Tuesday, November 27, 2007
When Jean Valentine’s Dream Barker won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1965, the award was at its height of legitimation – Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, John Hollander, Alan Dugan & Jack Gilbert had all won in recent years, James Tate would soon enough inaugurate soft surrealism with The Lost Pilot in 1967. Regardless of what your allegiances might be in the “raw” vs. “cooked” debate of the period, many (most?) young poets would automatically buy whatever new volume came out in the Yale series and mull over what this new voice would mean for American poetry. Again, this was a time when the number of publishing poets in the U.S. was still under one thousand, a tenth (or less) of what it is today.
The Yale prize was – still is – thoroughly a creature of the
In this context, Jean Valentine’s poetry seemed at the time almost entirely out of place – it was linguistically interesting, for one thing, not really confessional or narrative, clearly not an instance of post-Brahmin formalism, yet just as distant from anything one might then have typed as New American. The part I kept coming back to, both there & in confronting her work mostly in journals in the four decades since, was her focus on linguistic surfaces. She wasn’t the only poet of the period who stood out in this way – Eliot Coleman down in Baltimore was fascinated with fragmentation while Donald Finkel in St. Louis had his own unique vision for the longpoem – but such writers seemed very few & far between. I never had any sense that they were in touch with one another, or ever needed to be. Each appeared to be entirely spun from their own devices, with their own concerns, sharing mostly their disconnectedness from the whole shebang.
Valentine has gone on, of course, to have a successful – her collected poems won the National Book Award in 2004 – if relatively subdued career. In over a quarter century of visiting
Yet Little Boat this year from Wesleyan is a true delight. It’s always readable, often brilliant, thoroughly consistent with the author of Dream Barker some 42 years before, and yet now calling out in ways that bring other, very different names to mind than the ones I might have thought of back then – Louise Niedecker, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout. Maybe even Graham Foust & Joseph Massey. That, frankly, is great company.
Here, for example, is a poem that strikes me as perfectly constructed:
The Look
Pain took me, but
not woke me – no,
years later, your
look
woke me:
each shade and light:
to earth-love then
I came,
the first
beach grasses.
Trying to pin this poem down, narratively or figuratively, is simply not possible. That very first word, Pain, can be understood in so many different ways as can the other key noun in the first four lines, look. The poem is figured between an I and you, but you are superimposing your own interpretation even to suggest that there are two people here. What isn’t an imposition of the reader’s fantasy life, however, clearly is this text’s sense of motion: the use of enjambments, twists in the first three lines setting up a sonic entrance of considerable conflict, under which the softer sounding of the paired off-rhymes took/woke look/woke lead the reader right to the first of two colons: each functions as a gate enabling the reader to pass only in one direction. It’s no accident that each of the four words in the first stanza’s last line starts off open (each/and) or soft (shade/light), ending on a harder sound – that won’t happen again until the third line of the next stanza when the halt at the end of first sets up the echo of each in beach, opening to the final almost dreamlike sounds of grasses. I still have no clue what pain or which look might be intended here, but – as is so often the case with Rae Armantrout’s best work also – I find myself wrapped in total belief.
Yet where Armantrout’s poems seem continually to be testing for God, sounding in search of that echo, Valentine strikes me here as being closer to Fanny Howe – one of the texts borrows from Howe’s work & Valentine has dedicated at least one other poem to her prior to this book – in that she takes on the Christian frame very much as given:
Blessed are those
who break off from separateness
theirs is wild
heaven.
reads one untitled piece in its entirety. Or this more mysterious poem, “Eye of water,” from the book’s final sequence, “Mary Gravidas, Mary Expectant”:
I have nay ben nn
To keep nn safe
I cannot keep them safe
If nn tway
If nn thee
Keep them
Eye of water
Those double ns – four sets of them in the first five lines amaze me. If there is an “ordinary” explanation for such opacity, I don’t have the reference. Yet they function perfectly clearly, like a radio in a movie that gives off static & in so doing tells us into which decade this narrative fits. The poem alternates between despair & prayer – the third line makes clear what the first two enact, yet the ns of the second stanza operate differently altogether, almost as if the poem were coming up against a blind spot, or point beyond which words could not pass. The echoes of Scots & the nearly biblical thee serve to reinforce this.
