TOP89-DES86
This Old Poem #89:
Jean Valentine’s X
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 4/10/04
Sometimes a
poet or a poem become so intertwined with an event or thing in someone’s life
that the person cannot separate the quality of the poet/poem from that
event/thing that they represent, or remind 1 of. Such is the case with poet Jean
Valentine. Not with me, but with an artist pal of mine named Art Durkee. Art is
someone who came to many UPGs over the year it was held, & his general
knowledge of life & poetry, as well as the breadth & depth of his
reading, is without question. Yet, there’s seems to be 1 poet he esteems well
beyond her reputation. JV is that poet.
Even more
puzzling is that he has often tried comparing her favorably to Edna St. Vincent
Millay- a far more consistent & excellent poet. The crux of Art’s beef
with ESVM seems to be that he thinks her imagery is & subject matter is
stale. With this I cannot totally disagree, for ESVM was a Classicist by
inclination- meaning she purposely engaged older (& inevitably triter)
themes. Yet, her skill with form is truly peerless. The same cannot be said for
JV- a woman who is not a terrible poet, but not a particularly good 1 either.
This is manifest to most, thus my ideas on Art’s motives re: his JV ardor
having to do with some early love.
Nonetheless,
JV does have her own website-http://www.jeanvalentine.com/index2.html,
from which I cull this info:
Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe
College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale
Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965.
Author of eight other books of poetry (listed below), she has received a
Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The
Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York
Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale
Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in
2000.
She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of
New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y.
Including this gem of a
blurb:
‘Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you
can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among
rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and
familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where
consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order,
because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other
way.’- Adrienne Rich
JV writes short poems with
a nature orientation. This smacks of an Eastern/Mystic bent, but her poems are
quite a bit more prosaic. Like this one:
The Welsh poet
said of his mother
who "left the world"
last week
"She was never dead
in or out of it."
He shows me a beautiful Indian bird
red with yellow dots on it:
Happiness. Beauty. Art.
--That bird seems to like you.
--Yes, that bird knows
there's not much time.
The mother has a gold body now.
This poem is a rather blasé attempt to show the transformation from life to death. The imagery is not striking, the music is nil, & the metaphors have nor real heft- they are simple imagery & rote transfiguration motifs. Here’s another:
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.
I don’t know enough of barn life to know if this represents a real scene. But personifying the animals does what? The imagery is muddled & the poem just sort of lays there like the afterbirth it’s presumably referencing. Here’s another poem:
The Second Dream
We all heard the alarm. The planes were out
And coming, from a friendly country. You, I thought,
Would know what to do. But you said,
'There is nothing to do. Last time
The bodies were like charred trees.'
We had so many minutes. The leaves
Over the street left the light silver as dimes.
The children hung around in slow motion, loud,
Liquid as butterflies, with nothing to do.
OK, a dream
of wartime. What is accomplished? Is there any strong music? Is the imagery
unique or startling? Does the title add enigma? Only the phrae ‘Liquid as
butterflies’ has any heft. This is typical of most of JV’s oeuvre. Nothing
too bad, & nothing particularly interesting. 1 does not stub a toe on a JV
poem, merely graze it.
Let’s now
look at the poem in question:
The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.
I remember looking at you, X, this way,
taking in your red hair, your eyes' light, and I miss you
so. I know,
you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway,
whether dead or whether living, real. --Then Y
said, "Who will remember me three years after I die?
What is there for my eye
to read then?"
The lamb should not have given
his wool.
He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small.
Playing with a stone
on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean.
Note- this is the worst poem we’ve read yet. It’s mawkish, even if we remove the epigraph, but with it it’s an abomination. Why are the lines broken as they are? Why does JV need to reinforce the ‘precious’ aspects of asserting the preciousness of life? Obviously because she does not trust the reader to get the depth & seriousness of death, & more so if it comes from AIDS. Let’s remove the pabulum & try to make this poem a bit more taut:
The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky.
I remember looking at you this way,
taking in your red hair. I know,
you are you, and real, standing there
in the doorway, dead or living.
"Who will remember me three years after I die?
What is there for my eye to read then?"
The lamb should not have given
his wool. So small. You were
playing with a stone on your bedspread,
the edge of the ocean.
So, what was done? The epigraph is a nice dollop of yucky oozing
sentimentality removed. Sentiment is now in its stead. We also do not need the X
& Y designations in the poem since a 2nd personage will naturally
be Y, + the X of the title now means more than just the named speaker. The break
into 2 stanzas helps delineate the rewrite better. Stanza 1 is the scene
setting- something that is missed- probably a person. The condensed 2nd
stanza allows for the imagery to flow more naturally. We do not need extraneous
phrases like ‘and I miss you/so’, or ‘At the end, X’. The poem now is
far more universal, & a bit more touching than the mere AIDS-based original.
Let me quote 2 pieces from an interview JV has online that are cogent.
Here’s #1:
Interviewer:
What is your relationship to revising?
JV:
I used to revise for a long period of time. And I used to really tear my
hair--over writing and revising, actually--much more than I do now.
Interviewer:
Have you reached a point where you can put something down and feel it's more or
less there?
JV:
No. [little laugh] No, it's not quite to that point. Things come usually over a
period of months. But the difference is the level of anxiety. When I was a
drinker, my level of anxiety was much higher. Also my level of depression. Both.
When I got sober, my whole self was being reorganized, you know? For five
years--I couldn't write at all during that time.
JV reveals that since 1987
her style of writing is to not really revise. Also her admission of alcoholism
is telling since it puts her more in line with the PC Elitists than the nature
poets of her earlier days. Is it any wonder whatever early promise may have
existed was snuffed out?
JV:
So I always had that identity, and it was a saving identity [as a Poet &
Writer]. Then, when I stopped writing for five years, I no longer had it. I
had also, by then, developed the identity of being with a guy. I'd had that
since college, a little bit in high school maybe. I was going to be with some
guy, that'd be part of my identity. And I wasn't, then, for these five years.
Interviewer:
When was this?
JV:
My writing started to peter out in 1981 and '82, and I started again in '87. I
got into recovery in '85, and I got much more grounded in myself then. But those
years, between '82 and '87, I wasn't with a man, and I wasn't writing poetry.
And what I found out--this was the good part--was that I was still there.
Without these things that I thought were me, I was still there. And that was
important.
If this kind
of banal self-revelation has not made you cringe pat yourself on the back.
Still, it’s these moments that most likely make bad poets bad, & make even
those should know better like their bad poems. Ecce homo!
Final Score: (1-100):
Jean Valentine’s X: 45
TOP’s X: 65
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