves like paint, gravity bearing upon it to break its liquid sac: Sometimes it happens before I’m ready. All of a sudden I see it ›ow. I sit down just to adjust. And then I see the other fullness coming. I prepare myself. I’m glad to have people there with me. Then I just watch it drip. I’ll see a stream soon. It’s so moist that the light makes it shine. There’s some wrinkling already, but I don’t mind. There it goes. Look at all the liquid. The edges are so jagged, like it went through some canal, but that sac is intact.[as the sack of paint ‹nally gives and ›ows off the paper]: There. The way the drops are staying still—how could that be? They have to fall. They’re not glued on. Their very slow descent . . . they were suspended.17 Aylon accepts, even welcomes the genuine interaction of gravity, paint, and paper creating what might be perceived as ›aws— wrinkling paper and jagged edges of paint—as central to the process of art taking an organic, rather than imposed form. The artist and process work together; Aylon’s wonder (“The way the drops are staying still—how could that be?”) suggests that creating is also an experience of beholding and witnessing. The word create used to de‹ne artistic process is virtually a cliché, so we might overlook the spirituality involved as artists generate what is native and organic, re›ecting a landscape both material and immaterial. In “Annunciation”—an announcement of incarnation, but also its phenomenon—Valentine articulates the bond between artistic and spiritual creation, art-making as incarnation, as a ›ourishing of the human spirit, as the bloom of this life. In “To Plath, to Sexton,” Valentine asks why writers work in the midst of, or following the diminishment of, what they’d hoped for: “So what use was poetry / to a white empty house?” She answers: “It was the use of you. / It was the ›ower” (215–16). NOTES 1. Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 245. 2. Among them Paul Zwieg, David Kalstone, Ellen Davis, and Maggie Anderson.

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3. Donald Hall, Claims for Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 8. 4. Henry Hope, Georges Braque (New York: MOMA, 1949), 13ff. 5.“A Conversation with Jean Valentine,” interview by Eve Grubin, Crossroads 59 (2002): 8. 6. Hall, Claims for Poetry, 260. 7. Valentine, “Conversation with Jean Valentine,” 6. 8. William Morris, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mif›in, 1979), 897. 9. Jean Valentine, “Preface to Three Poems,” Kestrel 15 (2000): 14. 10. “An Interview with Jean Valentine,” interview by Michael Klein, American Poetry Review 20.4 (1991): 40. 11. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), 105. 12. Ibid., 37. 13. Valentine, interview by Klein, 43. 14. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 72. 15. Tanya Pastor, “Audience Hears Poet Read Selected Works,” Daily Targum, December 3, 2004, n.p. 16. Valentine, interview by Grubin, 9. 17. Helène Aylon, “The Breakings.” http://www.heleneaylon.com/ breakings.html.

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MAGGIE ANDERSON

Globe on Fire Jean Valentine as a Political Poet

The core vocabulary of Jean Valentine’s poetry1 has always been oneiric and elegiac, and her central imaginative landscapes, dreams and loss. Because of this, her poetry has not often been characterized as “political,” pertaining to the large public world. For several reasons, I think this is a mistake. First, it is a limited reading that insists that dreams are not “political.” The diminishment of the importance of dreams, or their reduction to a cluster of sexual metaphors, is both time and culture speci‹c. Many cultures in the world govern their daily and communal lives by the images they ‹nd in dreams. When Jean Valentine’s poems are called “diffuse,” “almost hermetic,” or “dif‹cult,” it seems to me that these adjectives could also describe what is both challenging and compelling about dreams. In a recent interview John Hoppenthaler asks Valentine how she “achieves a receptive state to write poems [she] has said are very much dream-like.” Her answer is characteristically matter-of-fact, “Well, I actually go to sleep and dream.” For the poet, of course, what might be made out of images from sleep is crucial. The striking intensity of Jean Valentine’s poems comes, to me, by way of their deep and secretive understanding that our dream lives matter signi‹cantly to both the private and the public life. Second, although Valentine herself has said that her early poems written in the 1960s were not “political,” images from public life frequently intrude on domestic scenes like a freight train bearing down on a small intersection. Valentine says, “I remember in the sixties, I felt I should try to write political poems, but I didn’t have a politically active life and I couldn’t write political poems. I think since then I’ve done a little more about public life, but I couldn’t do it at that point; I didn’t have the experience” (Valentine, “So Let It Be Like Rain” 24). She refers here, I imagine, to her recent poems about the AIDS pandemic and to her poems that focus on 134

the lost imaginative lives of women (“Her Lost Book,” 262). In 1983, Valentine told an interviewer, “I am trying to move into an other, into others, to move out of the private self into an imagination of history, into the public world” (Valentine, “Hallowing” 30). Yet even in Jean Valentine’s ‹rst book, Dream Barker and Other Poems, which won the Yale Poetry Prize in 1965, unmistakably public, political events invade the primarily domestic world (husband, wife, children) of the poems and trans‹gure it. One poem in particular is indicative of what’s usually at stake in Valentine’s imaginative world. In “September 1963” (56), the speaker is a mother taking her child to the ‹rst day of school with trepidation, to leave her among the “riddle of primary colors, / The howling razzle-dazzle of your peers.” The mother’s parting words are both encouraging and ominous: “Dearest, go: this is what / School is, what the world is. / Have I sewed my hands to yours?” Quickly enough, the child is dancing and playing with the others, but the shadow of the world beyond the safety (or imagined safety) of the domestic is already appearing. In fact this world has been there from the title. In September 1963, after the largest human-rights demonstration in U.S. history at that time—the August March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech—four black schoolgirls died in the racist bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church. The mother in Valentine’s poem ‹nds a park bench and sits down with a newspaper: Glad, Derelict, I ‹nd a park bench, read Birmingham. Birmingham. Birmingham. White tears on a white ground, White world going on, white hand in hand, World without end.

The “white tears” are those of the “white mother” and the “white children” who are, at least for the moment, safe in their schools. “There is another world,” Paul Eluard wrote, “but it is in this one.” From her earliest poems, Jean Valentine has placed the vital world of dreams beside the urgencies of the diurnal, and these worlds coexist with the largest and most terrible political events of our time. There are two other characteristics of Jean Valentine’s poems— both of them present in this early poem—that, to my mind, make them undeniably political, despite her own protestations. One is 135

the reference to, the inclusion of, color in many of her poems. It is unusual for a white poet to include color in poems as frequently as Jean Valentine does. Most often, she refers directly to race, and in a group of poems in her 1997 book Growing Darkness, Growing Light, color becomes a central metaphor for understanding: “Red for Blood” (226), “Yellow for Gold” (227), “Green for the Land”(228), and “Black for the People” (228). In the last of these, the poet aligns herself with a man who is black and in danger from the white men, who are a danger to her also: The man I am with is black, we are with nothing but white men. He’s caught, he says they’re going to shock him or burn him. I say I’ll be there.

Valentine’s Home. Deep. Blue: New and Selected Poems (1989) uses a color in the title. Here, blue is one of the descriptors for “Willi,” to whose memory the book is dedicated. The title poem, “Willi, Home” (167), is an elegy, a blessing, written from the liminal space of “just before sleep”: “It’s too late to say goodbye. And there are never enough goodbyes.” I know: the daffodil is me. Brave. Willi’s an iris. Brave. Brave. Tall. Home. Deep. Blue.

In addition, among the eighteen new poems included in this “new and selected,” two may be seen as overtly political: “Mandelstam” (169), a poem apparently in the voice of the great Russian dissident poet Osip Mandelstam, and “Primitive Painting: Liberation Day” (168). In another deeply political poem from roughly the same time, “The Under Voice” (203) from The River at Wolf (1992), Valentine writes, “blue [is] the most fugitive of all the colors.” She explains, “Some painter said that . . . I loved it, of course, because I love the idea of the fugitive in anything. . . . it’s the ‹rst [color] to fade in a watercolor if you put it in the light. It’s the ‹rst to go, so it’s literally the most fugitive” (Valentine, “So Let It Be Like Rain” 31). In the poem “The Under Voice,” blue becomes the fugitives them136

selves, the homeless men and women “streaming up and out of the sidewalk” on the East side of Broadway: connected to no one streaming no one to no one more like light than like people, blue neon, blue the most fugitive of all the colors

In all of Jean Valentine’s books, color is a central descriptor for the world. The colors she uses are like the different lines on maps for rivers, highways, or side roads. She is clear-eyed in her insistence that the world is governed and determined by its hues, like bright sea-glass in rock. The second unmistakably political concern in Valentine’s poems is her focus on children. This is obvious, of course, in “September 1963,” but it is present, sometimes more subtly in many, many of her other poems as well. When Valentine writes of children, they are not often her own biological children (though she has two of these and occasionally writes of them directly), but they are all the children of the world. They are the physical sign of the future for which we adults are all responsible—our collective hope, or our collective shame. Two poems from her second book, Pilgrims (1969), come to mind: “Visiting Day at School” (92), a poem that again references the public world of school and its racial inequalities, and “The Child and the Terrorist, The Terrorist and the Child” (97). In this eerily contemporary poem, the images shift and ebb and ›ow between the possible “terrorist” in any child, and the grown-up yet somehow “childlike” political terrorist who endangers us all. The poem opens in a dream world: The globe’s on ‹re in his hands and everyone’s asleep. What will we feed him when he comes?

The speaker is “Just getting to know his step, his voice.” She has concealed herself, “my step, a way back in the dark / to where I go without telling lies.” Although in the context of the book as a whole this poem seems also to refer to the end of a love relationship, the deliberate choice of political actors (“the terrorist”) makes it undeniably a poem with meanings beyond the private. The poem ends on mysteriously compelling images of distance and 137

alienation: The speaker wants “to turn in a cool globe.” And the terrorist (or the child?) answers the question “how is it with you?” “Archaically cut off. Antarctic miles.” This image, a place unimaginably far away in time and uninhabitable, is also fugitive. Jean Valentine’s relationship to the poetry of Mandelstam has been intense and ongoing over years. In nearly all of her books, she has a poem about the Mandelstams. In the “Mandelstam” poem from Home. Deep. Blue, she refers to the years 1934–35, when the poet and his wife were exiled to Voronezh after his release from prison in Moscow. Punished all his life for his “counterrevolutionary actitivies,” Mandelstam essentially signed his own death warrant by writing a short satirical poem about Stalin in 1933. Valentine’s poem imagines his grief for his country as he and his wife go into exile: I am 43 Moscow we will not live Russia Iron shoe. . . Russia old root cellar old mouth of blood under-the-earth pulling us down into herself no room to lie down

Most recently, in “Reading the Mandelstams” (265) from The Cradle of the Real Life, the poet asks for their safe return to her (our) present world: “Why can’t they drive you both now, tonight / up to the house, light up the house // Lines of ice / in the night window / notes.” In a recent conversation, Valentine told me that she thought Osip Mandelstam was “a political poet in the best sense.” And what would that be? “He never seems to have been swayed from the poetry he had to write by the events and pressures around him,” she answered. “I see him as a ‹gure of integrity, and his wife equally, for her heroism in seeing his poems into print and so into the future. He was always led by the necessities of poetry, rather than the necessities of security of all kinds.” Jean Valentine’s 1979 book, The Messenger, includes a translation (with Anne Frydman) of a Mandelstam poem, “394” (145). Man138

delstam numbered all his poems and this one is also dated and placed: “Voronezh, May 4, 1937.” It tells of a young girl who is pulled into what seems a political gathering, despite her “unwilling hesitance” and “the shining riddle in her walk” that “wants to hold her back.” Although it is springtime and the weather warm, the scene is dangerously charged. The girl goes to meet “the mother of the grave.” The second half of Mandelstam’s “394” is a tribute to the keeners, the women who are called to mourn the fallen, and to wait at the tomb for the resurrected. The poem presents death as the predictable outcome of political risk in a dangerous world. It ends with a homily that makes such death appear almost commonplace Today an angel; tomorrow worms, and the grave; and the days after only lines in chalk. The step you took no longer there to take.

Both the presence of the reluctant girl (a child) and the implied elegy for her irreversible decision address concerns in Valentine’s own poetry and perhaps suggest a reason for her to have translated this poem in particular as a part of her desire to move into “an imagination of history.” Hearing Jean Valentine read her translation of Mandelstam’s poem at an unquestionably political gathering helped me to understand in a new way what I had always felt was her engagement with public events. In May 1990, on the campus of Kent State University, where I teach, a gathering of poets was held as a part of the twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the four students killed and nine wounded by National Guardsmen in an antiwar protest on the campus on May 4, 1970. For those who lived through that time, it is not dif‹cult to recall with stunning clarity the days in early May that seemed, in our current expression, to “change forever” the way we looked at college campuses, at education, and at protest against the increasingly unpopular war. By the end of May 1970, over two hundred colleges and universities had closed, and students were on strike at over four hundred others. At the Kent State twentieth-anniversary gathering, over three hundred poets came to participate in the readings that went on 139

continuously from May 3 to May 6 at several venues in town, both on and off the campus. Poets came from New York, California, Oregon, Texas, and other states, and many, many Ohio poets drove in for the weekend. There were some scheduled readings for those who had only a limited time to be here, but most of the readings were “open,” and poets signed up for ten-minute slots. At one of these open readings, on Saturday, May 5, I looked up from my exhaustion and heard Jean Valentine. Valentine was the poet-inresidence at Bucknell University that semester and she had driven over the mountains from Pennsylvania with Karl Patten and some students. At the gathering of poets, she read two poems: one, the Osip Mandelstam poem “394,” from May 4, 1937, and the other, “After Elegies” (103) from her book of the early 1970s, Ordinary Things. My own sense of Jean Valentine’s work had always been that she was much more a political poet than had been recognized by critics, and perhaps even by herself. Context illuminates, and when I heard Valentine’s poem in the midst of literally hundreds and hundreds of poems I heard that weekend, I knew without a doubt that hers was the voice of a “political poet in the best sense.” Valentine’s “After Elegies” begins with a personal grief. The poet sits at a table (there are many tables in Valentine’s work, always portending a quiet domestic scene about to break open into a larger world), sleeping. There is an unnamed “you” who, though dead or otherwise lost to the poet, nevertheless occasionally reappears out the window. Loss alters the entire physical world for the bereaved, as Valentine notes: . . . We notice things differently: a child’s handprint in a clay plate, a geranium, aluminum balconies rail to rail, the car horns of a wedding,

As in Jean Valentine’s other political poems a central concern here is children. They are outside the window “in white,” presumably ‹rst Communion clothes, in a safe world, blessed by weddings and geraniums. And then, the children transform. They become LIFE shots of other children. Fire to paper; black faces, judge faces, Asian faces; ›at earth your face fern

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coal

Here are the familiar colors again—black and white, but also red and orange in the “‹re,” green in the “fern,” and yellow in the “Asian faces.” The earth is ›at, askew. The poem references directly the famous photograph of a Vietnamese girl running naked through the napalmed streets. In the context of that weekend at Kent State when we had gathered to remember killed and wounded children on college campuses, Jean Valentine’s poem, in a characteristic political gesture, extended the grief to “other children” and to other causes. In addition, both the Mandelstam poem and “After Elegies” address indirectly the partially articulated belief behind our gathering—that if enough poets gathered at the site of the event and read enough poems over enough days then some change, or at least something more resolved in the memories of the atrocities of twenty years before, might take place. Valentine has addressed directly the power inherent in gatherings of poets in community. In speaking of what teaching has given her, Valentine says, “this is my great love of it—that it can form these little communities, even for a short period . . . and sometimes people continue friendships from those. But even if they don’t, it’s an experience of a little community, and I think our country is so short of that. . . . That’s the very good thing about all these workshops. People criticize them, but if you get people together in any way in this country, that’s a good thing. I also think if you get people preoccupied with poetry for a while, that’s got to help” (Valentine, “So Let It Be Like Rain” 17). In Jean Valentine’s most recent work—the poems in Growing Darkness, Growing Light and The Cradle of the Real Life—the political content has become more overt. Her poems on the AIDS pandemic, for example, also show a sharper edge. In an interview with Michael Klein in the American Poetry Review, Valentine speaks of her poem “Still Life: in the Epidemic” from The River at Wolf (185), This poem concludes with lines that are uncharacteristically violent for Valentine: . . . And Mother State, you say, “You are not enough. I am. Eat me, and I will raise you up. On TV, eat me. Chew me, gingerly, like chewing ice, eat me. America. Eat me.”

She tells Klein, “I’ve read that poem at readings and I don’t completely understand it, yet I feel it’s right—as close to right as I can 141

get it for the moment. It’s about the abuse of our people by our government” [40]. Throughout the 1990s, a new directness entered Jean Valentine’s poems. In the contributor’s note to her poems included in the anthology, Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, she writes: “Knowing people with AIDS and their partners and families and friends has brought me closer to the camp‹re” (Klein and McCann, 178). Valentine comes to the public crisis by way of the domestic and, in her image of the warm light that draws us together, I think of Gaston Bachelard’s writing about images of the house in The Poetics of Space, where the evening lamp on the family table is also the center of a world. The larger world beyond the little table entered her early poems in ›ashes and darts; it has now become much more pervasive. Perhaps, because of Valentine’s own increased self-acceptance as a recovering alcoholic, the world has become both more tolerable to look at, and inversely, less tolerable to remain silent about. In recent elegies for those who have died of AIDS (“The Night of Wally’s Service . . . ,” [235] the series of poems for “Rodney Dying,” [235], and “Documentary: AIDS Support Group” [233]) there is the familiar sense in her political poems of how young these victims have been. Not children perhaps, but unquestionably dying preternaturally young, and from her perspective (“my sixty years of rings,” from “Rodney Dying (2)” [236]) young enough to have been her own children. I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s assertion that “poetry is not a luxury” when I read the poems of Jean Valentine. In a prose poem entitled “Actuarial File” (157), Valentine lists her “evidence,” what we will need for the rest of our lives. There is nothing casual or optional here. The tone of the poem is de‹nite and self-assured; the items themselves are precise, like essential oils: Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass, everything goes somewhere—and everything we do—nothing ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs. Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings, our solitudes. Our eyes. The necessities of Jean Valentine’s own life and of the world prompt her poems, but as a “political poet in the best sense,” the necessities of poetry bring them to ful‹llment. In her willingness to embrace the several truths of our several languages Jean Valentine 142

writes as convincingly as any poet of our time of the political world and its “ordinary” terrors.

NOTE 1. This essay was originally written in 2003, shortly after the publication of The Cradle of the Real Life. Poems by Jean Valentine discussed here include those from her eight books published between 1965 and 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Klein, Michael, and Richard McCann, eds. Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. New York: Persea Books, 1997. Valentine, Jean. “The Hallowing of the Everyday.” In Richard Jackson, Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Valentine, Jean. “An Interview with Jean Valentine.” Interview by Michael Klein. American Poetry Review 20.4 (1991): 39–44. Valentine, Jean. “So Let it be Like Rain: An Interview with Jean Valentine.” Interview by John Hoppenthaler. Arts & Letters 3 (Spring 2000): 11–33.