Valentine often gathers these poems into sequences, yet for me what is so special here is how each never loses focus, never seeks to defer elsewhere. After reading Little Boat straight through, I actually found myself enjoying it more the second time, jumping around from page to page, not trying to construct larger frames. Again & again, Jean Valentine is an argument for the particular. She does it with exceptional grace.
Labels: Jean Valentine
I note that you omit from this emerging portrait of a group a few prominent male poets of your generation whose work at least superficially resembles that of Armantrout, Valentine, and F. Howe, and whose names I won't mention.
At some point I'd be interested to read what qualities you'd call dealbreakers in short quasi-religious lyric/narratives.
I found Jean Valentine's "Ordinary Things" on one of the racks, and opened it up out of curiousity more than anything else, prompted by such an "unpoetic" title for a book of poems. Inside, I found such clarity and simplicity, but a simplicity that contained a great deal of tension or force hovering behind every word. I stood there and read the whole thing, then bought it and took it back to my student apartment, and re-read it several times over the next few days.
It was a revelation. What Jean Valentine's approach to poetry gave me, at that time, was permission: permission to pursue the directions in poetry that I had been leaning towards, but timid about pursuing. A timidity about finding one's own voice that many young poets feel. I found in Valentine's style a perfect model, and echo, of the poems I felt rising up in my own self. So, it was validation, as well as permission. But I knew I could do it, after that. The poem of the particular, still mysterious, still very thightly-focused, almost haiku-like at times. Also, the dense life of memory and meaning that can hover behind a very short moment, coloring everything. Vlaentine packs a lot into usually very small poems.
That's still often where I start a poem, even if it ends somewhere else.
I keep mentioning Jean Valentine to various poets I know across the country, and most of them go, "Who?" So I agree with your assessment that she's had a successful if relatively subdued career. I have all her books, I usually grab them when I see them first published now. Only once or twice, opening a new collection, have I not felt that same rush of something even deeper than pleasure—call it recognition—that I first felt upon opening "Ordinary Things."
Many eyars after college, I wrote her a letter, basically thanking her for her permission and validation, earlier in my life. I got back a lovely short note, very pleased, and full of the same clarity of mind that's in her poems.
Your praise of the "The Look" almost entirely based on a technical appraisal of its method, while steering clear of the subjective numbus which the words do nothing to clarify. It is, as you point out, so very vague in its denotation (to "pain"), that we hardly know what to make of it. There seems to be some much larger issue (about a relationship, religious conversion, health issue?) which the poet will not or cannot reveal to us, upon which our interest necessarily hinges. This blurred emotional vagueness is not redeemed by the even more vague "earth-love"--and our pleasure at arriving at beach grasses, through the two beach access gates (private property?) is softened and dulled by our misapprehension of (or simple confusion) at what we don't know from the start.
Aside from brevity, I can't think of anything in this poem, or the two others quoted, that reminds me of Armantrout. Niedecker is a better comparison, but the Wisconsin poet's determined Objectivist's specificity always saves her work from this kind of problem. Armantrout's work as religious quest??? That's new to me.
By the way, I looked in vain on the web for a complete listing of the Yale Prize winners since inception. God knows why these contests appear reluctant to publish them. The real issue is always who the selectors (judges) are, not the winners--because they never (or almost never) step outside their boundaries. Who would Ron choose, if given the opportunity to judge the Yale?
not as you have it "Eliot"
I was in that Hopkins' Writing Seminars 1970-72..
He is/was a "National Treasure" and should be read...
met Jack Gilbert in Lindos, Hellos year prior to going to Hopkins..
I can't for-the-life-of-me find those letters that jack sent to me from Greece and SF....a dozen or so...
anyway, "hang-in" , Ed
Even all night long while
the night train
pulls me on in my dream
like a needle.
Even then, down in my bed
my hand across the sheet
anyone’s hand
my face anyone’s face
are held in the mercy
and kissed
the water
the child
the friend
unlost.
The way she is able to weave character certainty and uncertainty is fascinating; I find myself becoming part of the poem as I read it. Thanks for sharing the review of her book.
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