JEAN VALENTINE

A Reading by Jean Valentine
recorded February 14, 2008

David Wojahn: It’s a great pleasure to introduce you to Jean Valentine who, over the course of a forty-five year career and ten collections, has become one of our most significant poets and one of our most honored ones—most notably in the recent past as the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for her collected poems Door in the Mountain.

You know, there are some people who practice our craft who at one point or another get labeled a poet’s poet, and that often is a sort of backhanded compliment—a way of saying there’s something impressive but a little off about this writer; there’s something missing. But there are other poets, that’s a much smaller number, who get labeled this way because they do things in their poetry that every other poet, no matter what his or her aesthetic may be, would like to do but only rarely can. They’re poets’ poets because of the rigor of and the majesty of their examples, and I think Jean Valentine is a poet’s poet in that sense and it helps to explain why her poems are no less than beloved by other poets no matter what their school, their approach, their affiliation. They love these poems in no small measure because they honor the language and its intricacies and its mysteries better than almost any other contemporary poet and they attempt to do honor to the lives of those who populate the poems. Sadly, that honor must often come in the form of elegy. Jean’s written with great eloquence about those lost in the AIDS pandemic and about those lost because the society chooses to ignore them: the homeless, the disabled, people who in an earlier age would be characterized as downtrodden. This is not to say that she writes poems of social protest as much as it’s to say that they’re poems written from a stance of what Adam Zagajewski calls moral seriousness. And they’re elegiac and hopeful at once. They understand as Rilke writes in the Sonnets to Orpheus that, “Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk.”

But I have to say it’s easier to describe the stance of Jean’s poems than to describe their style. One reason why she’s so deeply admired by her fellow poets is that her poems defy easy description and glib categorization. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to other poets who start by expressing their admiration for her poetry and then immediately say in a spirit of awe rather than bafflement, “but how do the hell do those poems work?” A Jean Valentine poem is apt to combine flashes of insight, startling images, lucid dreaming, and passages of inscrutability followed by lines of disarming directness. And these poems, like those of Solan or the fragments of Sappho which have come down to us, know above all how to make use of the silences which surround poetry, the white spaces, the gaps, the lacunae. They know how a poem can make use of the unsaid and they’re brave enough to stand on the threshold of the unspeakable. This is one of the reasons why the poems can recall the great poets of spiritual yearning—Hopkins, say, or George Herbert.

Door in the Mountain, Jean Valentine’s collected poems, and her wonderful new book, Little Boat, are books that anyone who cares about poetry needs to read and I can’t tell you how lucky we are to have her read for us tonight—Jean Valentine.

Jean Valentine: So I’m gonna read, first, a poem that I translated a long time ago—it’s by Mandelstam, and it’s one of the last poems of his that we have. He died in 1938, we believe, and it was one of the last poems he wrote. It has no title, it’s got a number which is 394. It’s been translated very well I think by W.S. Merwin and maybe by others that I don’t know of. But what my friend Anne Frydman and I did, at Anne’s insistence, I have to say as I was telling you today, absolutely everything was as close as—she was a Russian scholar—as she could get to what he actually said. There were no little—which I don’t, I don’t disapprove of people who do other things, but this is just what we did. And actually there was one or two moments when I wanted to do something else but Anne was very strict. So we just did it absolutely. I’m saying that because it could be that there could be completely different versions of this, as you know, which would also be completely hearing to what was on the page. But this is what we did and it was back in the 80s.

[“Osip Mandelstam: 394,” Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, Wesleyan University Press, 2004.]

As you probably know, in hymn that would be rhymed, but we couldn’t do everything, not the way we wanted to, so we decided to try to keep the rhythm of the lines and let the rhyme go. I actually, if you’re interested in this kind of thing—you’re poets so you might be. You know I had only lines or chalk. The step you took no longer there to take. Flowers are deathless. Heaven is round. And I wanted to say and everything to be is only talk cause it rhymed with chalk. So Anne said no, forget about it, it says promise. She was like Ms. Bishop was about translation, just everything stays where it was, and just try to be as faithful to that as you can.

So I want to read some poems from this book Little Boat. This is the first poem. It’s called “La Chalupa, the Boat” and I was sitting at a table with an oil cloth tablecloth where they had like those—the Mexican loteria cards where they have the alphabet you know—it’s . . . that’s right, you know Spanish. Well they had the Spanish and then the English and it would be like an alphabet. And I was sitting there, like you may have done, with my coffee wanting to write a poem so I said La Chalupa the boat and there was this pretty picture of this young woman pulling a boat which was blue and painted with roses and white lilies. You know you can just copy some stuff sometimes. You can try anyway. So “La Chalupa, the Boat.”