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JEFFREY SKINNER

Everyone Was Drunk Reading Jean Valentine through a Shot Glass Lens

Alcohol, and Jean Valentine’s poetry—how does one begin to link two such primal forces? Jean has spoken honestly in public forums about her troubles with alcohol, and her journey of recovery, so the problem is not fear of “outing” Jean. But any attempt to say what is “alcoholic” in Jean’s work, or what “alcoholic poetry” might be is, I soon discovered, a fool’s errand. What do the poetries of Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman, or Dorothy Parker and Hart Crane, have in common? And surely it’s a mistake to think of any particular metaphor, trope, formal or informal measure or means as alcoholic. This would be similar to con›ating the use of received forms (sonnets, villanelles, etc.) with reactionary politics. We’ve been through that debate, and in retrospect it is hard to see why we bothered. How does Valentine handle the subject of drinking and alcohol in her poems? After all, many of her titles (“Everyone Was Drunk,” “The Drinker’s Wife Writes Back,” “American River Sky Alcohol Father,” etc.) invite explicit discussion of alcohol, and alcoholism. But Jean’s poems, even those with obvious connection, are always “about” more than booze, in the same way that “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is “about” more than Lincoln’s death. The dangers of reductionism loom. It’s probable I will end by falling into all the generalizing traps I have laid out. Alcohol suffuses American literary culture (if not all of American culture), as it suffuses Jean’s work. It is a real subject, shadowy and immense, cobbled from jagged, mismatched components of psychology, genetics, addiction, culture, desire, and many more. I will try to limit myself to comments rather than pronouncements, and to stay in that intersection where the substance and idea of alcohol most directly meet Jean Valentine’s words. And I will look at this intersection from the vantage of my own recov144

ery from alcoholism. This point of view is decidedly less sexy than the cultural reading many other writers would give. But perhaps it will have the value of being closer to the way Jean herself now looks at the world, from the sober side. bees A man whose arms and shoulders and hands and face and ears are covered with bees says, I’ve never known such pain. Another man comes over with bees all over his hands— only bees can get the other bees off. The ‹rst man says again, I’ve never known such pain. The second man’s bees begin to pluck the ‹rst grave yellow bees off, one by one. (221)

“Bees” can be read as an allegory of the AA process of recovery from alcoholism. The one covered with bees, who has never known such pain, is the drunk in the depths of disease. Perhaps close to death, he has ‹nally recognized the radical nature of his dilemma, and spoken it, out loud, to another human being. These steps, so seemingly easy and obvious—after all, he’s covered with bees—are in reality obscure, monumental, and rare. Most alcoholics never ‹nd their way to the consciousness that they drink too much and cannot stop drinking, and that this is killing them. After admitting such a monstrous thing (monstrous for many reasons, the most immediate of which is the immense burden this disclosure bears, psychically and physically) to oneself, then there’s the matter of telling another. You cannot remove bees from yourself if every square inch of you is already covered with them. But the alcoholic has made a life of hiding, evading, and living lonely within himself. It has been a life of withholding—withholding how much he’s drunk, how little he remembers of his actions during a drunk. He has used booze to withhold and erase feeling, for years and years. It is a cowardly and unseemly existence, he begins dimly to understand—and as soon as he does, the bees of unseemliness and cowardice suddenly materialize, and are added to the others. Eventually much of the alcoholic’s psychic life becomes grotesquely bent toward the denial of his means of coping, which 145

is drinking. It is only after this recognition, and this searing utterance (I’ve never known such pain), that he can be approached by another man with bees all over his hands—the drunk who has been through recovery. Only then can the painstaking ministrations of his “bees,” his experiences in the darkened corridors of booze, begin to remove the “grave” yellow bees of the sufferer. This act of compassionate connection is in AA a necessary beginning to sobriety for the “newly awakened” drunk, and a necessary condition of continued sobriety for the experienced helper (who nevertheless still has bees on his hands). The process is spoken by the poem in beautifully straightforward terms: “The second man’s bees begin to pluck / the ‹rst grave yellow bees off, one by one.” Jean Valentine’s poems are the most compressed, skillful, mysterious, and moving examples of literary close-up magic we have. They are miniature performances using common elements. And yet no matter how close we stand, how many times we read the work, how we deconstruct the words, the lines, we cannot see how she does it. “Bees,” like all good allegories, contains the essential elements of a life-and-death narrative in compressed form. Its means are vivid, stark, and physical—the yellow bees, covering the man’s arms and shoulders and hands and face and ears. Presentational and expressive, the poem is radically indifferent to discursive or didactic modes. Jean knows the body is the primary source of our ecstasies, terrors, and—oddly enough—our thoughts. In every poem Valentine slyly and irrevocably ‹nds the juncture at which mind and body are indistinguishable. The surprising, sometimes shocking intimacies her art startles up in us always imply the perceiving body, as well as the perception. They do this, somehow, without rubbing our noses in bodily ›uids, a tiresome shock-art tactic we have come to expect. Instead they insist on the much more subversive notion that the creations and detritus of the body are, in the end, indistinguishable from the creations and detritus of the soul. This idea is terrifying and kind at once: in the poem “Father Lynch Returns from the Dead,” the speaker says, “I ask what it’s like— / he quotes St. Paul: / ‘Now hope is sweet’” (236). And this bit of mortal brightness is followed immediately by the lines, “Then in his own voice: / Oh well it’s a great scandal, / the naked are easier to kill.” 146

Her poems solve the mind/body problem, though the solution solves nothing. the drinker You breathless drinking drinking making for the door out of your life heading out through the chimney the body-hole out from the house bone out from

the skin and

the silence —Love won’t take you out won’t take you out

death

nothing that’s the same will take you out (258)

The drinker is wound up tightly, in a terri‹c hurry to get— where? Well, she’ll decide later. And she is ‹lled with holes—gaps, lacunae—that must be forded somehow or got around, and which appear everywhere, in memory, imagination, conversation . . . more and more, as the drinking escalates. They are scary, these holes, increasing the sense of urgency: something bearing down on me, stealing me, piece by piece. After a while it becomes clear to all around the drinker (and even the drinker herself may have a dim ominous nub of awareness) that she is trying to hurry not from place to place, but out of her life: that the breathless urgency is desire to be relieved of self. Like some animal in a cage, she searches minutely, obsessively for the exit. To the observer it looks like mindless pacing. Wait, she says. What is the cage? I forget. Is it my lover, child, spouse, job, city? I have tested each one. Without them the cage remains. So, is it the body itself? 147

She would like to ask these things of someone, instead of running the questions uselessly through her own mind. She would like to tell someone . . . But she cannot tell, not anyone. How can she say she needs to get out of her own body? What would that sound like? They would put her away. So she is quiet, forcing herself further inside the very place she would escape, balled up inside her impossible, insane dilemma. And it’s not for lack of loved ones, at least early on. She has husband, or lover, son, daughter, mother, or father; one or many surrounding her who try their love as a fulcrum to . . . pry her out? They don’t even know what they’re doing either, poor things. She feels their attempted care, but distantly, as if through heavy gloves. And it is strange that so often after thinking of them, of the very ones who try to love her, she thinks: suicide, death. Why is that? She doesn’t know. But what about that, what about death as escape, now that the saddest part has come clear: “Love / won’t take you out”? Then it is the poet who steps in to say “death / won’t take you out.” And in this sudden, subtle shift in point of view from secondperson limited to what we might call second-person omniscient there is the leap to larger context, to the exact dimensions of the drinker’s dilemma, seen in the light of disinterested love—“nothing that’s the same / will take you out.” Nothing in the drinker’s own world, within her physical reach or the powers of her imagination—not even love or death—can save her. Only, the implication is, something outside the known, of another substance entirely, can do this thing. Medical studies have found that alcoholics are literally, that is, physiologically, more sensitive than nonalcoholics. Subjected to stimuli such as a loud noise, the alcoholic perceives it as signi‹cantly louder, more disturbing, than the nonalcoholic. There is an outsize intensity to the perceptual world experienced by alcoholics, before they even take their ‹rst drink. If the world is too much with poets, it is doubly too much with the alcoholic poet. It seems to be a matter of wiring. There is this porousness between the living and the dead. Between dreaming and waking and between the dead and the living. —j.v., in interview

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everyone was drunk South Dakota, August 1989. The buffaloes’ deep red-brown hinged shoulders and beards, their old hinged humps . . . These are the old males, separated from the herd. You can get a state license to shoot them. “So who saved me? And for what purpose?” The rich WASP suburb, 1946. The ‹ght about the Jews on Wall Street. My uncle said, I thought that’s what we fought the war about. My uncle was right; everyone was drunk; my mother was peeling shivers of Scotch tape off the counter, peeling off her good hope. Or was it I who was losing my hope? in the violent lightning white on the white lawn. So why was I handed out of the burning window? For joy. Journalism. Stories. (201)

Every alcoholic in recovery has some portion of survivors’ guilt. “So who saved me? And for what purpose?” He has seen others, just like him, some more worthy of salvation in his judgment than himself, who were killed by their addiction. Why are they gone, and I am still here? We were all drunk . . . Some say it’s luck, some claim they were saved to help others. Some say it’s the mystery of grace. Many say there is no answer. Not in this world. Jean Valentine was in a house of drunks, in the thick of a killing disease. The house of an alcoholic family might as well be on ‹re. The implication is that others in the poem did not escape, but the speaker did. Why, she wonders. But then Jean Valentine has the artist’s audacity to answer the question, speci‹cally: “For joy. Journalism. Stories.” This answer cuts through sociology and daytime logic; it is the eruption of what Jean calls elsewhere “the under voice.” To be saved (and of course the trope extends beyond alcoholism) is to be delivered back into the possibility of joy. But the answer also makes me remember the Irish proverb: “The most beautiful music is the music of what happens.” In alcoholism there is only repetition and decline—the same dreary story told over and over. But when you are handed out the burning window, ah—now something new can happen! And Jean can tell it.

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We can tell it. Our stories count. At some point all of us have been handed out the burning window. And even if the story turns out to be sad, it is all right, because purpose and hope, however conditional, have been recovered. “The buffaloes’ deep red-brown / hinged shoulders and beards, their old hinged humps.” We can see them now. The alcoholic has had a great deal of practice in continually compensating for his distorted perception of reality. He has practice in blackouts, too—amnesiac periods when he acts but retains no consciousness, no memory of his actions. Gaps in knowledge, sensation, and memory proliferate as the drinking progresses. Internal boundaries between analysis and fantasy, reason and intuition, are pounded daily by a combination of alcohol and repressed, untenable emotion. It is no wonder the boundaries weaken and become porous. And so it may be that odd juxtaposition and lacunae in a poem feel, for the alcoholic poet, far more natural than a more serial, linear structure. Though it may not appear so, the drinker leads a marginal, associative life. Over time he becomes, perforce, a surrealist. There are four characters in the poem “The River at Wolf”—the speaker, the you sometimes addressed, the animals (particularly the snake), and God. So without too much bending we might read the poem as Eve addressing Adam, sometime after the Fall. As such it is a poem of remembrance tinged with awe, after the tumultuous events have passed and a new way of being has been established. Who has not played the Prodigal Son? Every drunk has left the garden, but not every drunk has returned to trust the father. It is only after separation from God that we can talk of being ‹lled with God; if God’s perfect will is followed there is no separation, no border possible between God and me. Besides, if we never leave the garden, if we never leave our father’s house, there are no poems, no art. Here the speaker has returned, and God “‹lled me with himself, like gold, inside, / deeper inside than marrow.” Being ‹lled with Go(l)d diminishes the distance, not just between God and self, but between self and others, self and the world: “walking into the river at Wolf with / the animals.” The poem remembers the reconciliation after the Fall. The new way of wholeness, which we long for, includes an awareness of the delu150

sion of solitude. The shedding of pride is necessary before we can be given new, “green skin, lit from inside.” Only when we know we are not God (“like gold, inside, / deeper inside than marrow”) can we take our rightful place, which the animals have never left or forgotten. After the necessary process of reconciliation and amends—then the return from forbidden knowledge is sweet. The journey of alcoholism is a radical self-expulsion from the garden, an immersion in the life the prodigal son led outside the story—of which we know only that at the end he was competing with pigs for his dinner. There are a million such stories, each with different details, though sharing the outline and arc. You can leave the animals and your heritage, and be pro›igate. You can put your comfort and pleasure ‹rst in every moment. It is a choice. “The River at Wolf” is a poem of wisdom traveling close to the ground. It has an Irish manner: powerful understatement blended with factual acceptance of the supernatural. Very un-American, in a way—especially Jean’s casual, unironic use of the word God. Almost as if she had not been paying close attention to the literary magazines for the past thirty or so years. On the other hand Jean’s poems do not sound like those of an “Inspirational” poet—metrical, plodding, spiritually banal, and sincere as the snot on a toddler’s face. No. Her poems are as elliptical, fragmented, oblique, and inclusive of the dark as those of any good modern or postmodern poet. Perhaps what Jean is up to is American, but not of the class that usually writes poems. Well, good. Don’t you think? If you were dying and God ‹lled you with the gold of Himself and gave you another life, would you not want to say so? Would it not be the very thing to put in a poem?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Valentine, Jean. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

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BRENDA HILLMAN

The Gift of the Double Swerve (Jean Valentine’s Endings)

Some poets remake the invisible. Along the way, they retool abstractions into linguistic substances. Jean Valentine is such a writer, circulating among ideas of the invisible in which nothing is tired, tried or previous. Yet Valentine rides in a possibility of nothing being there. Hers is an existentialist vision in motion, as if existence and essence were in a cab heading uptown, essence got out at Nintieth and Amsterdam, and Jean Valentine got in. Her murals are small, her strokes are modest. Her swath is wide. I have been thinking particularly about her endings, especially the last couple lines of some of her poems. Writers develop familiar moves over the spans of lifetimes of writing; they have characteristic gestures for ‹nishing poems. In the work of the best writers, however, new tones are built of information that keeps yielding, becoming more than the sum of word-meanings. Jean Valentine expands the familiar in such a way as to shrink the predictable. Many writers from Modernism to the present write “against closure”—to use the title of Lyn Hejinian’s wonderful essay on the subject.1 Valentine writes against closure with her use of fragment, abbreviated punctuation, open syntax. It is even more interesting however that she enacts various kinds of “anticlosure/closure/anticlosure,” sometimes keeping the possibility of the declarative sentence that doesn’t conclude the poem or even ‹nish it, sometimes issuing a cryptic concluding sentence as a lottery ticket, sometimes sidestepping an algebraic logic for a geometric one, ‹nding a place in which the lines wrestle with themselves for the rights to intuitive lyric or dream. Or she uses a one-of-a-kind rhyme. I spoke to her about her use of dream logic; she told me how at one point, in a felicitous conversation with the ‹ne Irish poet Den-

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nis O’Driscoll, she was enticed by the idea that she could simply apply the magical realist principles of the “tall tale,” in which magical things simply occur without explanation, without resorting to the disclaimer of dreamdom, that inexplicable things are continuous with linguistic and conscious realities.2 She began simply to posit the norm of dreams as conditions. In her last three books, she shows how dream material makes human mental function more profound than logic. The dream transforms itself into meaning-making functions; in her stanzas, the illusory is imbricated with other thought; orderly or systematic re›ection folds back to itself with ›ecks of description, declarations of the present conditions of mind, emotive traces. She writes in valentime, which yields increasing intensity; her poems bring to mind those of Osip Mandelstam, who, in the face of terrible conditions of extremity, writes a seemingly orderly, deeply crafted verse. Her images or sounds set up either a feeling or profound expectation based on strange propositions. Thinking about her images, I recall from Lucretius the idea of the swerve in atoms in De Rerum Natura, and the idea in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift of a yearning set up in an object as a source of power, enabling the thing itself to have an idea that holds a sign, until the thing is taken back to the place of origin.3 The end of each poem, fed on a maintenance dose of baf›ement and change, holds up a mirror; the rest of the poem is a mirror held down to the end by a hand that trembles slightly.

I. The Swerve Lucretius writes that the swerve is what keeps atoms from bumping into each other. Just as they are about to make a mistake and strike other atoms, the atoms deliberately swerve; Lucretius is not speaking metaphorically. This is a proposal for how matter keeps itself going, just as imagination does. He writes: Another fact I wish to have you know: When the atoms are carried straight down through the void By their own weight, at an utterly random time And at a random point in space, they swerve a little,

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Only enough to call it a tilt in motion. For if atoms did not tend to lean, they would Plummet like raindrops through the depths of space . . . So Nature never could have made a thing.4

This is rather like the end of Jean Valentine’s poems; a bit of sound that is allergic to logic ‹nds a swerve of avoidance that makes reality possible. When the poem comes from a dream, but the proposition is that the language of waking is in›ected with dream-event, Valentine casts a line into the poem in a presence of what seems like someone experiencing a dream-trace, and when this ‹shing trip produces a mysterious yield, she casts her line again. I have considered this double style of ending in her book of origins, Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Here is the last poem from that collection. listening For Fanny Howe

My whole life I was swimming listening beside the daylight world like a dolphin beside a boat —no, swallowed up, young, like Jonah, sitting like Jonah in the red room behind that curving smile from the other side but kept, not spat out, kept, for love, not for anything I did, or had, I had nothing but our insideoutside smile-skin . . . my paper and pen . . . but I was made for this: listening: “Lightness wouldn’t last if it wasn’t used up on the lyre.” (243)

The retrieval of the last line here starts with the watery nature of the twin “ing” suf‹xes of the past participles in the ‹rst line. 154

Something will be doubled into something not like itself: swimming and listening, dolphin swimmers and humans. In a characteristic Valentinian plain style, the poem proposes gradual deductive shifts from the general to the speci‹cs of the case: things accrete toward-ness, moving from a small known thing into what they do not know. This is, as Lucretius suggests, in the nature of things. The precognitive but overview condition is dolphin-like; the name “Jonah” is repeated and swallowed in the next stanza; the short stanza, being short, is itself spit out though the two kepts belie this disjection. The “I” makes a biblical and epic journey in seven lines; the trope patiently works through its contradictions as the Jonah’s ‹sh/ life image gives way to a little rhyme, like a smile, before the “I” encourages attention to something not found anywhere in the poem at all: a gnomic statement that is like an ancient funereal identity riddle. Who says this last line? Surely not the Jonah-like “I” who has been tossed about from room to a skin-turned-parchment; the statement comes from an other not previously produced by the poem; it insists synaesthetically that light is dependent on lyric, and that it will only last if it is used up by song. Lyre can’t help its pun. This poem’s ‹nal swerve provides a disjunctive last insight. Other poems in that collection present a homesick speaker and bring a sense of estrangement into the last lines; in the poem “Homesick,” someone navigates the unnavigable: “and I ›oat in it, / salt, and breath, and light, / hawk and salmon and I” (220). In this, she ends on an I/eye pun, an ellipsis that makes a ›otsam in the still pond of the poem. “Rain,” a poem in which there is an address to the water-andlight-snakes produced by rain, the sense is that the other half of the term of the metaphor is missing because the snakes don’t “mean” anything; they just appear; the second half of this poem reads: Snake where do you come from? who leave your grass path and follow me wordless into our glass water and light house, earth wet on your mouth, you the ground of my underground. (219)

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No snaky-comma after the word “snake.” The swerve of the last line, the paradox offered to the void. Like a ›ight attendant ›irting with the guy in row 23, the titles of Jean’s poems don’t make any promises. In this last line, the poem changes its own terms; the snake has transformed itself until the end, and whatever “snakeness” is turns into a completely different substance, in which the ground had a substratum of becoming. This is the swerve makes sure one thing doesn’t bump into another, and blame it.

II. The Swerve in Types of Rhyme Maus reminds us in his seminal book The Gift that the gift proffered always “remembers” the place of origin, and the giver, handing over the gift, makes sure it gets transferred with the spirit or breath of the ‹rst place. In all the transference, the life of the article is changed but maintains its original charge. A gift always maintains this desire to satisfy that is not circular, exactly, but spirals.5 Valentine accomplishes this with an original repetition or momentary rhyme that occurs very often only in her endings. These repetitions take us back to a generalized nature and to a speci‹c reference the beginnings of her poem have devised. Often the closings of the poems make for quantum shifts in the levels of reality, as in the songlike poem “Mother and Child, Body and Soul”: And this child, this window in my side, boarded over all my life, —how can I take the boards off, in this wind? I will break if I bend . . . (237)

Breaking the measure of the line in half, she nonetheless adds an exact rhyme she saves till the end, making a circularity that is the type of anticlosure/closure/anticlosure. As the shift of levels of reality occurs in these often deceptively simple pieces, sometimes a call to a previous state or condition makes a loop out of the swerve, picking up a previously dropped thread. This occurs in “Red for Blood”:

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I don’t want to go, but I can’t not go, the animals all go up like chimney-sweeps, Eternity, you, me, up on a rope like the live geese, chimney-sweep geese. (226)

In the braided ending, the repetition of the word “geese” becomes more sonorous, and is engaged in three principles of reality (the linguistic animal, the literal animal, and the imaginary/emblematic animal). Similarly, at the end of “Green for the Land,” the swerving loop of rhyme is tautological because it occurs in the same part of speech—twin nouns: No more room on the pages of my green book to write on, and someone coming back wanting me: thief of my land, my childhood thief. (228)

She has spoken of the power of the poem to get at some sort of changing nature—which might connect to these rhymes, and with her sense of origins and private worlds—in her interview with Eric Gudas; speaking of what Stanley Elkin had referred to as “the under voice,” and in her poem of the same title, she says: “I think that for me it’s the same thing as poetry.”6 Valentine sends the word back to pick up its original energy, calling a makeshift mystery into a new con‹guration. The particularity of the word-moment, the single syllable, brings a social nature from a private world. NOTES 1. Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 2. Personal conversation with Jean Valentine, March 19, 2002, New York City. 3. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1971).

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4. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 63. 5. Mauss, The Gift, 12. 6. Interview by Eric Gudas, “An Interview with Jean Valentine,” The Marlboro Review 4 (Summer/Fall 1998), 71.

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ALAN WILLIAMSON

For Jean Valentine, Out of Thirty-‹ve Years

Much has been written, by now, about Robert Lowell’s “of‹ce hours” at Harvard in the 1960s. Really more an informal workshop, they were held on Wednesday mornings in a windowless seminar room in Quincy House. They were half a secret, since there was no published source for the place and time. Their constituency ranged from Lowell’s best undergraduates to already well-established poets, in Cambridge for a day or, as in Jean Valentine’s case, a fellowship year. Looking back at the of‹ce hours from more than thirty years’ distance is bound to be a matter of Proustian surprises: who didn’t become famous, who did, and in what way. The Yale Younger Poet, our arbiter of verbal elegance, who only published one more book. The cutthroat agent who would transform the publishing world in the 1980s, but who then wore a long scarf ›ung around his neck, every inch the poet. Lowell teased him for at once dismissing, and resembling, Shelley. The beautiful schizophrenic from Virginia, who showed up every year or so and brought, I felt, a dose of Lorca’s duende, that edge between being and nonbeing, the group badly needed. Jean Valentine wrote a poem about her: The wind, the Virginia rain, touch your face now none of us at this table could, frail gleam, glass face without a back.

