About Jean Valentine

For many, gifted writer and giving teacher Jean Valentine has always resided under the radar. Poet/meisterblogger Ron Silliman writes in 2007: "In over a quarter century of visiting New York, where she's made her home, for readings, talks, conferences, I've never—not once—heard a New York poet ever mention her name. For her sense of 'presence' there, she might as well live in Montana." Valentine is tickled by Silliman's comments: "He wrote that I was a very well-kept secret even in New York." And then she laughs, a sexy, throaty laugh that offers a hint of a life thoroughly lived. Valentine is a joyful, compassionate force and if, as in her work, she has attended to the undercurrent, those deep, instructive waters are powerful and affirming. And rising: Valentine has been named New York State poet for 2008–2010, and Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Valentine hadn't published a single poem when Dream Barker won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1965; in 2007, Wesleyan University Press published her tenth book, Little Boat. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the nea, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The New York Council for the Arts, to name only a few, and has taught at many locations including Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and New York City's 92nd Street y. Kate Knapp Johnson, a colleague at Sarah Lawrence, remembers her as "a compassionate and richly experienced teacher and advisor, a poet, whose lines return to me again and again at uncanny and extraordinary moments, literally informing me of the meanings of my own experience." Valentine says she works "with things that I don't understand—with the unconscious, the invisible...trying to find a way to translate it." She writes a lot, longhand, and then "I take most of it away to leave what remains alive." This filament is Valentine's incandescence, part prayer, part struggle, and vitally human: "I came to you / Lord, because of / the fucking reticence / of this world / no, not the world, not reticence, oh...."

Though she has resided more than half of her life in the same apartment on New York City's Upper West Side, Valentine's early years were unmoored. Born in Chicago in 1934, daughter of a Navy man, Valentine remembers, "we moved around all the time...It does make you a bit, probably, a little uncertain of what's coming next, but that's probably a good preparation for life." This recollection, in which vague, difficult aspects of life become possible gifts of transcendence, exemplifies the poet's work, where loss, redemption, and mystery merge. Adrienne Rich writes that in Valentine's poetry, "The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet." David Kalstone remarks on her "tough strangeness" and "dreamlike syntax." For Maggie Anderson, "The core vocabulary of Jean Valentine's poetry has always been oneiric and elegiac, and her central imaginative landscapes of dreams and loss."

"My dreams were very important to me right in the beginning," says Valentine. "I had a teacher in college who said 'You could write from your dreams' and that was like being given a bag full of gold." For Valentine, dream articulates the emotional sense of being in a world in which what is lost is still memory, and what is invisible, even spiritual, may still be fully felt. "The cry of the heart of modern poetry, for the most part, is more like prayer," she notes in an interview with Michael Klein.

Responding to Klein's question about Elizabeth Bishop and homesickness, Valentine says, "I felt a longing for connection...Maybe [Bishop] being an orphan and my being...whatever." The ellipsis is Valentine's. In that hesitation, that "whatever," are the makings of a difficult past and a corresponding strength, one that, as Valentine herself writes of Emily Dickinson, "seemed to choose her refusals and promises, and survive them—happy are those who can." Valentine was ten when her father returned from the Second World War, suffering from post-traumatic stress. "It was a very sad and awful time for [her parents] and for all of us, so I got out of the house as much as I could." Yet in this childhood was "a place where we were very much at home when we were children—we used to go there on summer vacations and we had dear aunts and uncles who were like grandparents to us. We were happy there. This place was called 'the farm,' although it wasn't a farm. I remember my sister [Ann] saying to me in California: ' If we walked far enough we could get to the farm...'." Ann's ideal rendering of a path between here and there, the imagination transcending the present, may have contributed to Valentine's use of dream as redemptive and necessary for conveying the truth of experience. "Sometimes I'm using dream as a way of almost trying to translate experiences and thoughts that I have that I think might come to the reader more easily if they said they were dreams."

Valentine's work wells from necessity, and records an ongoing process. From the titular poem of her first collection Dream Barker, where a strange, beautiful, and questionable artifact ("a shell shaped like a sand dollar / But worked with Byzantine blue and gold") is available only in dream, to a shared recognition of despair "For a Woman Dead at Thirty" ("even if I'd known / All I could have said is that I know"), the writer is immersed, confessing, studious, and intense. Moments of dreamlike beauty modify, but only temporarily, an underlying dread:

And asked for it; we held out our hands.

Six Dollars! barked the barker, For This Beauty!

We fell down laughing in your flat-bottomed boat.

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.

In her marvelous essay on Sylvia Plath, Valentine asks, "What makes the difference between the subversively unconventional, even revolutionary, and the despairing soul?" The question sounds personal. During her early years of writing, poets like Plath, Sexton and Berryman were producing important work ("When I saw the first of the Ariel poems in print, in 1963, I sat down and rewrote my whole first manuscript," she writes), but "they were suicidal." Valentine feared what she perceived as poetry's dark force, and so in her late thirties she began to meet with therapist Dr. Shea. "I said I'm afraid of...driving off a cliff. I have young children and I don't know if it's the poetry and if I should stop it, and that was a genuine fear of mine...A lot of [the poets] were very heavy drinkers, but rather than be ready to look at my drinking, I was saying to him: what about poetry?" Lucky for Valentine and her readers, "He said, 'No, no, no, the force of poetry is a positive force, and probably kept those people alive longer than they would have been otherwise.'" She was with Dr. Shea for ten years. "He said, 'For you, you should write every day, including Christmas!'" Valentine laughs. "And that really changed my life and it changed my fears..."

Later Valentine would experience another watershed moment, and stop writing for five tough years, from 1982 to 1987. "My beloved therapist had at first moved away and then died...That was an echo of loss and a real loss, an echo of loss from childhood that was really very strong." During this difficult, instructive time, Valentine shed several of what she perceived as her "identities," among them drinking and smoking. "I was also not with a man for the first time in a long time, and that was also a part of what I had clung to as my identity. [Valentine married James Chace in 1957. They have two daughters, Sarah and Rebecca, and were divorced in 1968.] My children had left home, they were off, so I was no longer a home mother." This casting off of identities became for her, "a very positive thing. I realized that my 'identity things' were not there, but I was still there. You could take away all my identities, and I was still there. That kind of knowledge has really been a beautiful thing." The first poem she wrote again was "Trust Me," the affirmation that ends the 1989 collection Home. Deep. Blue.

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 fills us as a woman fills a pitcher.

Valentine embodies trust, essential to the navigating life's mercurial currents; this is one of her many gifts to her readers. A passionate advocate of writing and writers, she edited The Lighthouse Keeper: Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor—what she calls "a festschrift"—because she wanted people to know Taylor's work; now a collection of essays by writers responding to Valentine's oeuvre is in the works. She teaches by her example that poetry is a necessary, daily, humane articulation. "I've got this nun friend; she's just like old Dr Shea. I ask her how should I pray and she tells me: 'Write, do your writing, every day, do your poems. That is your prayer, that is your health, that is everything for you.'"

   Amy Newman's most recent books are fall and BirdGirl Handbook. New work appears or is forthcoming in Image, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, Born Magazine, and The Kenyon Review. She teaches at Northern Illinois University.