[“La Chalupa, the Boat,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This is called the “Artist in Prison” and it’s about a real artist whose name is Ray Materson and he found himself in prison after sticking up a 7-Eleven with a wooden gun painted black, he was about seventeen years old, so he ended up in prison for quite a long time and he became an artist there. He started embroidering little tiny pictures. I guess he got so trusted that he could, you know, use a needle. He got the threads from—well it’ll say in this poem.

[“The Artist in Prison,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This story has a good ending—or middle—he got out in marriage, and he and his wife have children, and they run a school for kids who, you know, might be in trouble. He’s living up near Albany someplace.

These are other ones. “But Your Touch.” Often these don’t have titles, they just start with the first few words of the poems.

[“But Your Touch,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

[“The Door is Fallen Down,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one goes “The Father Was a Carrier.”

[“The Father Was a Carrier,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This [is] called “The Eleventh Brother” and it’s after a fairytale called The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen. Forgive me if you’ve heard me tell about this before. But in case you didn’t know about that story, it’s one where the sister is asked, she’s enabled, but well, a bad witch turns her brothers—eleven princes and she’s the princess—turns them all into wild swans. And she’s given the chance to turn them all back into princes if she makes shirts for them out of nettles. She gets them all done before dawn, you know. And she gets them all done but the last one and her youngest brother was her favorite, and she gets just one sleeve done at dawn and so he comes back into being a human with one swan’s wing and one arm. This is called “The Eleventh Brother.”

[“The Eleventh Brother (2),” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

Well I think now I’ll read some sequences. This book is made up of four sequences as well as those—those ones I’ve been reading are kind of random—but these are sequences and the first one is called “Jesus Said,” and it draws on the Gnostic gospels. And the quote at the front of this says, “Jesus said, Split a piece of wood, and I am there.” It reminds me of the Whitman where he says, look at the sole of my boot and you’ll find something like that—sort of that kind of remark that these people make. This first one is called “The Woman’s Poem.”

[“The Woman’s Poem,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one’s called “Annunciation Poem.”

[“Annunciation Poem,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one’s called “The Poet’s Poem” and, you know, Dante would—I think this was true—I think Mandelstam said Dante wrote his poems walking, and I know Mandelstam did. So this one has that.

[“The Poet’s Poem,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

And this one’s called “The Teacher’s Poem.” It has a quote at the top of it from Picasso who I heard said “if you don’t have red use green.” I would like to write that over all the schools’ doors. 

[“The Teacher’s Poem,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This is called “Death Poem.”

[“Death Poem,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

And then this is the last one of this sequence. It’s called “The Afterlife Poem.”

[“The Afterlife Poem,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This sequence is called “Strange Lights,” and this was a time that I was in Ohio and I wasn’t very sick but they had to put me in a hospital and it gave me about—I recommend it really—it gave me about four or five days to do nothing. It was a small little hospital in the country in Ohio. They didn’t really have a lot to do and so they would come in and talk to me—it was really nice. And then afterwards I wrote these poems. “Hospital”—they all begin with the word hospital.

[“Hospital: far from home,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one begins “Hospital,” or title is “Hospital: at last I saw.” It’s got a quote at the beginning of it from William Blake about fairies, and I took the rest of the poem pretty much from an essay by Fanny Howe called “Fairies” from her beautiful book of essays The Wedding Dress. So we start with Blake.

[“Hospital: at last,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one’s called “Hospital: strange lights.” This was an experience I had going to see a doctor in his office, and he said “what do you do?” which is—you don’t know that—in New York they don’t usually say that. And I said I teach and I write poetry and he said I have a poem by heart, would you like to hear it? And I said yeah. He was about my age and I thought it might be Robert Frost or something like we were asked to memorize when I was young. And it was from “The Song of Songs” and he was memorizing it because he was going to sing it in his synagogue the following Saturday. And he just—it was very moving—he just stood there in his white coat and sang this to me. And I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t even ask him what—what he, it was in Hebrew you know—what he was saying, what part of “Song of Songs” it was. So I just made that up when I got home and tried to write about it and I took a line from the King James Version which goes, “In the secret places of the stairs.” So “Hospital: strange lights.”

[“Hospital: strange lights,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one is “Hospital: It was euphoria.”

[“Hospital: It was euphoria,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

And then this is the last of these ones called “Hospital: Scraps.”