I remember Jean as a quiet, smoothing, mediating presence “at this table,” in that roomful of jostling egos, all too eager for “Cal’s” attention and approval. I know from what she has said later that it 159

was a troubled period in her life, but that didn’t show. Or perhaps it showed in the quietness itself, the sometimes almost inaudible voice, in someone who after all moved in the same sophisticated New York circles Lowell himself moved in, and might have shared their self-assurance. Lowell loved the poems she was writing then, which went into her second book, Pilgrims, and on one occasion compared them to Plath’s Ariel. One could see why; though less tough (in both senses, resilient and aggressive), they had the same perfectly attuned ear to how the world impinged on one nervestrung sensibility. Pilgrims seems to me now, without minimizing its more ultimate adumbrations, one of the best books written about couples in the 1960s. Believing in emotions, and in a sustaining community, but not, in the last analysis, in traditional arrangements, they are bewildered when they “f[ind] themselves alone, / their ‹rst force gone. / No law.” They are, in very truth, like pilgrims in a New World, “alone in the ›are / of their own selves.” Others have written about this collective history, but few are as compassionate as Jean Valentine about the nostalgia for more settled times, for home and childhood, that pulled constantly against erotic and existential doubts: —Does he love her? She loves, he loves, they love the old stories of the snow and the look of the house. Together so. (Door in the Mountain 78)

The things of childhood—conjugations, “old stories,” nursery rhymes—are this book’s constant touchstones for the unreachable way-things-ought-to-be. “Visiting Day at School” begins, as many 1960s poets might have begun, in ambivalence, dislike of of‹cial American values warring with reluctant affection for some of the people who espouse them: The tall, good, raw-boned, wrong teacher teaches wrong glory the children shuf›e back from dumb (Door in the Mountain 92)

But the poem turns magical when the speaker tries, hopelessly, to envision the children’s entire future as if it could be one with the 160

metaphors of fairy tales, as if Freud’s “reality principle” did not have to be learned: Jane, see the line the days ›ew, quick bird, down around the thumb, almost straight, through all the king’s gold, back. (Door in the Mountain 92)

The book runs its course through parenthood, brief erotic idylls, therapeutic struggles, separation, and divorce. But it is always in the expression of intense longing, longing at once “to be good” and to be happy, that it strikes its unique poetic note. Its religion—because it is, in all its overtones, a deeply religious book—lies in the very hope that two people could, somehow, pose the ultimate questions together: high in a sudden January thaw or safe a second in some unsmiling eyes they’d known always whispering Why are we in this life. (Door in the Mountain 98)

I’m struck, returning to this book after thirty-‹ve years, how well I remember it, how many of its phrases—including some of those I’ve quoted—became de‹nitive to me, for generalized predicaments I too lived through. If there is also a peculiar overwroughtness, a little hard to get back inside, it may be because the book is so accurate to its particular “exploding time.” The Vietnam War, the draft, the real belief that nuclear war might happen, clichés though they are now, were a kind of extra electricity in the air. They altered how we experienced a love affair, a drinking bout, a new movie. (Or perhaps we just thought they did, covering our own more free-›oating anxiety. But such ‹ctions become indistinguishable from facts.) Many poems have preserved the politics of the 1960s; a few have kept its utopian sensibility credible; but only Jean Valentine’s, aside from Lowell’s own, put me back inside its nerves. Watching Jean Valentine’s development as a poet has been a little like watching the development of a certain kind of painter, 161

moving toward abstraction. Everything that can be dispensed with, is—everything that alludes too directly to a tradition or reaches out too easily toward an audience. In her case it isn’t so much representation as melody—that yearning tone that gave the early poems so much of their arc and sweep, and made them so poignant to their ‹rst readers. Such artistic decisions are always decisions of the spirit as well. Something in the early music must have struck Jean Valentine as not quite enough, not quite true to her relations to herself and to the world. Certainly anger was left out, and in the section of The Cradle of the Real Life signi‹cantly entitled “Her Lost Book,” one can see it being put back in. But I’m thinking more of a way each assertion, each image now seems to stand in its own air, exactly and only itself. Its relation to other images, assertions, lies peculiarly in the way they are suspended together—so that I think of the lines of calligraphy, or, again, the lines and blocs of abstract painting. There is duende aplenty in these recent poems, but mixed, always, with Jean Valentine’s peculiar quietness, her way of being just. A poem about her father manages, in ‹fteen lines, to get the balance of respect (“he raged like Achilles”) and—not blame— awareness of irreversible consequence (“we ›ew off . . . one a note / into a bottle”) that takes most poets a lifetime. But the poem doesn’t stop there. It goes on to speak, directly, all the emotions inarticulately at once—“Oh my dead father”—and then to hear the father replying: “Ah Jeanie, you’re still in words.” The use of the childhood nickname conveys, I think, at once the father’s ineluctable, dangerous power to cajole, and the inexpressible wisdom of the dead—as when Beatrice calls Dante, for the ‹rst time, by his name, in Purgatorio XXX. It’s hard to avoid terms like “wisdom” or “spirit” in writing about Jean Valentine’s recent poetry; but part of what her spareness pares away is precisely the possibility of that self-satisfaction which is the bane of so many poets acclaimed as “spiritual.” I think what saves her is a kind of pure attention, in which insight arises as it arises, often in the company of fear, horror, anger. “I didn’t need to hate them. You can’t beat a stick.” The maggots in the wound on a bag lady’s forehead seen as a “miner’s lamp” to “empty us / of every illusion of separateness.” The recognition that “home” cannot be a person or a ‹xed place, but something that “will melt / like ice on a stove and I will drink it.” The utterly poignant,

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yet somehow contented, ‹rst lines of the last poem in Growing Darkness, Growing Light: My whole life I was swimming listening beside the daylight world like a dolphin beside a boat —no, swallowed up, young, like Jonah, sitting like Jonah in the red room behind that curving smile from the other side. (Door in the Mountain 243)

I’m so glad Jean Valentine—that listening dolphin—has remained part of my world, as a friend and fellow practitioner, over so many years. She is one of the few people, now, with whom I can talk about Robert Lowell as the kind mentor he was to both of us, not the caricature anecdote and biography have made of him. I cherish her willingness to champion, among her fellow poets, the odd voice that is completely itself, regardless of whether fashion is looking in that direction or not. I cherish her, above all, as someone in whom the way of the writer has never been separable from the Way.

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BRIAN TEARE

“The History of the World Without Words” Mysticism and Social Conscience in the Poetry of Jean Valentine Mystical language is a social language . . . For the mystic to “prepare a place” for the Other is to prepare a place for others. —michel de certeau,“mysticism”

Listening to “the under voice” Poetry, for Valentine, is listening put to active use, a lifelong vocation that includes “everything that happens,” from the mundane to the numinous, from Ordinary Things to The Cradle of the Real Life. As the title of her 2000 volume suggests, Valentine’s poems see divinity as inseparable from the quotidian, a feminist variety of religiosity that might best be called mystical, if mysticism can be de‹ned as both “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect” (James 380) and “the direct experience of the real . . . an unmediated experience of God” (Petroff 3–4). From 1979’s The Messenger onward, Valentine’s poems seem to have issued directly from what she later calls, in The River at Wolf, “the under voice,” a consciousness that experiences the material and the spiritual planes with equal immediacy. In the visionary realm of “Annunciation,” for example, the speaker’s “soul become[s] ›esh” even as “linseed oil break[s] over the paper” and her “pelvis thin[s] out into God” (3). This is an intricate series of gestures characteristic of the under voice, which exists at once as a category of experience, a poem on paper, and a spoken voice: the lines of “Annunciation” exceed the grammar of the sentence and erase the discrete boundaries of a single consciousness even as they insist on issuing from a material, sexual body. Thus Valentine’s under voice is—like the personae of visionaries such as Blake and Rilke—essentially a series of paradoxes, the 164

most obvious of which is that it is warmly personal in tone yet impersonal in its otherworldliness. Forthcoming with image even as it’s sparing of autobiographical narrative, the under voice argues that, as poet and critic Carl Phillips suggests, “something like the sacred is constantly at intersection with the most secular contexts, if only we could see it” (39). A Catholic convert with strong Buddhist sympathies, a person of prayer and of sitting meditation, Valentine draws deeply from Christian theology and iconography, but her poems treat individual belief systems and religious symbols in a more syncretic way, revealing or gesturing toward spiritual mysteries largely without recourse to dogma (Interview, 16).1 Instead of relying on any one institution for power, her work depends on the paradoxes characteristic of all mystical texts. Mystical paradox, as de Certeau de‹nes it, “cannot be reduced to either of the aspects that always comprise [it]. It is held within their relation. It is undoubtedly this relation itself” (16; emphasis added). Thus mystics argue that “God is neither personal nor impersonal,” as Bernadette Roberts writes in The Experience of No-Self, “neither within nor without, but everywhere in general and nowhere in particular” and thus can be experienced as both presence and absence (33). Emerging from what Janet K. Ruf‹ng in Mysticism and Social Transformation calls “the matrix of an encounter between the divine and the human,” Valentine’s under voice asserts its own version of paradox by insisting on mysticism’s use to the social realm, where its visionary power enables it to speak of social reality and the truths it hides as well as the earthly real and spiritual realities beyond it. For a sense of how Valentine’s poetry creates and sustains mystical paradox by extending it across social and spiritual realms, we’ll turn to two examples from “Her Lost Book,” the autobiographical sequence that ends The Cradle of the Real Life. “At the Conference on Women in the Academy” and “You walk across your self” show the range of material Valentine’s under voice is able to hold in relation, how easily it slips between secular and sacred, witness and vision, self and radical otherness: at the conference on women in the academy The young scholar, her weeping ‹nger the anger reality under the “social construction of reality”

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under the deaf blind TV ‹lmed broadcast auditorium: the woman talking in the split-open room under the room of what we say. (264) You walk across your self as you walk across a dirt road crossroads at dusk and across a ‹eld outsider a ‹eld and a ‹eld steps go beside you the sun crossing a line sun kind to you sun you. (274)

In “At the Conference on Women in the Academy,” a double consciousness is characteristically at work in the speaker’s attitude toward language. On the one hand, she distrusts the manipulations of the “social” language of patriarchy and institutions, what she calls in “The Women’s Prison” “this bodily tool of governments” (263). A “necklace of noose and lies,” this kind of language intends to harm and leads those under its control to “the tooth pit the grave” (263). On the other, it is also clear the speaker trusts that there is a kind of discursive space beneath the socially constructed one: if “the room of what we say” lies above “the split-open room,” there’s always “the anger reality . . . under the deaf blind TV ‹lmed / broadcast auditorium.” By leading us into a confrontation with the highly mediated nature of contemporary reality, the under voice makes us recognize the psychic and social costs of patriarchal dualism while at the same time offering a contrasting vision that af‹rms feminist anger, positing a “split-open room” revealed by women’s truths. And while the under voice often acts as a corrective, modeling for us a vision of social justice, it can also lead us, as in “You walk across your self,” to a metaphysical place, a “crossroads at dusk” where the self is an “outsider” to the self, “crossing a line” toward the sun as if crossing over the very horizon. The intimate and direct address to the Thou (the beloved, God, or a stand-in for the self) is typical of Valentine’s work, as are the repetitions that provide closure to the poem; both the vocative and the repeated nouns and pronouns serve to ground the mystical narrative of the poem, binding it in heightened intimacy and a tight musical structure. As 166

the words repeat, their syntax shrinks, mimicking the action in the poem as the line between the self and the sun blurs: “the sun / crossing a line” becomes “sun kind to you” becomes the astonishing union of “sun you.” The syntax stuns us as much as would watching a friend walk across a ‹eld toward the horizon only to disappear into the setting sun’s bright glare. It’s typical of Valentine’s work that this denouement is wrought from a lyric vocabulary drawn from nouns of the most familiar kind. It’s in the poem’s movement from phrase to phrase that the mysterious relationship between self and world is articulated, as line leads across line and “across a ‹eld . . . steps go beside you the sun.” To actively engage with the mysteries and paradoxes native to Valentine’s under voice may inevitably prove an intellectually rich and personally rewarding endeavor, but it doesn’t always prove an easy one. As Phillips attests in his essay “Reading Jean Valentine: ‘About Love’ As One Example,” her poems not only “do not give themselves immediately over to interpretation,” but to read them “with appreciation is itself a kind of religious experience” because we have to “abandon . . . the need to have concretized proof of what remains unseen” (39). And though my readings of Valentine’s individual poems are likely reliant on a belief in their mystical nature, to examine Valentine’s singular understanding of poetic craft allows us to see how mysticism lends the lyric poem suitably ›exible and subtle ways of communicating knowledge of this, and other, worlds. Because Valentine’s under voice in its most characteristic form emerges in 1979’s The Messenger, I’d like to look at “December 21st,” the ‹rst poem of its third section and a short lyric of astonishing complexity, one especially notable for how its grammar and punctuation hold in relation the quotidian and the mystical as equal parts of visionary experience. Given that critic Northrop Frye has called the lyric “an internal mimesis of sound and imagery” (qtd. in Preminger and Brogan 715), we could consider many of Valentine’s poems lyrics by virtue of their ebullient sonic properties (especially rhyme and repetition) and imagery rendered intense by visual starkness and/or tactile immediacy. However, as lyrics of the under voice, their mimesis suggests neither a strictly internal experience projected outward into language nor a strictly external social reality reported objectively, but rather how a startling intermixture of both arises out of a confrontation between the interior life and the particular, exacting facts of external worlds both visible and invisible. Thus “December 167

21st” could be said to think about God, the dead, and the real— places where human meets divine, memory lives in presence, and longing ultimately ‹nds succor “at the star of a girl’s nipple.” However, the poem also makes visible the edge of its own thought, its incomplete questions—“How will I think of you”; “how will I think of them”—implying a second, unvoiced half, a repressed sorrow such as, “How will I think of you when I die.” It might startle us, the equanimity with which the speaker approaches each of the worlds it apprehends: a profound implacability makes legible a direct, intimate address to God, the presence of “the dead I love,” and the simple nouns of a household: How will I think of you “God-with-us” a name: a word and trees paths stars this earth how will I think of them and the dead I love here-with-me

and all absent friends

and table: hand: white coffee mug: a northern still life: and you without a body quietness and the infant’s red-brown mouth at the star of a girl’s nipple . . .

a star (147)

Simply by examining the punctuation that connects the phrases of “December 21st”—punctuation that consists only of spacing, colons, and ellipsis—one gains a sense of the interconnectedness of Valentine’s poetics and her theology: they are permeable worlds we live in, and language registers the relationship between them not by the more causally indicative devices of commas, semicolons, and periods, but rather by more linguistically indeterminate and ›exible ones. Thus we have a poem of inquiry—a poem posing questions—that utilizes no question marks. It is also a poem that asks questions whose answers are implied in its very method of ask168

ing them—how then does she think of you, of the dead, of God? By eschewing narrative and discursion in favor of syntactical fragment and individual image, focusing on the line rather than the sentence, and using white space rather than semicolons, colons (out of their context as list-makers) rather than commas, and ellipsis rather than periods. All these strategies emphasize the world permeability and temporal simultaneity that mark the fullness of being native to Valentine’s work. Indeed, a poem like “December 21st” almost entirely effaces the distinction between inward and outward, as habitually does the under voice, which rarely marks the boundaries between dream, mystical vision, and ordinary life, the act of writing and the poem itself. The thematic, experiential content of the poem and its formal qualities are so fused that, as H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, “here and there a memory or a fragment of a dream-picture is actual, is real, is like a work of art or is a work of art” (41). Thus the poem’s life on the page is as predicated by the hewn fragility of white space as by its sense of the intricate interweaving of God, death, and physical objects. It’s breathtaking how divinity and a coffee cup come ›ush up against one another, and that the speaker addresses God vocatively, with more familiarity than a table or her own hand. Indeed, the temporal simultaneity of domestic intimacy and manifold invisible worlds embodies the essential, de‹ning paradox of religious faith: in giving up certainty, we are given mystery. But Valentine doesn’t strain to explain the mystery of the fullness of being; rather, she scores it—like music—to make it as audible as she can. While considering the idiom of Valentine’s under voice, it’s equally important to take note of the feminist resistance implicit in its craft, especially given that traditional notions of narrative, exposition, and grammar all employ a logic whose structures re›ect a sense of the “social construction of reality”: linear, causal, hierarchical, patriarchal. For Valentine to use these systems consistently, without any recourse to alternative logics derived from mystical experience and the unconscious, would imply gendered philosophical, sociological, and theological worldviews that her poems simply do not endorse. Without the rational certainty and rhetorical boundaries implicit in traditional patriarchal logic, Valentine’s work is free to create and explore what Marie-Florine Bruneau in Women Mystics Confront the Modern World calls “a possible space for the disruption of patriarchal order,” to imagine and put into prac169

tice a feminist relationship to divinity, art, social order, and the act of being itself (13). She has not, however, always felt free to do so. Though long supported by deep friendships with feminist poets like Adrienne Rich and Jane Cooper, Valentine recalls that feminism ‹rst entered her life and writing more obliquely. In a comprehensive 2002 interview with Valentine, poet Kate Greenstreet asks, “What effect did the advent of Feminism have on your everyday life, and on your writing life?” (14). And while Valentine ‹rst asserts that “in my everyday life, I couldn’t take that on at that time . . . I was a single mother, I was just getting by, holding on by my ‹ngernails,” she goes on to reveal a concurrent and lasting impact on her poetics: However, I remember that before I ever had a poem printed, I had been absolutely changed by reading Plath. And I think the reason I was changed by reading Plath is largely that she was a woman writing out of a woman’s life in a way I had never read before . . . from Plath I got a lot of the Women’s Movement, right there in ’63 when I read the Ariel poems and The Bell Jar. (14) That the second poem of Valentine’s ‹rst book Dream Barker can be read as a direct address to Plath should come as no surprise to us: Dream Barker was published two years after Plath’s suicide, the same year Ariel appeared in book form. Valentine’s interpretation of Plath as a woman and fellow poet might surprise us, however, as much for its prescient assessment of Plath’s legacy for women poets as for its chilling equanimity of tone. “For a Woman Dead at Thirty” begins with a tercet of elegiac praise whose lines end with the same insistent monosyllabic rhyme, a gesture reminiscent of “Daddy”: No one ever talked like that before, like your Last white rush in the still light of your Last, bungled fever: no one will any more. (41)

And while these lines imply, then underscore the singularity, intensity, and importance of the Ariel poems for the speaker, the phrase “your / Last, bungled fever” acknowledges the ›ip side implicit in Plath’s ‹nal months of poetic achievement and foreshadows the turn taken in the ‹nal tercets of the poem. The braid of

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imagery and rhetoric in these stanzas fully reveals the speaker’s complex ambivalence, one necessary to check any overidenti‹cation with the elegy’s subject: You smiled slantwise . . . Six months dead: here’s Romance: You wanted to know. You Never, you blazing Negative, o you wavering light in water, Water I stir up with a stick: wavering rot, O my sister! ever if I’d known, All I could have said was that I know. (41)

If “For a Woman Dead at Thirty” takes place six months after Plath’s death, it was likely written when Valentine herself was twenty-eight or twenty-nine—close to the age when Plath ended her life. And if Valentine ‹nally apostrophizes the dead woman as “my sister,” she’s ‹rst a “Never,” a “blazing / Negative.” The grammatical parallelism of Valentine’s imagery is especially revealing of the speaker’s ambivalence: if at ‹rst the dead woman is a “wavering light in water,” after the speaker troubles the water “with a stick,” what had been “wavering light” becomes “wavering rot.” The ‹nal couplet reveals existential impotence in the face of imagined community: even if the speaker had known what the dead woman knew—that is, what “Romance” is—she would have been able to change nothing of the outcome of such knowledge. Only later, in poems from the 1990s like “To Plath, to Sexton,” does she confront head-on the simultaneously terrifying and empowering legacy of the confessional women poets. “So what use was poetry / to a white empty house,” she asks them, “And when your tree / crashed through your house // what use then / was all your power?” (215). If “For a Woman Dead at Thirty” presents the Plath-like ‹gure largely as a warning—here’s Romance—the questions of “To Plath, to Sexton” shift emphasis to a tone of elegiac collegiality. Why? Over thirty years into her own writing career, Valentine herself can answer the questions they didn’t live to answer: “It was the use of you. / It was the ›ower.” But it took

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Valentine three decades of poems to come to this conclusion. As she herself says, she “went very slowly” into feminism, and though her work has all along been implicitly feminist, it’s only since the 1990s that her work has explicitly engaged feminist themes and tropes. A poem that exempli‹es both the kinetic asceticism of her recent work and its critique of the unduly limiting “iron story” of patriarchy’s “hero and chorus” is “The Tower Roof,” from The Cradle of the Real Life: No music no memory not all your art not not your iron story can fold you into the galaxy saved by yourself lost by yourself your iron words hero and chorus This far and no farther. (256)

The lines “saved by yourself / lost by yourself” inscribe the succinct damnation of the limits of the artist who has no recourse to community with the Other: “This far and no farther.” It’s a charge in a voice as adamantine as it is chilling. The inherent limits of patriarchal artistic vision posited by the poem—that unbending “iron” forms of art cannot suf‹ce to allow the artist to “fold into the galaxy”—are echoed in another poem from Cradle, “He Says to Me, In Ireland.” Here the speaker responds to a male artist whose art is fueled by the deaths of the women around him: But I want those women’s lives rage constraints the poems they burned in their chimney-throats The History of the World Without Words more than your silver or your gold art. (266)

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Both poems suggest that there are forms of art that can neither reach outward toward mystery nor record women’s lives—and both these forms are male, metallic, “iron” or “silver and gold.” It’s telling that, for Valentine, mystical experience and women’s lives are equally inaccessible by means of traditional conceptions of art, a practice implicitly too rigid to reach far beyond itself. Being open to others anf being able to open outward toward others are central to her poetics as well as her ethics, and a trope in her poems is to praise the work of other artists and individuals who facilitate and privilege this state of being. As she writes at the close of “For a Woman Dead at Thirty (2),” published thirty-‹ve years after the ‹rst: “this world lightened // as your words / opened into their third / star-darkness” (256). Valentine places this poem directly after “The Tower Roof,” as if to show an alternative to “the iron story” she critiques there. And while it certainly models a feminist response to another woman’s life and work, the passage foregrounds the heavenly nature Valentine ‹nds in connecting with another woman’s words. It’s this ecstatic facility that has made the under voice uniquely capable of rendering and recording a “History / of the World Without Words.”

“Mother Lord”: The Poet as Woman and Mystic If poetry for Valentine is above all “God making / words / words,” this divine making is a saving necessity that guides the self toward ways of being in the world that reenvision the world itself (271). De Certeau’s description of mysticism as a “vocabulary of a language that belongs to no one” speaks directly to the political nature of Valentine’s poetry; in her society, rather than being a privileged “enlightened one,” “the mystic is only one among others,” and returns to “a particular place . . . within his or her group, within a history, within a world” (20). Thus intricated with family, nationality, and locality, Valentine’s mystical poems specify the histories in which they participate even as they resist the narratives of injustice that attend them. And though such circumstances are often causes for rebellion, disappointment, and anger, rooted there her poems harness the speci‹city of a life whose details ›ower into signi‹cance. If, as Bruneau asserts, “the mystical experience” is “a particularly deep experience of daily practices,” then surely poetry

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is, for Valentine, such a daily practice (6–7). “It’s a piece of brown wrapping paper,” she writes in “My Work of Art,” “taped to the wall over the table / in this beautiful room with no pictures” (Lucy 10). Women’s mysticism insists on everyday life as a source of spiritual power and authority; it turns the ordinary and quotidian, Bruneau argues, into “a possible space for the disruption of patriarchal order” (6–7). A particularly powerful and paradigmatic example of Valentine using a familiar landscape to harness disruptive power is “The Under Voice,” from The River at Wolf. It’s also a wonderful illustration of de Certeau’s assertion that “each experience drives the mystic toward a more radical interiority also expressed as a ‘beyond.’” The poem begins with a Whitmanic declaration, “I saw,” and the ‹rst stanza gives us a catalog of what the speaker saw on “the East side of Broadway”: “fruit and ›owers and bourbon” as well as the homeless “streaming no one to no one.” Were the poem to remain in this mode, it would take be a powerful example of the poetry of witness; however, just as the speaker’s voice slowly detaches from a material “self,” so she just as slowly begins to draw the poem’s details from a less easily recognizable world. And though the second stanza’s ‹rst line seems to hinge open with “Then I looked and saw,” the rest of its three lines takes a strange angle on the ‹rst stanza: though the speaker looks “outward,” it’s an oddly subjective vision. What in the ‹rst stanza was “the East side of Broadway” is recast as an abstract vision of the social fabric; what was separate—“I” and “the homeless women”— becomes “our bodies . . . lying together,” thus healing what the speaker sees as the condition of the homeless women: being “connected to no one.” In recasting the social roles occupied by the speaking “I” and the disconnected “they,” the poem revises the social order, creating a space in which they lie together, those who are marginalized and the one who has power to speak. This disruption of received social values—in this case, those of class—is the core of Valentine’s ethical poetics. Such disruption lays the ground for further revelation. When the third stanza begins, “And the under voice said,” we hear a voice both radically interior and “beyond” self. Though this vatic stance might bewilder even as it proves beautiful, its segue into the vertiginous begins as the move from ‹rst person to an unidenti‹able point of view, one almost godlike. It feels like a radical dilation by virtue of both the spaciousness the voice attains and 174

the manifest breadth of its compassion. Its address—“Stars you are mine, / you have always been mine”—seems to bring “our bodies” together under the rubric of stars while the action of the poem, with its recollection of birthing’s “wide silver-blue stirrups” and its implied metaphor of “riding” the birth like a horse, is cinched by the question, “little baby and woman, where were you taking me?” This acknowledgment of the unacknowledged power of the homeless women to move the ‹rmament to birth is triumphant, and gathers in the encompassing promise of the poem’s gorgeous breakneck ‹nal line: “Everyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive.” As I suggested earlier in this essay, it is this point of view, that of the under voice, that underwrites Valentine’s oeuvre from The Messenger onward; it is only by virtue of this voice—voice of paradox, of contraries held in relation—that her work can speak “The History / of the World Without Words.” Given that Valentine’s under voice is something interior that also leads beyond, it’s especially interesting to note “To the Memory of David Kalstone”: Here’s the letter I wrote, and the ghost letter, underneath— that’s my work in life. (211)

This ars poetica makes explicit that each of Valentine’s poems is inscribed in two registers, is two texts, if you will: the letter, and the spirit of the letter; the text, and the spiritual experience that is its origin. Each poem embodies what’s interior; each letter leads both beneath and beyond. This formulation makes explicit Valentine’s sense that truth, power, and reality originate from a doubly interior space: inside the inside. As The Cradle of the Real Life makes clear, Valentine’s mysticism is most explicitly feminist in gendering this radical interiority. The origin of “the Real Life” is in the self’s connection to the mother, the “words only / half gathered” in the womb, as in the poem “Embryo.” Truth, power, and reality are in Valentine’s poems manifestations of connection “to the Real Life”: “the under voice” speaks by virtue of “listening listening.” The location of the Real Life is exactly the opposite of more heterodox, patriarchal notions of “soul” or “godhead”: it is neither above nor outside. It’s not only inside, but inside the inside; it’s further under, beneath. Thus, rather than raising 175

up the Father-Son dyad of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the highest point of worship, Valentine’s poems go under, “ground of my underground,” to connect with and praise the feminine divine (219). In The River at Wolf, which contains a number of powerful elegies for a mother ‹gure, playful sonic riffs mirror the ability of doubly interior divine power to both produce longing and make meaning. In “Skate,” for instance, the absent mother is the “face I can never meet / inside the inside face,” and is also later addressed as “Teacher, spine in my spine” (215). So powerful that “the spelling of the world / kneels down before the skate,” this ‹gure produces a strong desire for a return to union: “Swim in you, sleep / in you,” the speaker intones in “Ikon,” “let me, / Mother Lord, / all this hour.” In keeping with a radical interiority that paradoxically opens outward, the closure of “Ikon” is enacted by an image of the Mother Lord’s heart within the speaker’s, a kind of feminine tabernacle: Black hill of consolation! There is no book and my name is written in it, my heart makes an earth crib for your heart. (186)

However Christian and feminist Valentine’s use of the Mother Lord seems, the notion that the relationship between mother and child is analogous to the one of God and the individual can also be found in Martin Buber’s I and Thou, and many of Valentine’s later poems resonate directly with his ideas. Early in I and Thou Buber writes, “Every child that is coming into being rests, like all life that is coming into being, in the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form” (25). Buber’s rhetoric is echoed not only by imagery in “Embryo,” but is also taken up and given an additional Edenic gloss by these lines of Valentine’s poem “Seeing You,” from its ‹rst section, “Mother”: For a long time I made my home in your hand . . . I could see you, brilliance magni‹ed. That was the original garden: seeing you. (192)

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But of course, as Buber points out, we inevitably detach from this bodily reciprocity and “enter into personal life” separate from that of the great mother (25). The sorrow and vulnerability that attends this detachment is mirrored in lines from Valentine’s maternal elegy “My Mother’s Body, My Professor, My Bower,” in which, without the mother, “you can’t protect yourself, / there is nothing to get” (209). In Buber’s formulation, the self’s relationship to the Other is based on the longing felt by the I after separation from “Mother Lord,” because it is only through love, “through the Thou a man becomes I” (28). Thus it is that Valentine’s often otherworldly poems can just as often claim worldly desires, as in “The Power Table”: Yes I am standing in the doorway yes my softness & my hardness are ‹lled with a secret light, but I want world-light and this-world company. (216)

It is delicious, then, that Valentine’s divine presence is often an explicitly male lover; her God-as-lover participates in but also revises the traditional “symbolism of the soul as God’s bride, which we ‹nd in the Song of Songs” and in classic Christian mystical literature such as Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Bruneau 17). The ecstatic erotic poem “The Blind Stirring of Love,” for instance, recalls the poetry of Saint John of the Cross: the speaker prepares for a visit from her lover, only to discover “all along / you have been inside me”: I rub my hands my cheeks with oil my breasts I bathe my genitals, my feet leaf and bark redden my mouth to draw down your mouth and all along you have been inside me streaming unforsakenness . . . (257)

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The physical details and straightforward eroticism of the poem allow it to be read “straight” as a tale of courtly love. However, it’s also available to us as a poem of faith whose metaphorical nature is the province of parable: God abides in those who prepare themselves for him. Demonstrating the same spirit in which feminist theorist Luce Irigaray writes that “God reveals himself as the work of man and woman,” this elision between sacred and secular is an action that Valentine’s poems perform again and again, so much so that it often implies a triangulation between the earthly lovers and the divine He (To Be Two 13). Given that, as Caroline Walker Bynum writes in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, “the image of the bride or lover was a clearly central metaphor for the woman mystic’s union with Christ’s humanity,” the most notable contrast between poems that record an experience of the “Mother Lord” and those in which “God ‹lls me with himself” is that while the feminine divine is usually located in residence within the speaker—“spine in my spine”; “my heart . . . an earth crib for your heart”—an encounter with the male divine is most often ‹gured as arriving from the outside, as physical touch (Bynum 134). Much in the same way that the speaker in “The River at Wolf” is “This close to God this close to you,” so, in the second stanza of “The First Angel,” God’s hands trembled when he touched my head, we are so much in love: the new moon holding the old moon in her arms. (212)

This kind of causality—that God’s hands tremble at the intensity of earthly love—is as delightful as the ambiguity of the pronouns: “we” could refer to the poet and her beloved as much as it could the poet and God. The lyric image that follows the statement “we are so much in love” as a kind of gloss is celestial; “the new moon holding the old moon in her arms” directs us away from earthly life toward a more transcendent mother-love. Additionally, the passage’s movement from a male God to earthly lovers to the nurturing image of a feminine moon gives us a powerful example of further elisions between speaker, beloved, and a God who is both mother and lover. 178

The key to these elisions is held in the pivotal stanza of “The River at Wolf”: “Blessed are they who remember / that what they now have they once longed for.” Almost all of Valentine’s later work in this erotic mystical vein is founded on a longing for union, or the satiation of that longing. Mother Lord, God, and the beloved are all objects of the speaker’s devotion and love, and as such, their identities often overlap, and sometimes share aspects of one another. This places Valentine ‹rmly within the continuum of women’s mystical literature, for, as Caroline Walker Bynum reminds us, “When we look at medieval devotional writing, we note at once that God is described in both masculine and feminine terms. To the traditional and dominant description of God as Father . . . devotional and occasionally even theological writers added the idea of the motherhood of Christ” (168). The Christian ideal that devotion to God entails the recognition and honoring of divinity in others also animates Valentine’s work, and this idea will serve us well in examining her more overtly political poems.

The Dream Parable No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life. —martin buber, I and Thou

Given her commitment to poetry as a vehicle of social conscience, the love of and devotion to others is an ethics central to Valentine’s poetics and is inextricable from its mystical nature; her poems strive to embody Buber’s assertion that “All real living is meeting” (11). And while the majority of them are lyrics of unusually lapidary syntax, many others are short narratives that act as reminders of duty to others, self-remonstrations, and documents of social injustice. Interestingly, though their narrative situations and details read as “realistic,” they are in fact often derived from dreams whose vivid detail and drama rival the visions of mystics like Julian of Norwich and Angela of Foligno and serve much the same moral purpose. These poems, such as “The Forgiveness Dream: Man from the Warsaw Ghetto” (133), aren’t poems of witness, exactly, since their material doesn’t purport to represent actual event. Rather than relying on reportorial accuracy and objectivity for strength, they derive their power from the fact that, as Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, “no one can really know how far he is good or 179

wicked” just as “no one can deny the memory of his own immoral dreams” (58). Taking for granted the fact that “the moral nature of man persists even in dreams,” Valentine’s parable-like poems measure the actions and characters of dreams against her consciously held moral convictions (57). In doing so, she reveals her dream characters to have failed morally in all the ways we ourselves might also, and thus assigns to her dream parables “the role of warning voice,” which Freud describes as “drawing attention to hidden moral defects in our soul, just as according to physicians it can alert our consciousness to previously unnoticed physical illness” (61). These dream parables are, as far as I can tell, a genre of Valentine’s own invention, a form half vision and half story, one she’s been using and honing since her ‹rst book, Dream Barker. Often, in dream parables such as “Sasha and the Poet” (from Dream Barker), “Anesthesia” (from Ordinary Things), “Butane” (from The River at Wolf ), or “Bees” (from Growing Darkness, Growing Light), a short, unreal or “surreal” narrative serves as the vehicle for a metaphor whose tenor is some sort of moral lesson. In this excerpt from “Living Together,” Valentine writes beautifully of her conception of the parable form: You open your life like a book. Still I hear your story like a parable, where every word is simple, but how does this one go with the one before, the next . . . (131)

In “a life like a book . . . where every word is simple,” the test of both life and book is that we must also discover their moral and aesthetic order: “how . . . this one / go[es] with the one before, the next.” And though some, like the disturbing and comic “Butane,” resist moral readings, most of Valentine’s dream parables concern themselves both with the responsibility of I to Thou, and with our resistance to, and the possible failure of, compassion. Following Janet K. Ruf‹ng’s engagement with the work of theologian Robert J. Egan, I’d like to suggest that Valentine’ dream parables most often serve the notion of community and/or social responsibility by introducing, through dream and vision, “ways to help individuals become conscious of their communally created bias” (Mysticism and Social Transformation 21). Valentine’s work gen180

erally does this in one of the two ways Egan outlines, the ‹rst being to introduce into her work the ‹gure of “‘the stranger,’ the point of view of someone who is other . . . and who, in a related way, reveals something of ‘God’s radical otherness’ when the stranger breaks into one’s world” (21). Sometimes an economic or racial other, and at other times simply otherworldly, these strangers ‹gure prominently in Valentine’s dream parables as catalysts for an examination of conscience. In “Come Akhmatova,” for example, “a homeless women” “block[s] my way into my / home-place,” but the heart of the poem lies in the realization that “if she comes in / she will be my bad ikon, / throw me away / as I throw her away.” This recrimination is chilling, and Valentine’s speaker is merciless with herself, exposing both her fear and her unwillingness to live with the knowledge of injustice. Here is the poem in full: A homeless woman with harsh white hair stands outside my Chinese-red door blocking my way into my home place: She says I lived here once. This was my place. I want my pictures. I have them, the glass of the frames is broken, if she comes in she will be my bad ikon, throw me away as I throw her away, her gray unmoving accusing stare. Come Akhmatova in the siege of Leningrad: “Can you write about this?” “I can.” (203)

In shifting away from the present scene and toward literary allusion, Valentine situates her dream parable in such a way that it’s able to harness the bleak power of the opening of Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” and transform itself from a poem of failure of compassion to a poem that does not “throw away” the homeless woman, but instead meets her “gray unmoving accusing stare” head on. This allusion to “Requiem” also begs the question of the relationship of Valentine’s text to Akhmatova’s; comparing their poems, we are taught much about the de‹ning strategies of Valentine’s dream parables, and their difference from those of a poetics of wit181

ness. Here is the opening of Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” “Instead of a Preface”: In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identi‹ed me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “I can.” Then something like a smile passed ›eetingly over what had once been her face. —Leningrad, 1 April 1957 (Poems of Akhmatova, 99) Here we ‹nd outlined the basic differences between Valentine’s poetics and those of a poetry of witness: essentially realist, Akhmatova’s project in “Requiem” requires speci‹c dates, spans of time, and locale, as well as an authority bred of her reputation as a poet. Facts are needed in order to animate the power of her brilliant spare objectivity. Additionally, the pathos of her poem arises out of, and relies on, the contrast between that objectivity and the obvious misery of “the terrible years” that she has clearly suffered; her detached and matter-of-fact tone as a narrator allows the ravishing ‹nal sentence—its re›ection of the speaker’s own suffering—its full power. Valentine, however, in a poem like “Come Akhmatova,” faces two dif‹cult tasks: (a) to make real for the reader a situation that, though it could be drawn from life, is clearly dreamlike, and (b) also to make that situation bear the weight of being a parable with a clear moral purpose. In accomplishing these dif‹culties, Valentine’s work reveals mystical literature to be a realist project in some ways surpassing traditional notions of realism: of history, but not quite in it. Not victims of the situation they relate, her speakers, in order to render the moral gravity of the Real Life, have to make real for themselves, and for the reader, the absolute otherness of the

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stranger—not exoticize, romanticize, or in any way exploit it. Valentine also can’t rely on the stranger to recognize her speakers, to make them authorities or locations of power; rather, her speakers must gain authority by their ability to confront their shortcomings in the face of the stranger and to write down both the plight of the stranger and their own failures. In this case, Valentine has located the heart of an ethical struggle: to live with full awareness of the stranger’s situation in one’s mind is to change the conditions of one’s life, to live with an awareness of one’s own privilege, one’s willingness to “throw her away” in order to protect it. The second way Valentine’s work helps us “see through and resist . . . forms of structurally based injustice” is that her speakers often undergo “negative experiences—misery, deprivation, suffering, protest, con›ict . . . called contrast experiences” (Ruf‹ng 20–21). Parable-like “contrast experiences” such as Valentine’s powerful “Black for the People” provoke examinations of conscience, but more importantly they force the speaker to experience an otherness that fundamentally changes her notions of responsibility by pointing out the dangerous limitations of her morality. Like “Come Akhmatova,” “Black for the People” introduces a stranger, in this case an African-American man, who acts as a catalyst for the action of the poem; the main difference here is that the speaker of the poem is witness to a “contrast experience” of racial violence; furthermore, she witnesses violence that, being white, she’s both exempt from and complicit with. As Ruf‹ng points out, “In a contrast experience people actually experience the absence of what ought to be”; thus it’s important to note that the dream parable “is not a matter of simply pointing out some fundamental injustice such as slavery or genocide or sexism” (21–22). “Black for the People” hinges on the realization “But I’m not him”—the speaker comes to understand quite viscerally that while she remains physically safe from “white men,” her companion does not. Neither her presence nor her conscience can help him, and it’s this knowledge that leads to the disturbing ‹nal lines of the poem: The man I am with is black, we are with nothing but white men. He’s caught, he says they’re going to shock him or burn him. I say I’ll be there.

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But I’m not him. He has to go into a machine where two white men put him. The machine saws loud into his back, three, four inches, into his back. Then they let him go. Not wanting him alive, not wanting him dead. Their knees grind over the sea and make malice. What is love? What does love do. (228)

After the extreme violence of the second stanza, a bitter line-break interrupts the terrible knowledge of “Then they let him go. Not / wanting him alive, not wanting him dead.” The startling rhetorical shift to the question “What is love?” is made even more so by the de›ated question without a question mark that ends the poem: “What does love do.” These questions reinscribe the entire action of the poem, throwing us back to read it as a parable whose lesson is that, when faced with the actual violation of another who faces injustices we don’t, we must ask ourselves what our love can actually do for them. No matter what Rimbaud says, in the case of real suffering, the self is not actually the Other: it’s her companion’s back the white men saw into, not hers. The piety at the heart of Valentine’s dream parables is that her speakers come as close as they can to experiencing what it means to be Other. In “Come Akhmatova,” the speaker, her door blocked by the homeless woman, faces the moral homelessness of having a home while the stranger does not; in “Black for the People,” the speaker remains exempt from physical violence while the stranger faces extreme physical harm; in both cases her speakers experience a discomfort neither chosen nor desired, a discomfort that they must use as a lens through which to see their own circumstances. These contrast experiences reveal to her speakers the advantages given them by virtue of “communally created bias” only because dreams, as Freud suggests, also “disclose a real or hidden moral disposition on the part of the dreamer” (62). It is from this juncture—the meeting of society and conscience—that the dream parable derives its lasting moral power, a power that often turns against the dreamer. The ‹nal couplet of “The Mother Dreams” could serve as the verdict passed against many of her speakers: “I saw and I did nothing. / I knew and I did nothing” (239). In presenting the political contrast experiences of “Come 184

Akhmatova” and “Black for the People” as representative dream parables, I’ve glossed over an equally common mode in Valentine’s oeuvre of parables. Shorter and more abstract, poems such as “Bees,” “The Baby Rabbits in the Garden,” or “Mother Bones” are related in third person or spoken by animal personas, as in fables. Though the narratives of these shorter parables are usually taken out of a readily legible social or political context, a dream parable like “Mare and Newborn Foal” connects us to moral dimension of communal life by focusing on the fact that “We live our lives inscrutably included within the mutual streaming life” (Buber 16). More cleanly metaphorical, a poem such as this tends to dwell almost solely within its vehicle while leaving its tenor largely unarticulated. The argument of the poem almost wholly implicit, thus hidden from discourse within action, it re›ects the way in which “The relation to the Thou is direct,” as Buber argues, “No system of ideas . . . and no fancy intervenes between I and Thou” (11). Thus “Mare and Newborn Foal” utilizes neither model Egan proposes for the way mysticism instigates social change—it contains neither stranger nor contrast experience—nevertheless it models for us a direct expression of love for others, emphasizing how “My Thou affects me, as I affect it” (Buber 15). The poem, spoken as if from a mare to a newborn, presents us with a lyrical, tender, and mysterious narrative of mutual nurturing: When you die there are bales of hay heaped high in space mean while with my tongue I draw the black straw out of you mean while with your tongue you draw the black straw out of me. (250)

The central action of the poem—drawing “the black straw” out of one another—remains to me as essentially inscrutable as it is haunting and affecting: though easily read as the vehicle of a metaphor, “the black straw” has no neatly readable tenor. However, that doesn’t rob the poem of its power; much in the way that Carl 185

Phillips suggests we make a “leap of faith” when reading Valentine’s poems, here we can ground ourselves in the richly suggestive narrative situation and let its connotations lead us toward illumination. Each reread of “Mare and Newborn Foal” sends me back to theology, where Buber’s I and Thou serves well again as an annotation: “Relation is mutual” (15). Or, more explicitly: “Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its ‘content,’ or object; but love is between I and Thou” (14–15). In this Buber-annotated version of “Mare and Newborn Foal,” we can read the exchange as taking place between Mother Lord and spiritual child. The black straw exists as reciprocity between the I and the Thou, and the action of drawing the black straw out of each other the love, the responsibility of one for the other: as Buber writes, “I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou” (11). However, a divine reading shouldn’t bar us from seeing the poem as a parable for any true relationship—mother and child, lover and beloved, self and Other, and so on—for, in the shared spirit of Buber’s and Valentine’s texts, moral good is present when I speak the Thou with my whole being. If throughout this essay I’ve emphasized the connective, nurturing aspects of Valentine’s feminist mysticism, I’ve done so at the risk of obscuring the fact that her visionary poems are as much about dif‹culty and terror as about love and comfort. They have to be: their only power is their vulnerability, their ability to open outward. To desire a meeting with the Thou, to ask the Lord to come, as Valentine does elsewhere, is a risk because “of / the fucking reticence / of this world” (8). The I in its speech continually longs to be met with response, and without this longing the I couldn’t stand waiting at the “gates in the dark at thy name hinge,” ready for a meeting with the Thou to open the con‹nes of self into the relational beyond (11). Both fear and love attend this waiting. They are in fact the traditional axes of mystical experience, the same emotions medieval visionary Julian of Norwich reports throughout Revelations of Divine Love, as in this summary of her ‹fteenth of sixteen revelations: the absence of God in this life gives us very great pain and trouble; we shall suddenly be taken from all our pain; Jesus is our Mother; God is very pleased with our patient waiting; his will is 186

that we bear our discomfort lightly for love of him, mindful of the day of deliverance. (177) Norwich’s assumptions attest to the startling historical continuity of the content of Valentine’s mystical poetics. Many of Norwich’s arguments remain implicit in and thus give structure to Valentine’s work: the bi-gendered nature of divinity, the pain of God’s absence, and the necessity of waiting for revelation. In the same way that Norwich in her waiting prepares a place for the Thou, Revelations of Divine Love allows us to prepare a place for the Thou in ourselves, mindful of the pain of doing so. This is one of the most important of the shared functions of women’s mystical writing: as a personal record of lived spirituality, it creates a shared public space for experience that borders on or lies outside the province of theological orthodoxy. And so it is that Valentine’s “Luminous Room” can mirror back to us our own longing for ecstatic union even as its own idiomatic language bequeaths us a shape in which that longing might abide. Erotic, terrifying, and blindsidingly ecstatic, no other of Valentine’s poems captures so directly the “terrible scarcity” of meeting the Thou, which is the same ‹erce way her poems meet the reader: as both gift and challenge. “Why did you keep ‹nding me where I was?” she asks in the poem’s ‹rst section, “The Room,” “my fear and / my love, //not here yet, / but for here” (190). Treating each of us as the Thou through which the under voice speaks its I, Valentine’s work changes us by virtue of what it gives us: the chance to dwell for a while in “The Luminous Room.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Akhmatova, Anna. Poems of Akhmatova. Trans. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. New York: Houghton Mif›in, 1973. Brogan, T. V. F., and Alex Preminger. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bruneau, Marie-Florine. Women Mystics Confront the Modern World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

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de Certeau, Michel. “Mysticism.” Diacritics 22 (1992): 11–25. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. H.D. Tribute to Freud. Oxford: Carcanet Press, 1971. Irigaray, Luce. To Be Two. Trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc. New York: Routledge, 2001. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Random House, 2002. Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Trans. Clifton Wolters. New York: Penguin Books, 1966. Petroff, Susan Avilda. Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Phillips, Carl. “Reading Jean Valentine: ‘About Love’ As One Example.” Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 73 (October 2005): 38–44. Rivard, David. “The River at Wolf.” Ploughshares 19 (Fall 1993): 246–47. Roberts, Bernadette. The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Ruf‹ng, Janet K., ed. Mysticism and Social Transformation. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Valentine, Jean. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Valentine, Jean. “The Hallowing of the Everyday.” In Richard Jackson, Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Valentine, Jean. “Interview with Jean Valentine.” Interview by Kate Greenstreet. Unpublished manuscript. Valentine, Jean. Lucy. Louisville, KY: Sarabande, 2009.