[“Hospital: Scraps,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

So I’ll read some from this next sequence which is called “A Bowl of Milk.” The first one is called “The Look.”

[“The Look,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one has a title from Frank O’Hara—his poem “[To] the Harbormaster”—and the line is, “I wanted to be sure to reach you.”

[“I Wanted to be Sure to Reach You,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one’s called “This Side.”
 
[“This Side,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one goes “I was Lying There”

[“I was Lying There,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This last one in that series has three parts—very short. It’s called “The Harrowing.”

[“The Harrowing,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This next sequence is called “From the Questions of Bhanu Kapil” and she’s a writer who wrote a wonderful book. She’s written another one now but I haven’t read that yet. But the one I read was called [The] Vertical Interrogations of Strangers. And in the front of the book she has all these questions; I think there are about twenty of them. And I was already in love with the questions, and the book is just wonderful. It’s not straightforward interview. It’s [a] very lyrical, beautiful, beautiful book. So I—what I did was I took some of her questions and wrote poems under them and she said that was okay and we’re gonna talk about it sometime. You know we haven’t had that opportunity yet. The first one is called “Where did you come from/how did you arrive?” She’s asking these questions of women who have been immigrants to the western world, as she has, so that explains some of the nature of the questions. Anyway, I made mine into as if I were asking a question of my grandfather who came from Tipperary.

[“Where did you come from/how did you arrive?” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one is called—you see why I like these—this one is called “What do you remember about the earth?” It reminds me of—I think Chekhov has a line somewhere where he says, somebody looking back at the Earth says to someone else looking back at the Earth, “Do you remember that white tree?” I wanted to put that in there but I thought I can’t have it all by other people, I have to do something myself here. “What do you remember about the earth?”

[“What do you remember about the earth?” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This one goes—the title—the question, is “How will you/have you prepare(d) for your death?”

[“How will you/have you prepare(d) for your death?” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

So I have one more sequence that I’ll read you a few poems from, and then I’ll read a few new ones that aren’t in this book. This is called “Maria Gravida.” It’s—means Mary pregnant, Mary expectant.

[“Maria Gravida,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

This is called “Moose and Calf” and it has a quotation from Julian of Norwich which I’ll read to you and then you’ll recognize it when it comes into the poem.  She’s having a vision, she had all these visions, and she said—and this is a vision of seeing Christ, which I think all of them are. So she says, “For there within he showed me a place”—and this was within Christ’s own body—“He showed me a place in his side” I think she says. “For there within he showed me a place that was inviting fair and large enough it was to offer refuge for all.”

I was up in Alaska and the person who was my host took me on a long drive to see if we could find a moose, and we did. We found a moose and, and, a little calf on the edge of the highway. It was spring, it was March and they were just coming out to eat the willow shoots that were poking up through the snow.

[“Moose and Calf,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

And this one’s called “To my soul.” I was at an artist colony—there was an artist from Poland, and she was making these pictures. She’d make pictures out of coffee grains. She had pictures made out of that, and she had a camera over it, and then she had a hairdryer—very slowly blew the grains away. And she would have a portrait, for instance. She had many portraits of women in Iraq, and then she had portraits of whole crowds of people, and as she took pictures of it, they would slowly disappear. It was really extraordinary so I put that into this. This is “To My Soul.”

[“To my soul (2),” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

And then the last one in this book is called “The Rose.”

[“The Rose,” Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan University Press, 2007.]

I might take another five minutes—read a couple new ones. This one is called “In Prison.”

[“In Prison,” Jean Valentine, The New Yorker.]

This is called “Canoe.” I have been reading Black Elk, and so he’s in here. “Canoe.”

[“Canoe,” Jean Valentine, unpublished.]

That’s what he said. He said, “To the end of this world or cycle.”

This is called “The Japanese Garden.”

[“The Japanese Garden,” Jean Valentine, The New Yorker.]

This one’s called “Ghost Elephants.”

[“Ghost Elephants,” Jean Valentine, The New Yorker.]

This is called, “Then Abraham.” 

[“Then Abraham,” Jean Valentine, unpublished.]

I’ll just read two more. This is called “Her Blessing.”

[“Her Blessing,” Jean Valentine, unpublished.]

This last one is called “The World inside This One.” This is just very new but I just want to read it out loud because it helps sometimes. I had a student, last fall, who sent me a quotations from LOR that went, “There is another world and it is inside this one.” “The World Inside This One.”

[“The World Inside This One,” Jean Valentine, unpublished.]

Thank you.