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RACHEL MORITZ AND JULIET PATTERSON

“Awake too you are everyone” Gestures of Empathy in Jean Valentine’s New Poems

The new poems in Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain explore the affective space of empathy. Gathered at the beginning of the volume, these are poems of thresholds and crossings, of losses balanced by marvels. Valentine’s new works continue many of her earlier concerns, from the numinous mysteries of desire and death to the struggles of alcoholism, poverty, and homelessness. Central to these poems is the sense of an intimate speaker or voice. One feels the poet has traveled to the source of her feelings and speaks clearly from that source. And yet her poems consistently project out into the world that surrounds them; “the widest orbit of being,” as Heidegger says, becoming “present in the heart’s inner space.” Or as Valentine describes, “I am trying to move into another, into others; to move out of the private self into an imagination of everyone’s history, into the public world” (“Jean Valentine State Poet” 125). In the poetry of Jean Valentine, we can experience empathy as an aesthetic attempt to achieve not only an unmediated connection with the world, but also with her reader. Valentine’s talent in this regard lies in her ability to function within an intense awareness of the gaps in time and space, whether these involve memory (present and former self) or relationship (self and other). Inside the spare miniatures of these poems, the speaker attempts to directly bridge these gaps and to explore the emotions that surround them. Syntactically, Valentine draws attention to the intimate act of remembering and relating through stripped-down language and through the pairing of possessive pronouns and nouns; for example, in these opening lines from “The Very Bad Horse” (emphasis ours):

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My ‹rst own home my big green ‘bed-sit,’ (9)

and from “Happiness (3),” Your gentleness to me The hard winter grass here under my shoes. (17)

Valentine’s nouns consistently point to pieces of things in the act of identi‹cation, commonly pieces of bodies marked by intimate starkness: simple statements, few adjectives, as in these lines from “Do ›ies remember us”: “you gone / through my hands / me through your hands,” and from “I could never let go”: “my husband / my wound / my sleep” (Door 16, 19). Curiously, Valentine’s identi‹cations feel more intimate than illustrative because of their focus on pairing and relationship—what connects, what lies between. Furthermore, the syntax of her poems reminds us that it’s through relationship we can realize the possibility of integration between self and other. Movements toward and away from a singular location (the private self) need not ‹ght each other. Indeed, Valentine’s subjective voice claims its speci‹city even as it gestures outward, usually from backdrops stripped of descriptive context or narrative linkages. Though the canvas often feels oblique, there is no attempt to create an objective or distanced selfhood. And yet, this speci‹c self is always moving toward; it’s almost as if nouns (and the subjectivities they represent) transmute into each other through their syntactical pairing. In some poems, Valentine reaches toward her own self, whether in body or in the past; as in “The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns” (emphasis ours): Talking with Mary about 1972: like a needle through my 25-yearsolder breast my years thinner rib: 1972: (7)

and in “My old body”:

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My old body: a ladder of sunlight, mercury dust ›oating through— (26)

In her more political and socially conscious work, Valentine’s attention to pieces and relationship continues. For example, the ‹rst of “Two Poems for Matthew Shepard” reveals a ‹xation on the small, the divided off (again, emphasis ours): Into love the size of a silver dollar [the soul] disappeared to a pencil point then nothing. Left his nails and his hair. (22)

Beginning with a question, “But what about the blue dory—the soul,” this poem ends in the concrete of body parts, highlighting and repeating the possessive pronoun “his.” In the second poem, “The Blue Dory, the Soul” we can read the speaker as Matthew Shepard himself. At the same time, it’s also possible to read the speaker of the ‹rst poem as having merged into or become Shepard: —I left the blue dory on its hip on the fence left my soul not “mine” “my” clothes off I left the edges of “my” face “my” hands (23)

Here Valentine uses quotations to draw direct attention to possessive pronouns. It’s almost as if these called-out pieces (soul/clothes/face/hands) have loosened from Shepard; perhaps they have entered the collective realm, even reaching across to the reader.

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The relationship between speaker, other, and reader is again highlighted in her poem “The Rally.” The speaker begins by stating that the poem is “about a young black man,” and then speci‹cally references his body (emphasis ours): His tongue has been cut by a razor the tops of his ears have been cut off

More directly than “The Blue Dory, the Soul,” this poem merges the speaker with the unknown individual: My clothes my money

my bag my papers It’s

the young man My palms my soles It’s the young man your silent invisible body here at the door your glance (23)

By shifting to direct address in the last two lines, “The Rally” fully enacts a circle of empathy: attention is given to the subject (the young man) and to the wounded parts so intimately related to him; we see a merging of self and other through attention to possessive pronouns and through a shift from “his” to “my”; ‹nally, the poem gestures back toward the man, now a familiar “you,” and toward the reader, who might ‹nd herself implicated by second-person address. If shape shifting allows Valentine to move across gaps between bodies and selves, it also makes her poems inevitably mutable, responsive in some way to us as readers. Of course, there are other obvious gaps in these poems: white spaces on the page and between phrasal units that hold considerable longing and silence. While the words move toward each other, the canvases of the poems remind us of distances between. In Valentine’s work, we experience the speaker’s invisibility less 192

as an erasure of subjective presence than as a focused gesture toward another person or thing. By calling attention to the intimate and concrete names of things—selves, body parts, lost objects of the past—Valentine creates a formal and tactile experience of empathy for her reader.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. “Jean Valentine State Poet.” New York State Author and Poet Awards 2008–2010. 2008. http://www.albany.edu/writersinst/webpages4/ programpages/sasp.pdf. Valentine, Jean. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003. Middlebury, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

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EVE GRUBIN

Where Do You Look for Me The Afterlife in the Poems of Jean Valentine

Early morning light blinked through the heavy iron window panes of Slonim House, the stately, Tudor-style mansion used by the graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College. We sat around a large oblong table talking with our teacher, Jean Valentine, about the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska. A student said that when she reads a Szymborska poem she is intrigued, but she doesn’t feel much. And then she forgets about the poem right away. Later that day or even a few days later a line or an image from the poem will sink in or strike her; she is suddenly awash in its mystery. The student asked Jean, “How does Szymborska do that?” Jean replied, “It’s magic.” She gave no further explanation. She just said it again, shrugging slightly, “It’s magic.” Some poems simply enchant us, and how they cast their spell is often inexplicable. Here is Valentine’s “Hospital: Scraps,” from Little Boat (37): Scraps of hard feelings left on the ›oor winter material But out the window sun on the snow Dressmaker’s pins —somebody’s soul a feminine glint in the trees

All of Jean’s poems tell a story or a dream fragment or an observation, but it is intuition—emotional and religious—that drives them. Scraps of material are left on the ›oor of a hospital; more important than that fact is the feeling pervading the ‹rst stanza: disconnected, remote, detached, bitter, all of which can be felt in both 194

the music and the meaning of the language. The sounds of the words in the ‹rst stanza are hard—‹lled with hard consonants (“p,” “d,” “t,”) and hissing (see the “s’s”). The word “scraps” suggests cutups, pieces, the absence of wholeness. Used out of context, the clichéd expression “hard feelings” becomes fresh, suggestive of angry negativity between people. “Left” connotes abandonment. And “winter” implies a coldness combined with the “material,” an abstract, ›at, and banally multisyllabic, almost technical word. In the next stanza the emotion shifts, offering movement through an opening, embodied in the “window.” Warmth is conveyed trough the image of the sun melting the snow, and the homey old-fashioned speci‹city of “Dressmaker” transforms the poem from bitterness and regret to tenderness and possibility. The repetition of “o” sounds in this stanza adds further to the sense of potential and comfort. And then, suddenly: “—somebody’s soul,” followed by the astonishing “feminine glint in the trees.” I believe that these lines, especially the last one, cannot be accounted for without recognizing the centrality of the afterlife in Jean Valentine’s poems. During the years I studied with Jean in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, I spent a lot of time on the subway. Travelling from Brooklyn to Grand Central, where I would catch the train up to Sarah Lawrence, and then back again, passing through the belly of the city during the week, I read Jean’s poems. Absorbing her poems underground and then shooting up above ground and then down again and then up into the sunlight or the night air matched the interior makeup of the poems themselves. Her poems shift from underground to above ground with a natural ease: death and life exist side by side in her work, and practically no boundary exists between this world and the next. In many of the poems the narrator refers to the afterlife casually, as an accepted reality. The poems embody such profound con‹dence when imagining the next world that the voices in them often speak from that place. In “Where Do You Look for Me?” from Growing Darkness, Growing Light (233), the voice begins: They think because I am dead now I am no longer twigs on the ground, stones or bits of stone in the wall.

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This stanza seems to suggest that the very things we live among are infused with the afterlife. The poem ends with a passionate question: Oh my darling, where do you look for me?

The intimacy of this ardent cry has the effect of an appeal. But what are we being asked? The question is not “Do you look for me?” or “Will you look for me?” The assumption is that we look. But the speaker wants to know “where.” This question enchants us toward the concept that the afterlife can be found in this life. two incense sticks standing in the beach sand in a yogurt cup

This image, a kind of still life, appearing in the second stanza of the poem “Mattress on the Floor” (9), from the ‹rst section of Little Boat, is startling in its childlike ordinariness. Has ever such a strange and exquisite arrangement of objects appeared before in literature? What does it represent? When Moses happened to be walking by a burning bush, not an unlikely sight in a hot desert—we can assume that brush caught ‹re from time to time—why did he stop and look? That he noticed the bush was burning was not remarkable; his ability to notice that the bush was not consumed led him to realize that he stood before the Divine presence. In this poem, the poet looks closely to notice the details—these sticks were incense sticks and the cup was originally for yogurt. This peculiar mundane display points to the title of a later poem in the book, after Joseph Cornell, “‘Remote Objects of Intense Devotion.’” Objects as odd and ordinary as two sticks in a recycled cup glow with intense devotional possibility; apparently valueless, the little collection becomes a kind of shrine, telling of a remote yet reachable Divine presence—we only have to be led by the music of the words, and absorb the images, to notice the “feminine glint in the trees.” This poem appears just before “Lord of the world!” (10), which begins, “Lord of the world! soft / unconditional galaxies,” lines subliminally suggesting the unconditional love of an eternal being. The obscure image of the incense sticks in the yogurt cup creates an opening into the unconditional love emanating from the

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“galaxies” that the following poem refers to. The poem directly before the poem with the magical collection of objects is “Photographs at her Wake” (8), where the presence of a woman who has died can be found in “Two curved tortoise-shell combs” and in the “glint of water / green in the limestone.” In the last lines of the poem the poet asks: Can you feel a hair under a page of the telephone book? under two pages? under three?

The poet engages the reader, asking us again, “Where do you look for me?” This time, we are invited to consider whether we possess the sensitivity, like the true princess in the fairy tale “Princess and the Pea,” to “feel” the something there beneath the commonplace monotonous layers of the mundane. How perceptive are we? Are our antennae attuned to the presence of the spiritual realm amid the commonplace? Can we “feel” the tender presences under and inside the weight of the everyday? In “The Afterlife Poem” (30), from Little Boat, Valentine moves from an expression of intense traditionally Christian connection (the poem begins, “Jesus said, / “But I am ‘alive’!”) to It’s the same material, but lighter, summer stuff, star-coil, Akhmatova’s hair . . .

Here, metaphor is employed to represent the afterlife. The lighter stuff of the afterlife is made of the “same material” as the “winter material” from “Hospital: Scraps.” The scraps in Heaven are more re‹ned, “lighter,” feminine (“Akhmatova’s hair”). Valentine’s vision of heaven is not far from the mental picture of John Keats, who wrote to his friend Benjamin Bailey: “heaven is like happiness on Earth repeated in a ‹ner tone.” On a deeper level, in a Valentine poem, all of the things in this world are metaphors for their spiritual counterparts in the next world. The Kabbalistic concept that everything here re›ects its pure original source is embodied in 197

these poems and may explain why ordinary objects seem strange and the magical feels familiar. Objects such as two incense sticks, scraps of material, or a mattress strike the reader as simultaneously familiar, ancient, quotidian, and infused with an inexplicable spiritual radiance. It is as if the poem reminds us of a prior knowledge of these things from before we were born. While reading Little Boat I was reminded of something Jean asked us. At the end of one of the semesters I studied with Jean, she spoke to the class in her poised, quietly assertive voice: “You all know how to write. You have the technical skills. But what will you do with it? Poetry is more than technique. Walt Whitman wasn’t a good writer. And look what he accomplished. What will your poems contain? What will they try to say?” Here are the last four lines of “In Memory” (5): You. Did you ever think you could do something useful? You know. Radiant?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Valentine, Jean. Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997. Valentine, Jean. Little Boat. Middlebury, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

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MIGUEL MURPHY

Artifact as Metaphor Reading Nearness in Jean Valentine’s Little Boat

1. When Heidegger discusses modernity, he wonders that the concepts of distance, of the near and far, are dissolved by technology. Film, television, ›ight, the Internet and now cell phone technology all contribute to our inability to perceive distance. Something that is before us, this cup, this pen, this video clip of a mountain, is not necessarily near. Inversely, when we embrace someone from our past in a dream, we may experience a nearness more palpable than when we pass a neighbor we see on our street every day. Our human nearness, Heidegger proposes, is not a condition of physical proximity. To understand what nearness is, he says we must contemplate the philosophical nature of a thing that is before us. “Nearness,” he writes, “cannot be encountered directly.”1 The title poem to Jean Valentine’s ‹rst book, Dream Barker, recounts a dream of sharing a meal with the dead. The poem opens in a fashion characteristic of Valentine’s work that blurs the distinction between dream and memory, validating both kinds of experience. “We met for supper in your ›at-bottomed boat,” the poem begins: “I got there ‹rst: in a white dress: I remember / Wondering if you’d come.” She shares a meal, not with the dead, but with the living, who is not with us here. Valentine and her dream ‹gure meet for a date and have a conversation ‹lled with oblique idiosyncrasy, yet characterized by a deep understanding—they weigh together the possibility of the unknown meal and end up together in a secret laughter. In the dream: In a dish of ice was a shell shaped like a sand-dollar But worked with Byzantine blue and gold. What’s that?

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Well, I’ve never seen it before, you said, And I don’t know how it tastes. Oh well, said I, if it’s bad, I’m not too hungry, are you? We’d have the shell . . . I know just how you feel, you said And asked for it; we held out our hands. Six Dollars! barked the barker, For This Beauty! We fell down laughing in your ›at-bottomed boat, (Door in the Mountain 71)

In this early poem, the dream self and the ghost—not the ghost, but his memory—not even his memory, but he himself—set out to break bread, to make communion. The poet is Odysseus setting forth on the waters of the underworld, attempting to embrace the mist of her beloved. As in many of Valentine’s poems, dream is her experience too. And experience is a kind of metaphor. By the end of the poem, it is not the meal, but the shell that’s valuable—the gilded object that ful‹lls the time this dream couple shares together. The shell is ornament, both art and artifact of this very human connection. Chosen for its beauty, it memorializes this time they have lived in each other’s real, but too brief, presence. It is the object of art that is immortal—and it must be spoken for, barked, so that we must listen for its price—this shell preserves the nearness between them. The spirit of their togetherness, which is mortal, momentary, can only live on in this dream, a dream that ends: And then I woke up: in a white dress: Dry as a bone on dry land, Jim, Bone dry, old, in a dry land, Jim, my Jim.

Here, at the end of the poem, Valentine is stranded in her waking life, left to the prayer of her lost lover’s name: the waking world, the world of daylight and elegy, world outside of memory and dream. She is left instead to the archaeological markers of this relationship: a white dress, the land, the name, repetition, bone. The dress from the beginning of the poem (“I got there ‹rst: in a white dress: I remember”) returns now, reliquary. Now, the dress is a kind of proof of the dream experience, a symbol and remembrance of what has been lost. Valentine’s speaker is left only the physical remains, as in the dream they may have the Byzantine blue-and-gold shell, and not the ›esh of the thing. Perhaps hunger 200

is something we can only experience alone, when we are alone like the living who remain behind with only the names of their loved ones to nourish them. Like the waking poet, writing now. Word and bone. White dress. Poem. What is the Little Boat? What I see in these lines of “Dream Barker” for me remains true when I read Valentine’s earliest books and returns to me now as I reread her most recent collection, published forty years after she won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1965. If what we are is mirror between ›esh and abstraction, intellect and body (physical yearning and mind: the soul in Whitman’s spider: surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space), then it is the anchor in Valentine’s poems I’m most interested in, that thing which moors us in the current, joins us, holds us here. It is the shell of the dream, the white dress and the name: those emblems of our experience, that word that moors our voice into human meaning and conversation, “Jim, my Jim.” Lonely artifacts that will gather us into the memory of the living. My favorite poems of Valentine’s larger body of work remember how a name is a boat, too, to carry us. Somewhere. Into the past. Into death. Where we have lived best and nearest. In his essay,“The Thing,” written ‹ve years after the end of World War II, after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, after the world’s terrible awakening to atomic particle existence, after we are aware of ourselves as invisible energies or shadows of ash blown onto the ruin of a wall, Heidegger traces the lineage of the word “thing” to the Old High German. He is opposed, he points out, to a traditional philosophical debate of thingness—which argues that something exists, the object itself, before the human word that makes of it an abstraction. Language, philosophy tells us, destroys reality. Heidegger would like instead to think of the “thing” as a “gathering”—an object that stays us here, since it gathers together what he calls the fourfold: earth, sky, human use, and immortality.2 He uses the example of the jug, that container of the void. Humankind makes it out of clay, out of the earth, where it has heft and shape and size. We can pick it up. The sky is contained by the loop of its handle. It can be full of the empty shadow of the void, or it can be full of wine, a symbol of agriculture and scienti‹c understanding. Symbolic blood we drink. We may pour it out in celebration, as a libation for our togetherness, and the togetherness re›ected by the four distant realms: earth and sky, mortality and immortality. These realms are not blurred, he says, but are drawn 201

together by the object of our experience. “Nearness,” he writes “preserves farness” (175). In Jean Valentine’s work, moreover, a thing is an announcement, a nearing of the world’s experience. A true Nearness, a presencing of the far. Heidegger instructs us further: “whatever becomes a thing occurs out of the ringing of the worlds mirror-play” (179), that is, between memory and experience, the mortal and immortal realms. In a Jean Valentine poem we ‹nd ourselves near as a white dress is near, as coat buttons, a bowl of milk, a yogurt cup, thread, human hair, aluminum foil, dressmaker’s pins, tortoiseshell combs, the Byzantine shell, a painted rose, coffee grains, cigarettes, an embroidered quilt, a guilded screen, each of them emblematic of the body’s experience with others. The thing de‹nes our location, but it also houses identity and human time. It memorializes human experience. The poem, too, is a construction, like a gate, a door, a bridge, Heidegger’s jug, a boat—a made vessel by which we are delivered to something humanly shared. Here, where the horizon is marked by the little, apparently unextraordinary clutter of daily life, is where human signi‹cance begins. 2. It is dif‹cult to stand before nature, before the bearing forth of nature, and not be reminded of our mortality. Here in Southern California, from the beach where I live, my neighbors and I stare ceremoniously into the ocean at sunset, a daily reminder of our own burning limitation. This reminder is never so profound as it is during the evening, as the light dies into color and then into a well of inky absolution and ceaseless crash. On the West Coast, we face the beauty of endings rather than beginnings. The sunset reminds me that here we consider the unknown as a darkness coming, as heartbeat, blood against night, large and immanent sleep. To watch the sunset on the West Coast is to face the beautiful wound of human solitude, because our lives ›are too, struggle, ›ourish, die. We become our own absence. As I look at the boats this evening, I think we are aware mostly of our journey in a linear way, here from the marina, there to Catalina Island (the distance now marked by what looks in the sky like a burning wreckage, gasoline-lit, wet red, smoky orange and burnt leather, and later by a phantom green lash, a glacier of electric ice melt, searing like a nightly blue ›ame the soft black puddle of itself) but we forget that we exist along this immediate borderline, 202

that the fringe between earth and space is continuous, the shoreline extends and absorbs, daylight re›ecting night, the sea seamed with wind. Blood bearing breath, we ›uctuate, creatures ›esh and ash. I can regularly see the boats sail in and out of the marina. Their sails are almost always white, tented in that iconic triangle bellied forward, slouched or robustly chested, depending on the wind. As they make their way, straddling the waves and light, they seem to shrink to a fraction of their size, to almost nothing. You could almost touch them. Toys, they ride farther and farther out. A scattering of stray letters. On a bright day, the light blurs the edges of the whitecaps. A rapid sheen over the water becomes the glare on a small gilded mirror, its glint strong enough to blind you. Shards. If I put my hand over my eyes into a visor, and peer out from my yard as though from my own deck, the rising falling horizon over the sea is a hypnotic reminder of the smallness of these ships, and of the smallness of our lives—how they are fragile and brief—how they hover there, magnetically, along the ocean in that distant, stuporous anonymity. How we sail between two sure shores, birth and death. How these ships pursue that seam of two touched horizons each of us must navigate. It is the classical journey. I am reminded by a favorite poem of mine, “Homesick,” by Jean Valentine: Leonardo’s man in the circle, but a woman, the circle adrift in the middle of the lake: cross through the line someone, salmon or hawk. The rowboat drifts on this northern evening’s midnight line of light, green lip re›ecting lip, and I ›oat in it, salt, and breath, and light, hawk and salmon and I . . . (Door in the Mountain 220)

For me this poem occurs in that moment when, suddenly confronted by the fact of ourselves in nature, we ask what it must mean to be alive, to be human. It re›ects the struggle of human identity as we question the mirror of the natural world. The reference in the ‹rst line is to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of the human male ‹gure and its proportions. The ‹gure is drawn something like a spider, arms and legs extended onto the web of geometrical mea203

surements, a large circle that touches each of his limbs. This drawing is often used as an example of the golden mean, that ratio of Euclid’s that de‹nes complex patterns in both nature and in art—the counterspiraling of the seeds in a sun›ower, the Egyptian pyramids, medieval mosque design, the face of the Mona Lisa—It is the argued mathematical equivalent of beauty. The inverse is true, too: we have derived our notions of the beautiful from this pattern in nature. It is important that here in the ‹rst line of Valentine’s poem, our speaker understands the experience of the poetic moment through this piece of Renaissance art. By correcting the man into a woman, she joins the two sexes with a single geometrical ‹gure, the “circle,” an allusion to a mathematical concept uniting human culture with natural processes. These nouns are primitive shapes, essential, as in cave drawings: “man” “circle” “woman,” as if our primal instinct, our nature, is toward each other and toward art, that basic form by which we express, by which we understand our lives. It is as if by the navigation of these three elements we ‹nd ourselves wedded to a human self and by extension, human history. This “circle,” then, represents the duality of human nature: both geometric and natural, cellular and mathematical, a construction of biology as well as a construct of the human intellect. “Adrift in the middle,” it is both emblematic and embryonic. In Valentine’s poem, the circle is egg and rowboat. It is the circle of consciousness. The speaker is both animal and “someone.” She is crossed by the animal realm, “salmon or hawk,” animals re›ected by their perspective elements. The question this poses is philosophical. What is human nature—and what exactly is the human element? Is it this state of middle-ness, this being between horizons, “on this northern evening’s midnight line of light”? The dif‹culty of the question is compounded by the sensual iambic extension of the line and the metaphor of the next, “green lip re›ecting lip”—as if the human body is itself a metaphor for that horizon between light and dark, spirit and ›esh, death and birth, emptiness and pulse. As if we are the mouth and what will be said as well, the voice of the unspoken body and word that will be born, the body’s hidden pleasure. I love the femininity of these lines ‹lled with eros—the frank desire pronounced of a woman’s sex, “lip re›ecting lip”—and the prenatality of the following line: “and I ›oat in it.” Floating as prolonged pleasure, ease. Also, to be carried by. Here is the self announcing its presence in the embryo of its experience, that other boat of our existence. Our ‹rst boat, Mother. 204

In the end, the answer to the question of humanity, and to the human element, must be triangulated between “salt, and breath, and light.” Salt for hunger, for the Flesh, remnant of the seas where evolutionary theory proposes complex life-forms began. Breath for both the body and its life, our muscular gasp, our grasp of each next moment, how our breath is our time. And light, for that other sustenance—the spirit. The light of consciousness, Dickinson’s failing Windows. The poem reminds us we must navigate between “hawk and salmon and I,” the world’s elements, the sea and the sky—the Freudian underworld of the subconscious and the classical heaven of the gods—for humanity must live between them on this earth. “Re›ecting” the nature of our awareness in the poem, the speaker is orphically situated by horizons of light and water, earth and heaven, ›esh and spirit, animal and human, where a “circle” uni‹es a place to contemplate where we are not. Where we are is inclusive ›oating in a space between. To be “Homesick,” as the title of the poem suggests, is perhaps a desire to know ourselves, our nature, both biology and conscience. The realms, and the metaphor of the realms, in Valentine’s work remain re›exive, re›ective. We are between always, and Valentine revels in her proximity to the opposing forces of our experience. Our life, the poem seems to say, is not a matter of traveling from and to, but rather, is the middling place—the ringing of the mirror-worlds—that horizon of two sure shores, birth and death, which is joined by the consciousness of human ›esh. The boat is a place. It is a door. Like a gravestone or a gate. Through it, through its use, we may travel into the unknown. Like these other symbolic sites, the boat helps us cross great distances toward the boundary toward which we are inherently drawn. The metaphor is important. Before we are born, we have our ear pressed against the boat of the mother, the world. It is the place where the living and the not yet living both listen. The beforeborn and the after-born. When we are poets, we have our preverbal ear pressed against the boat of our own ›esh, listening for the world of the spirit, which is forgotten to us in the darkness of our own being. The sea of the living—the daylight world—is swept against, and swept by, the sea of the spirit (how the dark night shores and sweeps the day)—realm of the dead, memory, and dream. We are near. We are reminded of our nearness. Through an outward contemplation of the natural world, we can achieve an inward attention. 205

3. Valentine’s poetic strategy, if one could be said to have a strategy— is memoryward. Likewise, many of her poems move introspectively—that is, they move speci‹cally from outward narrative incident to inward contemplation and back again. Often this movement results in a leap of verb tense, in which the present tense at the beginning of a poem is actually something that has occurred in the past, and Valentine’s speaker achieves an elegiac bliss that binds human yearning to domestic item. Her poems enact a humanization of a thing in which the object is a vessel for shared, and therefore, meaningful human connection. The poems I’m most interested in here have a similar pattern that involves this athletic movement: a literal incident followed by a syntactical break marking an inward philosophical consideration, or what might be called a spiritual incident, and another syntactical break which marks a return to that literal place in time, often the present in which a ‹nal address to a ‹gure from the past or dream can be made. I see this pattern repeated often in her most recent book, Little Boat, in such poems as “La Chalupa, the Boat” “Photographs at her Wake” “Annunciation Poem” “Hospital: strange lights” “The Look” “The Harrowing” “How will you/have you prepare(d) for your death?” “To my soul (2)” and “The Rose.” If we remember Williams’s parenthetical assertion (“no ideas / but in things / create”) and Heidegger’s contemplation of thing as a medium of human intimacy, then these poems convey the intimacy of a memory recounted to oneself, a re›ection, a contemplation of an experience symbolized by a named thing. La Chalupa, the Boat I am twenty, drifting in la chalupa, the blue boat painted with roses, white lilies— No, not drifting, I am poling my way into my life. It seems like another life: There were the walls of the mind, There were the cliffs of the mind, There were the seven deaths, and the seven bread-offerings—

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Still, there was still the little boat, the chalupa you built once, slowly, in the yard, after school— (Little Boat 1)

Here, this ‹rst poem of Valentine’s newest collection, relates a memory of a young age almost romantic: “drifting” in “the blue boat painted with roses.” As in other poems, Valentine almost immediately focuses inward for clari‹cation. The characteristic end dash marks a clari‹cation from inaction to action, from the literal to the meditational: “I am poling” she corrects herself, and so announces, “my way into my life.” The caesura marks a second leap, from what is to what “seems / like another life.” Here, the literal memory becomes a metaphor for a contemplative pursuit. In the next stanza, this other, spiritual life is developed as the struggle of re›ections. Valentine abandons the consciousness of memory, of narrative, for philosophical contemplation and in this third stanza enacts a mirroring between “walls” and “cliffs,” architectural structures re›ected by natural counterparts. What does it mean they are both “of the mind”? Both perceived, both present the presence of an impasse. Both symbolic of that border between Outer and Inner. The third and fourth lines of the stanza continue this re›ection, mirroring “seven deaths” with “seven bread-offerings,” ceremonies of loss and communion. The second dash of the poem interrupts this abstract re›ection. Analepsis, it returns us from an abstract contemplation to real memory, back to the painted boat, la chalupa. “Still, there was still,” she writes, a line implying timelessness, the Keatsian forever, the stilled fever of memory. But there is an inversion here in the boat’s appositives that demonstrates a transformation of the thing. The mirror-gazing of the poem multiplies into a kind of antistrophe. In the ‹rst stanza: “la chalupa, / the blue boat,” now appears in the ‹nal stanza as the “little boat, the chalupa.” Presumably, the nature of the thing is changed, marked by its new announcement and the strangeness of the Spanish word, itself a remnant of the French chaloupe, the Dutch sloep, diminishes. By the end of the poem, like the white dress of “Dream Barker,” the object is transformed by human experience and the poet’s attention. The human “walls” and “bread-offerings” re›ected by nature’s “seven deaths” and “cliffs of the mind” ‹ll the boat with spiritual incident. The last line of the poem introduces the elusive you as well as the prepositional framework of the poem: both “in” and “after” re207

call their unspoken re›ections: “out” and “before.” Oppositions in time and space that can only be gathered together in the circle of thing itself, the boat, “painted” “built once,” “slowly,” contemplatively by the humanity of Valentine’s speaker. The constructions of these poems build reasoned re›ections, marked by syntactical interruption, so that the horizon in her work is often a direct descendant of that horizon in Dickinson: the mind’s. The effect is architectural. Looking at one of her poems on the page reminds us of the fragmentation of archaeological ruins. And don’t we make pilgrimages to stand before them and remember, and sometimes, to wonder? The more we read Jean Valentine, moreover, the more her syntax seems evidence for the exchange of distances, near and far. Our breath is our time, and the ampersand is a kind of hinge, marking a re›exivity of inner and outer that results in a necessary breath on the part of the reader to enact the physical labor of the living. The dash, the caesura, embody a breaking off, a relativity to what is removed. The dash creates a horizon line, and the caesura an open sea between ourselves and memory, a metaphor for the abyss that must be crossed when the most domestic of objects brings us close in time. We speak a name, we ‹nger an orphan button, and in a Jean Valentine poem, we make a small pilgrimage. The importance of Valentine’s work to me is the way it expresses what is true: that I must consider my own mortality as I consider my nearness to those who are metaphorically far. Because the horizon where the real boats now drive the white winds against the dark shine of the sea, is also the boundary where the dead ›ee. The mind’s horizon, that mirror of what is seen and what is unseen, the real and more importantly, the imagined. What we remember must be invented, composed, philosophized. Remade. Artifact and poem. Named Thing. Cherished thing. My little ruins. How do I get there? How do I ask them to stay?

4. A small, gold leaf. The gold nugget my grandfather used to wear. It is the gold nugget melted into itself from old scraps—an earring, part of a chain, a stud. Smaller things whose purpose is now lost to this inheritance. It’s imperfect, as far as leaves go. It’s more like a shoreline, rough, 208

eaten away by the elements and time, and if the underside is smooth as water, the other is a little continent ‹lled with craters and peaks, pockmarked by rain, frozen and glittering. It is the one thing my grandmother gave to me after his death. It must have been terribly dif‹cult for her to gift and part with, this chain he wore against his nude neck. Near his breath, near his tireless blood, athletic and hot. He wore it through my childhood and through his old age and in all of my dreams of him come back. It’s a small thing, but it is “vast, invisible, minute / without even trying,” as Lorca wrote to describe the power of the object to defy death. It’s hard to explain, what it means to me, how it seems to wear me with my grandfather’s . . . presence. It symbolizes my attachment—to my relationship—to this strange knowing of the life that was my grandfather, who has not left me. But who has. We buried him in the desert inside the shadow of a mesquite tree. I lowered his casket into a door in the earth with my own bare hands and I’ve never felt anything so literal. A guitar case that weighed as much as a piano. In the end I was weeping and sweating and covered in dirt and the sunlight felt like hatred but I had done something good and for a moment what was heavy was in ›ight and the tears came in a sorrowful relief. In the end, I was given this, this object, my precious remnant, my fast knowledge . . . I wear it on a gold chain around my neck. I wear it on my life. I touch it now, the underside smooth, familiar, sure, worn. The small bowl of the underside, where it melted and was cooled so many years ago before I was born into a kind of blurry mirror. Gilded underside, where my thumb curls into the leaf’s curl, my little boat.

5. In the ‹nal poem of Valentine’s book, “The Rose,” the rendering of the ›esh is philosophical. The image of the rose painted on the dreamboat of the ‹rst poem is brought to life. Here she considers living thing and not the painted image—›ower, not word. But this living thing is human, too, alive and metaphorical: the rose a labyrinth, as if at its center,

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god would be there— but at the center, only rose, where rose came from, where rose grows— & us, inside of the lips & lips: the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair, we are born of, fed by, & marry with, only ›esh itself, only its passage —out of where? to where? Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream, Never mind you, Jim, come rest again on the country porch of my knees. (Little Boat 65)

As in the rest of Valentine’s work, caesurae and end dash operate in this poem to hinge and re›ect. They embody the re›exive nature of the literal and metaphorical, the physical and the abstract. They enact an interruption and a clari‹cation that moves inward. They embody seas between metaphorical shores. The ‹rst caesura lies here between the title and the ‹rst line, where “The Rose,” the ›ower, is contemplated as “a labyrinth.” A human puzzle, perhaps derived from nature (an echo of the golden mean) where the point is to be lost and to ‹nd your way to the center, “as if god would be there.” God as “god”—not the dogmatic, religiously de‹ned divinity, but the idea, the thing before its word. As soon as Valentine reaches this philosophical conundrum—the nature of “godness” and our human ability to perceive it—she interrupts herself, anchors us with the object of her attention, the rose. The mirror side of this contemplation of God is a contemplation of “roseness”: “only rose” “where rose came from” “where rose grows.” This riddling of the rose as philosophical question is again interrupted by a dash, by the poet’s own attention, so that the parts of the rose are also the parts of human body and culture: “us” “likenesses” “inside of the lips & lips” our “eyes” our “hair.” The prepositions here are instructive in that they af‹rm our cultural desires as well as emphasize our humanity as a product of location: “of” “by” “with” “to.” Prepositions, we have seen, that highlight a spiritual connotation to human experience, as we are “born” “fed” and “marry.” But the rose, like the human thinker, is not thing. To be “only rose” and by extension, only human, is to be mortal, “only ›esh itself, only its passage.” It is the passage of the ›esh that poses a real 210

dilemma for Valentine’s poem since the ›esh is marked by its mobility, its passage from here to there—between, along, near—the horizon of two touched realms, two shores, and so presents us with the real question of our mortality, a question of spiritual incidence in time. We are the animal and the passage. The last line of the ‹rst stanza syntactically embodies this consciousness: “—out of where? to where?” This is the human question of the creature asking what it means to be alive. What is the arc of our mortality? Are we headed out of death or into the place before birth? The two beyonds, nonexistence and nothingness, where the spoken prepositions imply their unseen twins: “out” and “into” recalling their antistrophes: “into” and “out,” each concealing the revelation of the other. I feel a little tongue-tied here, but in a very subtle way Valentine’s use of prepositions proposes a Whitman-like relation to the cosmos, a Gnostic, leafy consideration of what it means to have a body, blood bearing breath, in time. (Some nights in my insomnia, I walk down to the water and ‹nd myself stunned by this positioning, this seaming of two profound blacknesses. Standing on the pier is like standing before one of Rothko’s ‹nal paintings, stark ink over oil. Shadow over coal. The elements become unconcealed: sea, then, space. Invisible presences. Two great vast unfurling somethings, two deepening evers, two kinds of emptiness pressing against us the currents of their immeasurable, substanceless weights. There is a third presence, too— my own. The blackness is not menacing. If I stare into it long enough, it becomes re›ective. My stare becomes a kind of prayer—to the void out of which we appear, into that absence into which again, we disappear. Perhaps time is another problem of our vanity. Perhaps we are traveling not into absence, but into our own prememory. Perhaps we are not traveling forward at all. Starlight on the faces of the black-curling leaves. As I stand here, I ‹nd that I am focused like an invitation to this knowledge, to this riddle. I am the ‹xture of these two distances. They come to die inside me, where my own absence is a fountain. I listen and the waves in the darkness are a metaphor for my body. I too repeat, touch and depart, and touch again. My distance is unknown to me.) In the ‹rst poem of Valentine’s book, the thing, the boat, is embodied with human memory and through the process of the poem’s thinking becomes an object of spoken endearment, “the little boat, the chalupa.” But here in the ‹nal poem of the book, the living (and not painted) rose is lost to philosophical conun211

drum. Valentine questions the riddle of Flesh as labyrinthine existence. Inside the ›ower, the ›owering of two directions: body and its godhood. The living rose, ‹lled with what Lorca has called a “struggle of lights and cries,” like human civilization itself, is “in passage,” in those currents of life and absence, nature’s currents. In the end, the rose must be abandoned as it is—›esh as human, ›esh as question—for the solace of affection, human touch and experience. And so in the ‹nal stanza appear Jim and “god the mother,” a real and an archetypal ‹gure, to enact a human relationship in a dreamlike embrace. The new stanza marks a break from the speaker’s inward contemplation of rose and a return to “god the mother,” the source perhaps of our knowledge of ourselves and of the world. Notice that in the poem, this return, this invitation, can only happen “in the dream.” In a memory, where the mother invites you to “come rest again” with her, to return to the pieta of your longing, that “country porch” of the speaker’s “knees.” Who is the speaker announced here at the end of the poem obliquely as “my” if not the hidden god at the center of what is rose? Jim, and the spoken “Jim.” The word and the life inside of it. It is as if Valentine’s poem offers us an X-ray image of the living rose to reveal its existence as a spiritual incident, whatever it is that makes human inquiry meaningful. Body as metaphor for voice. Flesh as metaphor for knowledge. Like Dickinson, Valentine’s poetry is a thinking poetry, constructed, built around contemplation. A poem-vessel for philosophical ideas, the re›ection of our mortality as a spiritual-corporeal event. Though I think we have a different kind of evidence of her relationship to Whitman—her poetic preoccupation with an archetypal mother, the sea and its metaphors, the inward expansion of the self into cosmos, the eros of nature repeated in the eros of the human body, the vigorous spiritual announcement and invitation to the soul enacted by a passive, still meditation—the constructions of her poems build re›ections, reason marked by syntactical interruption, a “strategy” perhaps reminiscent of Dickinson.3 In Valentine’s work, words become strange artifacts of human experience. The thing conceals, and so preserves, its idea. The white dress conceals the dream. The name conceals the near. The “little” painted boat of Jean Valentine’s, moreover, is a thing that gathers together the present and the past, the living self and the imagined self, and preserves meaningful human experience in time. How Time, in memory, expands. The irony of her poem is that 212

the speaker’s conscious experience occurs only in a dreamed moment, a meditation on what can no longer be present. In a Selfre›ection. But this irony is not cold. It seems to warm and invite us into the nature of experience itself, which even if we don’t fully understand, we must remember with feeling. For Valentine, experience is the mysterious dream she must athletically pole her way along, toward, and between. The little boat of her poetry travels inwardly to achieve a familiarity, a nearness, an intimacy that re›ects the strange quality of a distant human other, and accomplishes an affection for what is quietly rendered and, because of its rendering, known.

NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 164. 2. Some of these ideas are related also to Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” also found in Poetry, Language, and Thought, 141–60. 3. Helen Vendler has called Dickinson’s poetry “chromatic,” as it builds serially. See “Emily Dickinson Thinking: Rearranging Seriality,” Poets Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Though Valentine’s poems do not work this way, I do think there is something important to glean from the careful study of the short lyric written by a woman, which might otherwise be regarded as “emotional.” Like Dickinson, Valentine’s poetry pursues a logic that is careful, measured in its development and exacting in its execution, and there is room still to say just how.

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CELIA BLAND

Secret Book Written in the Dirt Jean Valentine’s Lucy: A Poem

Lucy, three million years in the earth. Lucy, sentry to our history. Lucy, a vessel for our woe, gone to earth. Lucy, the fossilized skeleton of a hominid, a kind of ape-human half our size, nearly chthonic, her face reduced to fragile bone unbelievable in its endurance. For longer than humans have walked the earth, her orbital bones have been silently watching. She is god and a bulb of iris or daffodil. She is animal and rough hammer. A paleontologist holding the puzzle of her skull in his hands named her Lucy, perhaps after Wordsworth’s Lucy, who “dwelt among untrodden ways”; whose grave beauty is “Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky.” Perhaps after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Australopithecus afarensis, the “southern ape of Afar”—she is afar off, distant, waiting in the deserts of Ethiopia, once-Abyssinia. The Ethiopians call her “Dinkenesh,” meaning “you are beautiful” (Break the Glass 59). One might argue that for Jean Valentine, Lucy is the Abyssinian maid whose song entrances the poet, inspiring her—beware! beware!—to sing. Lucy was written in a wild burst, the poems coming nearly effortlessly in a manic week of inspiration. At the poems’ center: Lucy, the honeydew upon which the poet feeds. St. Augustine described memory as a vast, immeasurable sanctuary . . . Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it that it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and within it? (Confessions 126) Lucy is sanctuary, a memory that exists both outside itself and within it. The chapbook Lucy is a chain of poems. No table of contents, 214

few titles, many repeating images—spiders, stars, wild›owers, lost ones—and voices: Rilke, Chekhov, Williams. One can read its nineteen pages in one sitting, then read them again. (All collections of poetry should be chapbooks.) Turn her this way and that and, like a prism, Lucy shines. Her faceless presence is repository of Valentine’s grief—“when my scraped-out child died Lucy”—and source of her comfort—“you hold her, all the time.” Lucy is effectively one long poem of long enjambed sentences, bone fragments stubbornly punctuated, end-stopped: “My life is for. / In its language. / Your voice.” This from one of the few titled poems, “My Work of Art,” perhaps the center-poem, in which organic reproduction and artistic composition are comparable and the experience of a work of art aligns with the making of a work of art. Lucy dreams in the earth, artist and skeleton-mother. Valentine’s epigraph, Lucy your secret book that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt— Not having to have an ending Not having to last (Breaking the Glass 61)

sounds the theme of the series: Lucy as creative impulse. Lucy comforts, pities, and gives birth to beauty. This is most explicit in the end-poem, “Outsider Art,” about Martín Ramirez, who— mad? hiding? certainly silent—for decades inhabited a California asylum. Essentially buried in the asylum, he was inside, and yet his strangely precise and ‹ligreed line drawings of highway overpasses, bridges, cowboys and goddesses, are masterpieces of Outsider art. Like Lucy, tracing her book in the dirt, this poem de‹nes ephemera—“Not having to have an ending / Not having to last”—and is rife with short i’s—Ramírez, clitoris, lipstick—and long i’s—vagina, I, I—as the poet describes the making of art (or the living of life) despite its transience: When writing came back to me I prayed with lipstick on the windshield as I drove. (Breaking the Glass 75)

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Valentine, inside the car, writes on the inside of the glass. It is a religious act. Lucy is in the earth; we, as genomic possibilities, are inside her womb, in the marrow of her bones. The connection? Art is mutable—birthing, being born—as the her shifts to you, as the reader transforms from observer to participant, hearing the screams of an animal-woman giving birth, and becoming that mother, screaming still: did you hear animal-woman screams in the night? Were you afraid? Was it you last night your scream over and over as you give birth? (Breaking the Glass 74)

You must forgive me as I speak of the chapbook as one long poem in sections. I could almost speak of it as one speaks of an artist’s series of paintings. The palette, the techniques are analogous, the perspectives vary. The ‹rst poem addresses Lucy, who had hands, had life, and now has nothing, only breath marks breath marks only nor no words. (Breaking the Glass 63)

The double negative and mirroring words—only, only, breath, breath, no, nor—is indicative of just how much Lucy has lost. Valentine then asks: “what do you do now Lucy // for love?” Her mysterious answer: “Your eyeholes” (63). We could parse the possible meanings of such a response—seeing without eyes? perverse ori‹ces?—but the following poems provide more likely answers. The line from William Carlos Williams in the next poem: Lucy my saxifrage that splits the rocks wildgood

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mother you ‹ll my center-hole with bliss— (64)

reveals Lucy as the essential idea-in-thing, the wild›ower that splits stone (saxifrage means stone-breaker) with its humble burgeoning. Lucy brings bliss, brings blessings, brings comfort: At last there you are who I always knew was there but almost died not meeting when my scraped-out child died Lucy you hold her, all the time. (Breaking the Glass 65)

The radical shifts of tense—from present to past to present—in these lines is another instance of how Lucy stops the holes, she is (eye)holes, and she is holy. Lucy’s epigraph is from the Psalms: . . . in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. (Breaking the Glass 62)

The book we know as Lucy’s secret book “written in the dirt.” The continuance we know as our hereditary connection with this ancestor, predating all other “members.” The psalm, with logic now familiar to us from Valentine’s poetry, folds in upon itself; its members (the elect?) were recorded before there were members, just as they were “fashioned” before they were made. Is this about predestination or palimpsestic histories and fate? We do know that the chapbook Lucy was inspired by a small photograph, an artist’s rendering of this pygmy hominid in a news magazine soon after scientists unearthed her grave. Valentine describes the rendering: Brown museum hair, brushed the way they brush it there, brow lit from inside, intelligent eyebrows, a slightly wrinkly nose, a little ›at— (Breaking the Glass 71)

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This image sounds the changes of many of Valentine’s poems. In Door in the Mountain, her 2004 collection, doors are constantly opening to—whom? Death plumbed by life, or mutually dependent on it. Valentine describes the cry for mother, for the answers dreams can bring, and the small but pivotal af‹rmations of faith in the possible, and in the possibility of af‹rmation: “Come Akhmatova / in the siege of Leningrad: / ‘Can you write about this?’ ‘I can’” (“Come Akhmatova” lines 12–14). Lucy, too, is a poem of af‹rmation, but Valentine describes with diamantine minimalism the losses to that mysterious void at the door and the stress-fractures of her belief before voicing the ultimate, “I can.” Which, in the language of Lucy, is Lucy. Chartres is my Lucy. The brooding power of the cathedral, its “certain slant of light,” is at the root of something in me. Its spires poke from the back of my skull, antennae for words. “Lucy, when you are with me / I feel the atoms / racing everywhere.” (71) Chartres cathedral sits on one hill and the student youth hostel sits on another. You can stand in the parking lot of the hostel and look across the dip of the power lines and the cathedral is at eye level, brooding over the village below. What it really looks like is a bug, a huge stone beetle—the aggressive kind, with pincers— crouching, the fanning buttresses crooked like knees. The hostel was raucous with young people comparing maps and sharing beers but I was exhausted by the trip so far, and I went to bed. I began to dream but I wasn’t asleep. I would open my eyes and there were the asbestos tiles of the hostel ceiling a foot from where I lay in the top bunk. I would close my eyes and I saw a vision. Open: The green bars of the bunk bed. Close: I am under the arches of Chartres, on the ›oor tiled in a pattern of curving quadrants. I stand at a lectern and turn the pages of a book: it is the Book of Souls. Inscribed here are illuminated portraits of the faces of the elect, those who will be allowed into heaven, in gold leaf and rich inks. When I see the faces, I speak names and that person from among those tugging at my sleeve, breathing behind me—soar up to the curve of the dome and rest there, their faces made multicolored in the refractions of the rose window’s blue and ruby glass. I look down: the book. I look up: the people hovering. You may imagine me as susceptible to hallucinations, a roman-

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tic, but I was, to my general embarrassment, sober and solemn. I was twenty-one and thinking hard about it. Perhaps in my loneliness, my outsider’s voyeurism, I was hypnotized, caught within the radius of that holy place, just like those pilgrims who’d walked all the way from Paris, who “walked” up the front staircase on their knees; by the tourists decanting from busses in dispirited queues; by those kneeling by the sacred robe of the Virgin, which she wore while giving birth. By marble clerics strung along the arches like beads on a string. Festoons of saints. Caryatid popes leaning from the colonnades like staked tomato plants. My anomalous vision, my only “waking dream”: my Chartres. I was responding with sincerity to a monument both meaningful and meaningless. My dream Chartres was the place where I named, created—“in thy book all my members are written” (62). And it was my book. My secret book. Only breath marks. Chartres, like Lucy, is idea-in-thing, a vessel and a provocateur. It will endure, and has endured, since the ninth century, the twelfth, the eighteenth, the twenty-‹rst. Or it will fall. And in falling it will be refashioned as presence and as absence, drawn in lipstick on the windshield, formed as prayers upon our lips, ideas inside our skulls. “Let’s have a moratorium on poems about the Twin Towers,” a friend said to me recently at a poetry reading. I can understand his request—the poem-as-epitaph has become a standard like AIDS poems were in the eighties. This is not a critique of those poems, just a statement of the collective closing of our ears. And yet . . . In the eighties, I temped for a gold trader on the middle ›oors of the WTC. I was a data entry drone. The gold traders were Dutch. The ‹rm was founded in the Renaissance, heyday of the Netherlandish empire. There were grimy cubicles close to the elevators and a glassed-in trading ›oor where men paced like polar bears at the zoo among ›ickering computer screens beneath a kind of tickertape light box: speeding abbreviations and fractions. In the foyer hung a dusty reproduction of the company’s founder in the style of Van Eyck. He wore a turban, in the clearest of pinks and deep Delft blues, as he balanced powder on a small golden scale— testifying to the longevity of the gold business, the fundamentals of capitalism. We will last, his long nose attested.

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We will endure. I hated every minute of being in that tower. I hated the pneumatic tubes that sucked us to the thirtieth ›oor. I hated the view of the hazy city, robbed of its colors by yellowish plate glass until it was the New York of a seventies movie. I hated the curving brick plaza in front of the buildings where workers could supposedly sit and eat their lunches but where cyclonic winds, created by the weird conjunction of these white monoliths, drove us away. We stood in nearby alleyways, leaning against other buildings to eat our sandwiches as stray sheets of paper blew around the empty plaza. I always thought back to that summer with relief that I had gotten out of that job and the twin yardsticks. That I wasn’t condemned to stay. But when the towers were gone, the space where they stood was as much a landmark as the towers had been. That emptiness lived in my mind, irradiated by loss. Those thousands lost, that past, irrevocably lost. Who to appeal to for comfort? Who to tell of our sadness, to witness to unnamable tragedy? And who to cry, Iraq, Iraq, as one might cry, weeping by the bank of a river in Babylon, O Zion? For Valentine, the white towers are a focal point. In the memory of their rectangular reality and their absence, the air where they were memorializes all who died there. Who died. Lucy when the dark bodies dropped out of the towers ... Lucy, when Jane in her last clothes goes across . . . you are the ferryman, the monk Ieronim who throws your weight on the rope. (66)

Valentine memorializes by both individualizing—Jane is most likely the late, lamented poet Jane Cooper—and generalizing—the dark bodies—our collective losses. Lucy is a conglomerate of myths, of ideas, of the named and unnamed dead, and yet the essential elements, the gold at the base of this alchemical mixture, remains true: when (not if) tragedy, then Lucy.

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Lucy is “bodhisattva here- / with-us. You wanted to come back!” (67) Valentine’s impressionistic and expressionistic—even participatory—style makes Lucy a ferryman rowing us to the afterworld, an avatar of God. She is the mother in Ramírez’s work: like in the great cathedrals, a clitoris, a starry one, and a womb . . . How did you pray, Lucy? You were prayer. Your hands and toes. (74)

She is the wild›ower that breaks the rock, the poor, the living, the dead, the receiver of the dead and the unborn. Like the poet Orpheus, like St. Francis, she entices the animals with her song. The deer and the wild turkeys that draw close now to hear you. ... I can’t tell cold from heat. Anxiety dust. Death, no not even dust. (70)

She is the act of blessing, the ultimate af‹rmation. Her poem ends, ‹ttingly, with a litany of her names, her roles, her functions, and the poet’s offering: Skeleton Woman, Guardian, Death Woman, Lucy, Here, a picnic, corn bread, here, an orange with Martín and me at the lip of the Earth Surface World. (77)

Art is our offering, at the lip of the world, and Lucy, in Valentine’s imagination, is artist and Great Mother, making the offering and— thank you!—accepting it.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Cof‹n. New York: Penguin, 1961. Valentine, Jean. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2004. Valentine, Jean. Lucy: A Poem. Louisville, KY: Sarabande, 2009.

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JULIE CARR

On Saying No Valentine and Dickinson Break the Glass Don’t listen to the words— they’re only little shapes for what you’re saying, they’re only cups if you’re thirsty, you aren’t thirsty.

So ends the poem “As with rosy steps the morn” (10) from Valentine’s newest collection, Break the Glass.1 The poem is an elegy of sorts, in memory of soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; its opening lines evoke a world beyond, on the other side, of this one: “Everyone on the reverse of the picture / on the other side of the measuring eye.” The measuring eye is bound to the material world, the world of ascertainable objects, of immanence (the word, coming from Latin, means to remain within). In its second stanza the poem moves to describe a musical expression: The ‹ve notes, slowly, over & over, and with some light intent, And the whole air, no edge, no center, And the light so thin, so fast—

While Valentine is not often a punning poet, there are three moments here of semantic doubling. Most obviously we read the word “light” as holding both of its meanings. The musical phrase is nearly weightless (like a Valentine poem), and also intended toward the light, toward transcendence, toward the life of the spirit. “Air” too carries two meanings—both a song and a gas—as music becomes, in this poem, spirit or God of the air: without edge, without center. Less obviously, but as importantly, the “notes” of the stanza’s ‹rst line can refer at once to musical notes and to written ones—letters, or notes in a notebook, or perhaps even the gestures of a poem. Thus we begin to see that even as this poem offers mu223

sic as a kind of gateway to spiritual life, it also aligns music with writing (especially when we notice the that the poem’s ‹rst stanza holds just ‹ve lines, ‹ve “notes”). But if writing, or musical language—poetry—can carry us, by way of its “light intent” into the “reverse of the picture,” toward contact with the spirit, we can look now again to the end of this poem to see the paradox at the center of this hope. For words themselves are, for Valentine here, “only little shapes for what you’re saying,” they are “cups”—matter, mere objects—and what they hold will not quench our truest thirst. The most obvious referent for that ‹nal “you” is Lorraine Hunt Lieberson herself; she is no longer thirsty because no longer living. But allowing that “you” can also refer to the reader and, as easily, to the poet, then the ‹nal lines serve to remind us, all of us, to look beyond the meaning of words, beyond what they “say” and toward, it seems, their musical function in order to hear in them “the whole air,” the voice, one could say (and I believe Valentine would say) of God.2 As crucial as this turning toward, or tuning toward, the “whole air” becomes here, it is as crucial to notice that in order to turn toward, Valentine’s poems suggest that one ‹rst must turn away— must reject or refuse a certain set of desires (“don’t listen to the words”) in order to open to the spiritual life. Throughout this collection we ‹nd many such instances of refusal or withdrawal. This could be said to be the driving force behind all of Valentine’s work, especially her more recent work—the act of refusal that is, in fact, an opening, a deep receptivity. Thus Valentine’s quiet minimalism is a way to prepare for, to make space for, a greater, more maximal, engagement. Here are some other instances from Break the Glass in which Valentine turns away, says no, or suggests a rejection or refusal: don’t read this yet, my thoughts are still packed down like crumpled letters, and some of us will not get quite free— (“Dear Family” 11) your blackwater embrace— not bought or sold. (“The Japanese garden” 13)

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You can’t get beauty. (Still, in its longing it ›ies to you.) (“Then Abraham” 16) but not hunger or hunger not granted (“(Two were seen leaving.)” 29) —life from whom death also springeth green —thy leave to sleep (“The just-born rabbits” 31) I put my hand on the ground the membrane is gone and nothing does hold (“Red cloth” 35) I never thirst (“Eurydice who guides” 40)

When Valentine does evoke the af‹rmative, when she moves toward rather than away, she directs herself or her speakers toward some rendition of spiritual life, the afterlife perhaps—though one hesitates to adopt such a teleology; the book seems less about approaching death, and more about approaching an idea of God, “rowing in Eden.” Here are just three examples from the book of this “turning toward”: “Ghost elephant, / reach down, / cross me over” (14); “Break the glass shout / break the glass force the room / break the thread Open / the music behind the glass” (42); “Do we get another life? Oh yes. / Maybe not in this place. Maybe in different forms” (50). I mention these moments in order to make clear that Valentine’s work is not “negative” in its mood. Rather, in the moments of negation cited above lie deeper moments of af‹rmation. As she writes, “not that I am drawn to that which withdraws / but to him pearled, asleep, who never withdraws” (42). Yet even in this last instance, we sense that the sought-after “him,” though af‹rmed as always available, must remain, by de‹nition, hidden (like a pearl), must be approached cautiously, carefully, as one would approach a sleeper. I am reminded here of another contemporary metaphysical poet, one very close to Valen-

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tine personally and poetically, Fanny Howe, who offers the following: “One de‹nition of the lyric might be that it is a method of searching for something that can’t be found. It is an air that blows and buoys and settles. It says, ‘Not this, not this,’ instead of, ‘I have it’” (The Wedding Dress 21). (Interestingly, Howe uses “air” here to describe the poem. And her “air” too has “no edge, no center,” as it restlessly searches.) But we can also trace Valentine’s use of negative constructions to the source alluded to in the paragraph above, a source at once more distant and more near—Emily Dickinson. Here is one well-known moment of Dickinsonian negation that I think reveals the intimacy between these two poets: A Clock stopped— Not the Mantel’s— Geneva’s farthest skill Cant put the puppet bowing— That just now dangled still— An awe came on the Trinket! The Figures hunched—with pain— Then quivered out of Decimals— Into Degreeless noon— It will not stir for Doctor’s— This Pendulum of snow— The Shopman importunes it— While cool—concernless No— Nods from the Gilded pointers— Nods from the Seconds slim— Decades of Arrogance between The Dial life— And Him—

The poem imagines the end of ordinary “measured” or numerical (decimal) time (remember Valentine’s “measuring eye”), evoking the biblical apocalypse.3 The clock is simply a “trinket” belonging to the profane realms of commerce and adornment, but when “stopped,” it becomes itself adorned, adorned with awe, for now, in its stillness, it measures eternity.4 The ‹gures (literally either those ‹gurines that might come out to dance when the clock strikes the hour or the numbers themselves) metaphorically suggest the souls awaiting judgment in the moment of Christ’s second coming. And yet, in order for this revelation to occur, something 226

else has to end—and that something else is what Dickinson calls, with indelible accuracy, “The Dial life,” time itself. However, as often in Dickinson’s poems, the moment of spiritual revelation is also the moment of writing (“Emily Dickinson’s religion was poetry,” writes Susan Howe [My Emily Dickinson 48]). For the referent in the third stanza, the “it” that resists the aid of doctor and shopman (standing here as defenders of the life of the body, of commerce and town), is not only the broken clock with its frozen pendulum, it’s also the poet, or more directly, the poem. As we know, Dickinson used “snow” as a metaphor for her writing, and thus the poem’s pendulum-like rhythms create a different kind of time, which, unlike “the Dial life” does not stand arrogantly at a remove from God. Instead, it stands cooly unconcerned before the ordinary secular world. In rejecting the entreaties of doctor and shopman, the “snow” af‹rms “Him.” I’d like to turn now to two other poems from Break the Glass, “Eurydice who guides” (40) and “He Disappeared into Complete Silence” (52), in order to see more clearly how negation functions to af‹rm a spiritual commitment in Valentine’s poems. “Eurydice who guides” takes on the familiar myth by (unconventionally) giving agency to Eurydice herself, acknowledging her role as guide, rather than positioning her as only the object of Orpheus’s desire.5 Here Eurydice is not simply the lost beloved; she is instead emblematic of death itself. Orpheus’s pursuit is less that of a lover, and more that of the poet compelled to confront the question of mortality. In this sense Valentine’s “reading” of the myth resembles that of Maurice Blanchot in his well-known essay “The Gaze of Orpheus.” And yet, Blanchot—who sees Orpheus’s descent and his glance back at Eurydice as metaphors for the artist’s calling, his “impulse” or “demand”—grants Eurydice no agency. She is the poet’s desire, his need to confront the invisible (the “essence of the night”), or she is the work itself (The Gaze of Orpheus 100). For Valentine, however, death and poetry ‹nd themselves in a symbiotic relationship (not unlike that between Dickinson’s “loaded gun” and its master). If the poet attempts to draw death to him or herself, it is equally true that death compels the poet to follow. In this way, Valentine’s poem allows for more humility, allows for the poet’s responsiveness. The poem begins: Eurydice who guides Orpheus who guides who ‹rst has to return to death

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the one who sings the one who opens ‹rst

Orpheus’s singing allows him to “return to death,” to retrieve Eurydice, but she, in crossing over into the underworld, has “opened” ‹rst. Perhaps. The pronoun “one” in lines 3 and 4 is ambiguous, and I think meaningfully so. It is not ultimately decidable which of the lovers is the “one who sings,” which is “the one who opens ‹rst.” They guide one another, neither leads, neither follows. Valentine then takes this idea further, imagining Eurydice and Orpheus as mutually mothering, mutually nurturing: “his / mouth to her song / her thirst his thirst / the ones who nurse each other.” This moment echoes an earlier poem of Valentine’s, “Mare and Newborn Foal”: When you die there are bales of hay heaped high in space mean while with my tongue I draw the black straw out of you mean while with your tongue you draw the black straw out of me. (250)

This “black straw” is at once a metaphor for life—milk—and for death—the spirit or soul that exits the body in death (in this the poem recalls Celan’s “black milk”). Mother and infant guide each other toward death by way of nurturing.6 In “Eurydice who guides,” this paradox is also at work: what might be the ultimate negation—death itself—is instead equal to the essential (for the poet) opening, the opening that is song: “his / mouth to her song.” I am reminded here of a moment from Nathaniel Mackey’s important essay “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” in which Mackey asserts that “music or poetry, if not exactly a loser’s art, is fed by an intimacy with loss and may in fact feed it” (36). Mackey’s argument is that poetry’s political force emerges from its ability to confront, to sing about, absence, loss, or breaches in kinship. For Valentine too, there is no contradiction between the poem that is intimate with death, that expresses a 228

dedication to the life of the spirit, and the poem that confronts real-world injustice, real-world suffering. “Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to [the ordeal of the orphan], where in back of ‘orphan’ one hears echoes of ‘orphic,’ a music that turns on abandonment, absence, loss” (29) writes Mackey. For Mackey in this essay, the condition of the “orphan” is not simply existential. Rather, it is (also) political—a condition brought about by institutional racism. For Valentine too, the poem that, by way of negation, seeks to af‹rm the “reverse of the picture,” the “other side,” does so not only out of spiritual yearning, but also out of political outrage. And yet, even in her poems that address political injustice or the suffering of others, we sense that a portion of Valentine’s outrage emerges from her awareness that oppression and violence do not only insult and injure the body, they also harm the spirit, and are thus insults levied directly at God. In this sense, there is no conflict between the metaphysical direction of Valentine’s recent work and its consistent political commitments. Why else would this book, so focused on opening into spiritual life, begin with the powerfully political “In prison”? Why else does she dedicate a poem to Dr. Paul Farmer and address the “soon-dead children” of Haiti? In the ‹nal lines of “Eurydice who guides,” after we witness the mutual nursing of death and poetry, we are granted the comforting voice of, amazingly, a “blackened saucepan”—‹gure of both sustenance and ash: Don’t be afraid the blackened saucepan said I met them in the country by a well and once I drank from them I never thirst

To “never thirst” is to be quenched by both death and poetry. But we understand that the joining of the two marks not the cessation of life, but rather the opening into the transcendent, into God. Again, Dickinson: My foot is on the Tide! An unfrequented road— Yet have all roads A clearing at the end— (Dickinson poem 61)

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If this is “fading” O let me immediately “fade”! If this is “dying” Bury—me, in such a shroud of red! (Dickinson poem 119)

Interestingly, this “shroud of red” has a place in Valentine’s book, too. In the poem titled “The branches” (34) we are given an image of a “veteran / girl who died this summer,” perhaps covered by, perhaps being compared with, a “slow red /cloth.” In the poem that immediately follows, Valentine takes up this “red cloth” as a direct metaphor for the membrane between the living and the dead: “Red cloth / I lie on the ground / otherwise nothing could hold // I put my hand on the ground / the membrane is gone / and nothing does hold.” But the crucial end of this poem reminds us that for Valentine, as for Dickinson, this proximity with death is itself a kind of life: “your place in the ground / is all of it / and it is breathing” (35). Let me now conclude with “He Disappeared into Complete Silence,” another poem in which a negation (here as silence) is presented in order to af‹rm its opposite, in this case, speech. The wild ladders of longing no longer pieces of wild wood, sawed off and ‹tted to each other, no longer stored in a closed-off room with one blank window But called back, through the closed-off wooden ceiling, to his speech returned. (Breaking the Glass 52)

This poem imagines bodily death as a “closed-off room,” a prison of sorts with its “one blank window.” But as the “ladders of longing” (the immanent object) are transformed into the “calling” (the transcendent voice), the silence of the title emerges as “speech returned.” As in Dickinson’s work, we can read this “calling” as at once the voice of God, and that other calling, the calling of the poet (or, more broadly, the artist, since this poem is an ekphrastic response to Louise Bourgeois’s Plate 8 from 1947). “Called back,” the spirit moves upward through the wooden ceiling into speech again; the silenced body is answered with the voice of the spirit. 230

On the wall above Valentine’s writing desk is a framed rubbing of Dickinson’s grave, a rubbing she did herself. The gravestone gives Dickinson’s name, dates, and the words, “Called Back.” Even in this simple phrase (which Dickinson chose for her own epitaph) we hear the shadow of a negation, a turning toward that is at once a turning away. Seeking beauty, thirsting, hungering—these energies of striving will not, in Valentine’s work, deliver us to (spiritual) beauty or nourishment. Instead, as in the poem “The Young Mother,” we advance in a metaphysical process by, in a sense “withholding” from such efforts: “All you people looking out from the stern / of the white ship Withholding // —I’ll take my babies / and swim” (46). Perhaps one could say that Dickinson is on that ship, is that ship. With her one foot in the tide, she advances across time, as if effortlessly, called back to Valentine. Or perhaps we could as readily say that this ship is poetry itself, which we cannot advance upon, but instead, must be willing to receive. Ambition cannot ‹nd him— (Dickinson poem 115) You can’t get beauty. (Still, in its longing it ›ies to you.) (Valentine, “Then Abraham” 16)

NOTES 1. In this essay I am addressing only the individual poems in Break the Glass, and not the long poem “Lucy” that concludes the volume. “Lucy” is discussed at length in this collection by Celia Bland. 2. The poem is referencing Lieberson’s aria as Irene in Handel’s oratorio Theodora. 3. Recall Dickinson’s second letter to Higginson of April 25, 1862, where she writes, “For poets—I have Keats and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose—Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations” (Letters 404). 4. “Circumference thou Bride of Awe” she writes in a late poem (1636). “I always ran Home to Awe when a child,” she wrote to Higginson in 1874 (Letters 517). 5. Valentine has addressed Orpheus and Eurydice before in a translation of the poem “Orpheus” by Huub Oosterhuis. The poem appears in The Messenger (1979) and is discussed by Kathleen Fagley in this volume. 6. In the poem “If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them,” which is an elegy for Reginald Shep-

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herd, Valentine also presents nurturing as a necessary component of the movement toward death: “I write on the bedspread / I am making for you there / May you breathe deeply and easily” (41).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blanchot, Maurice. The Gaze of Orpheus: And Other Literary Essays. Trans. Lydia Davis. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1995. Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Mackey, Nathaniel. “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol.” Callaloo 30 (Winter 1987): 29–54. Valentine, Jean. Break the Glass. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010. Valentine, Jean. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

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BHANU KAPIL

The Umwelt of the Question Notes on Territory and Desire

What is a question? Literally, it’s a way of gathering information but not of processing it. As a mode of enquiry that’s also, linguistically, founded on doubt, on not having the words for what passed between you and another person at the end of a relationship, the question seals space. That tiny, bounded pocket of something that is also space is so free. Optically, a spore. Or: a bubble with two spherical envelopes rotating at different rates: one you can’t see, which I think of as the formless intensity or anxiety gathering in the body before speech, which is heat; and one that processes along a subtly different elliptic. That second membrane is oily, with rich blue and red hues, and in my dream of the question it’s what drives or compels the response, whether that’s a rupturing ‹ngertip or the eye tracking the color until it bursts. In a poem, a question develops a “lifeworld” or umwelt, which arises as soon as the question is asked. It simultaneously provides an extremely swift way to scan territory. In fact, according to my indelicate Punjabi logic, derived almost entirely from reading philosophies of art and sensation, the instant that the response appears marks the physical limit of what a body experiences as its environment. So what we see in the umwelt of a question that’s being asked of the body is: a body that’s breaking up before our eyes. In the poems of Jean Valentine, which appear in a section of Little Boat called “From the Questions of Bhanu Kapil,” this is a body that’s also tearing or distending the membrane of what bounds it. Two things: 1. My name is Bhanu Kapil, and 2. What information does Valentine have for us, about what happens to a body at the limit of its being? How does she record a site that’s both transgressive and failing at the same time, failing to sustain the body as an entity? And what does this body, which appears in these ‹ve short poems in such varied ways, dead ways, living ways, want? 233

In working through these ideas, which are really questions about how a ruptured body experiences desire, and asking these questions of Valentine’s poems, I’ve been accompanied by another smallish, hard-backed, smart-looking book with a blackish, shiny cover: Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, the newest set of essays by the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. It’s from her work that I gathered the word umwelt, which appears in a quote from the Estonian biosemiotician Jakob von Uexhull: Every object becomes something completely different on entering a different Umwelt. A ›ower stem that in our Umwelt is a support for a ›ower, becomes a pipe full of liquid for the meadow spittlebug . . . who sucks the liquid to build its foamy nest. I read these words and said a question was a stem. I said the question had one function in the umwelt of the book I had written, but that something happened to snap it off. This is what happened: Jean Valentine wrote to me on thick creamy paper, or perhaps ordinary white paper, from New York City, asking if she might use the questions I had invented (for a book of poems I wrote in my twenties, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers) for a book she was writing now. Without any hesitation, I snapped the stems and gave them to her to build a foamy nest. In the ‹rst poem of her own sequence, “Where did you come from/how did you arrive?,” Valentine extends this plant matter into a domain neither of us, the speaker or the reader, can really witness: trying to follow the body up its stem to the air— I couldn’t . . . (Little Boat 53)

The body in this poem is torn out from an imaginal “Tipperary” onto the “restraining blankets” of the birth bed, with tremendous force that has the register of a violation. I registered the broken stem, and how, without any information or memory supplying the duration that followed, the body became, in the next poem, a set of remains: a “ghost-body” with “Whatever kind of eyes / you have” (“What is the shape of your body?”). Then it happens again: 234

suddenly, without any cartography, the body appears in the following umwelt as an ecstatic, forming self: “my throat sang” (“What do you remember about the earth?”). However, what comes out of the throat—the human sentence—starts to fail in the passage it precedes: I was twenty, your student. I was going to tell you about it, your name, but the air was too thin, I couldn’t. [“What are the consequences of silence?”] (Little Boat 56)

As I track this composite subject, which is a breathing subject, an organism that takes in and exchanges “air,” I was deeply moved by the way Valentine uses the question to dissipate the body at the instant that it clari‹es. The originary domain, which holds the record of the earlier part of life, its many mothers, the ‹rst deaths and marriages, mutates as soon as it’s glimpsed, into what is weirdly an even earlier, particulate form. That is how I understand the dense, yet spectral narrative of the poem I quote from above. It’s not memory per se. It’s memory of an event before it’s happened. An umwelt of the pre-sense, of the space before writing begins, of sentience that’s not located in a visceral port. And in the last poem, “How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?,” this body, which I can’t quite capture as a form even with these words, starts to desire in a new way, moving incredibly fast toward an eroticism that’s completely unboundaried by time or space. The love that was experienced and mourned is happening now at the same time as the future love, the love to come: I know you brokenheart before this world, and I know you after. (Little Boat 57)

If I ever marry, I’d like to read that poem at my partner’s funeral, or ask for it, I suppose, to be read at mine. That’s separate. But not entirely. Valentine’s poems make me feel something in my heart, an electromagnetic prequisite, perhaps, for something happening to it (a heart) in the outer world. Full disclosure number 3: I am writing this in Loveland, Colorado, which is known as the “Valen235

tine City.” In tracking the subject of these poems, the body of a woman as she moves toward a particular sensation, which is also thought, I’m struck by how vividly Valentine takes up the concerns that seemed so particular to the immigrant/Indian body I was tracking in my own work. A history of violence, of erasure, of the experience of nonbeing, is, in these poems, precisely what carries the body into the new world. Like a necessary force. I love the modulated, proto-Marxist way in which Valentine then says, good. The body “whirl[s]” and “daven[s],” an incredibly vulnerable and sweet posture that’s complicated by fragments of intense attachment to the particular time in which the speaker loved and was loved: was a daughter, a student, an unacknowledged beloved, a niece. The repetition of these fragments is part of what makes these poems develop irrational spaces, which, as the mind attempts to cohere them / make them touch, causes an unexpected space to open, space that refers to lost intimate contact but which nevertheless provides it, through its own sensual pressure and pattern: I wrote you about it, but you never answered or spoke about it; two years later, we were in love, and still never talked about it: not about the quilt, not about our lips that never touched— [“What are the consequences of silence?”]

What I gather as a reader, and not as a reader who writes but a person reading a book in the middle part of her life, is a profound surrender of prior content and history. What such a reader, a dark reader, is left with is not a voidlike space, but, rather, a vibratory experience of love that makes border crossing a construction that’s no longer the dominant marker of a radical relationship to the earth. I’m an experimental writer. I’m a poet not born or raised in North America. I came here because I wanted to love in a different way, and though I haven’t exactly discovered what that’s like yet, I’m grateful to live in a nation that lets me try. I hope this is not insanely patriotic, but what I recognize in the move Valentine makes, toward vibration, is the immigrant’s desire to stay. To come into feeling and the inner part of being and loving in a way that’s 236

not possible if you’re constantly crossing the edge of something. Maybe that’s generalized language, a result, too, of recent conversations, with nearly every woman I know—writers and nonwriters—about Eckhart Tolle’s writing on the “pain body.” I don’t know. “From the Questions of Bhanu Kapil” gestures to a futurepresent in which there’s a love that unfolds regardless of the conditions, regardless of the difference between umwelts. It’s the opposite of being a victim of the world. It unties the body from the memories of loss, the visual recollections of abhorrent acts, which have bound it to a particular moment in world history: intimate history: recurrence without the progressive oscillate: a kind of obsessive or addictive looping or reseeing that’s hyper-ordered and ‹xed. Again, this is the language I use when I talk with my friends, and I hope it’s not too banal to employ in a literary context. Luckily, though, I’ve also got Grosz; a section in her book called “Vibration, Animal, Sex, Music.” In it, she writes about the irregular, uncontained oscillation of “fragments” and “notes” as marking the limit of a creature’s umwelt: a marker of “the transformation of species” (33). And so, these are my notes: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

A question is an evolutionary act. At the limit of a species domain, there’s vibration. Four poems in a lyric sequence constitute a species. Jean Valentine is a biologist. She’s the spittle-bug. I’m an ant. I carry the stem of the ›ower on my back to another ant, which is you. 8. Who are you?

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Contributors

Kazim Ali is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, and the mixed-genre Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities; two novels, Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and two collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is the translator of Water’s Footfall by Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri. Founding Editor of Nightboat Books (www.nightboat.org), he teaches in the Creative Writing and Comparative Literature programs at Oberlin College, and in 2009 he received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Maggie Anderson is the author of four books of poems, including Windfall (New and Selected Poems), A Space Filled with Moving, and Cold Comfort, and editor of four anthologies of poetry. She is Professor Emerita at Kent State University, where she was the founder and director of the Wick Poetry Center and editor of the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press from 1992 to 2010. Catherine Barnett’s ‹rst book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, was published in 2004 by Alice James Books; her second collection is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart. She teaches at Barnard, the New School, and NYU and also works as an independent editor. Dorothy Barresi is the author of four books of poetry: American Fanatics (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Rouge Pulp; The Post-Rapture Diner, winner of an American Book Award; and All of the Above, winner of the Barnard College New Women Poets Award. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cali239

fornia State University, Northridge. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Phil Matero and sons Andrew and Dante. Celia Bland is the author of the award-winning poetry collection, Soft Box. Her essays have recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Writing on the Edge, and Fifth Wednesday. She teaches at Bard College. Jonathan Blunk is writing the authorized biography of James Wright. He is coeditor of Wright’s selected letters, A Wild Perfection (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). His poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, and other journals. Philip Booth was the author of more than eight books of poetry including Available Light, Before Sleep, Relations, Selves, and Pairs. He received numerous grants and awards, including those from the Academy of American Poets, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Lee Briccetti’s ‹rst book of poems, Day Mark, was published in 2005 by Four Way Books. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Poetry and has been a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is the longtime executive director of Poets House in New York City, a poetry library and meeting place for poets and readers. Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry: Mead: An Epithalamion, Equivocal, 100 Notes on Violence, and Sarah: Of Fragments and Lines. Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. She teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is the copublisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press. Suzanne Cleary’s poetry books are Trick Pear and Keeping Time, both published by Carnegie Mellon. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, her poems appear in anthologies including Best American Poetry and Poetry 180, and journals including Atlantic Monthly and Poetry London. Her book reviews appear in Bloomsbury Review. 240

Martha Collins is the author of White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012) and the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), as well as four earlier collections of poems and two collections of cotranslated Vietnamese poetry. She served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in spring 2010, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine. Mark Doty’s eight books of poems include Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 2008. A Professor and Writer in Residence at Rutgers, he is also the author of four books of non‹ction prose and a handbook for writers, The Art of Description. Kathleen Fagley, a 2005 graduate of the New England College MFA program in poetry, is editing an upcoming anthology of the Monadnock Writers Group. Her poetry has appeared in Comstock Review, Slipstream, Cutthroat, Tygerburning Literary Journal, poemmemoirstory, and others. She lives in Keene, NH, with her husband Paul and teaches at Keene State College Child Development Center. Eve Grubin is the author of Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press). Her poetry has appeared in many magazines and journals, and her essay “After Eden: The Veil as a Conduit to the Internal” appeared in The Veil: Women Writers on Its History Lore and Politics (University of California Press, 2009). She teaches at NYU in London and is the poet in residence at the London School of Jewish Studies. James Harms is the author of eight books of poetry, including, most recently, What to Borrow, What to Steal (Marick Press, 2012) and Comet Scar (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012). He teaches in the MFA Program at West Virginia University, and directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. Brenda Hillman is the author of eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which are Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009). She is Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary’s College of California and works with CodePink, a women-initiated antiwar and social justice group. 241

John Hoppenthaler is the author of two books of poetry, Lives of Water and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, both titles with Carnegie Mellon University Press. He teaches at East Carolina University and is the editor of A Poetry Congeries, a by-solicitation-only feature housed at the cultural site Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. Fanny Howe is the author of over forty books of poetry and ‹ction, including, most recently, What Did I Do Wrong (Flood Editions) and The Winter Sun (Graywolf Press). She is currently Chair of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. Bhanu Kapil is the author of four books of poetry/prose, most recently Schizophrene (Nightboat Books). She lives in Colorado, where she teaches at Naropa University and Goddard College. Rachel Moritz is the author of The Winchester Monologues (New Michigan Press, 2005) and Night Sea (New Michigan Press, 2008). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, TYPO, and 26. With Juliet Patterson, she edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review. She also publishes a chaplet series from WinteRed Press. Miguel Murphy is the author of A Book Called Rats, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. He teaches literature and creative writing at Santa Monica College and serves as curating editor of Pistola: A Literary Journal of Poetry Online. Amy Newman’s fourth book Dear Editor won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and is forthcoming this year from Persea Books. She’s Presidential Research Professor in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University, and the founding editor of Ancora Imparo, an interdisciplinary journal of art and process. Juliet Patterson’s ‹rst book, The Truant Lover, was the 2004 winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and a 2007 ‹nalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have recently appeared in 26, Pebble Lake Review, Sink Review, Swerve, and other magazines. She coedits poetry with Rachel Moritz for Kondundrum Engine Literary Review.

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Jeffrey Skinner’s latest collection of poems is Salt Water Amnesia, from Ausable Press. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Louisville. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Fence, American Poetry Review, and others. His play, Down Range, was produced in New York City in 2009. Brian Teare is the author of three full-length books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and Pleasure—as well as the chapbooks Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown. He teaches at Temple University and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Lee Upton is the author of twelve books, including ‹ve books of poetry, four of literary criticism, a novella, and, most recently, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition, Boredom, Purity, & Secrecy (Tupelo, 2012). Her poems and short stories appear widely. She is Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College. Michael Waters’ recent books include Gospel Night (2011), Darling Vulgarity (2006—‹nalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001) from BOA Editions, as well as (as coeditor) Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mif›in, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). He teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program and lives in Ocean, NJ. Alan Williamson’s most recent books are The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Westernness: A Meditation (University Press of Virginia, 2005). He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

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POETS ON POETRY Annie Finch and Marilyn Hacker, General Editors Donald Hall, Founding Editor New titles

Karim Ali, Orange Alert Martin Espada, The Lover if a Subversive Is Also a Subversive Marilyn Hacker, Unauthorized Voices Andrew Hudgins, Diary if a Poem Lawrence Joseph, The Game Changed David Mason, Two Minds of a U/estern Poet Cole Swensen, Noise 'That Stays Noise

Recently published Meena Alexander, Poetics of Dislocation Arurie Finch, The Body if Poetry Sandra M. Gilbert, On Burning Ground: Thirty Years of

Thinking About Poetry Grace Schulman, First Loves and Other Adventures Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx Reginald Shepherd, A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom if Poetry Also available, collectious by Elizabeth Alexander,A. R.Ammons,JohoAshbery, Robert Bly, Philip Booth, Marianne Boruch, Hayden Carruth, Amy Cbmpitt, Alfred Corn, Douglas Crase, Robert Creeley, Donald Davie, Thomas M. Disch, Ed Darn, Tess Gallagher, Dana Gioia, Linda Gregerson, Allen Grossman, Thorn Gunn, Rachel Hadas, Joho Haines, Douald Hall,Joy HaJjo, Robert Hayden, Edw=! Hirsch, Daniel Hoffinan,Jonathan Holden,Joho Hollander, Paul Hoover, Andrew Hudgins, Laura (Riding) Jackson,Josephine Jacobsen, MarkJarman, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch,Joho Koethe, YusefKomunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Martin Lammon (editor), Philip Larkin, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Larry Levis,Joho Logan, William Logan, William Matthews, William Meredith,Jane Miller, David Mura, Carol Muske,Alice Notley, Geoffrey O'Brien, Gregory Orr, Alicia Soskin Ostriker, Ron Padgett, Marge Piercy, Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, Charles Simic,William Stafford,Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, James Tate, Richard Tillinghast, C. K. Williams, Alan Williamson, Charles Wright, James Wright,Joho Yau, and Stephen Yenser