Jean Valentine '52 Wins 2004 National Book Award for Poetry
"Letter” is a poem by Jean Valentine
’52 that I found among the new poems of her most recent
collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems
1965– 2003, the winner of the 2004 National Book Award
for Poetry. The poem is unassuming in the space it takes
up, quiet in image, in its movement and thought—easy,
even, to overlook. But the longer I spend with it, the more
I appreciate the work of Jean Valentine.
In its title, “Letter” offers us something tangible,
something, well, deliverable. And yet like the hornet’s
sleepy hold on the curtain she climbs, our grasp on the
poem’s physical world is tenuous: Who has penned this
letter? Who is its recipient? Where in the physical world
of the poem does it sit? And, if “Letter” is
the poem (the arrangement of letters into words) that we
read, a letter opened for us, how do we translate its intentions?
Just so, I think, Jean sets in motion this
complicated and utterly tenuous relationship between the
physical world and the interior experience of the present
“I”—a relationship we see repeatedly through
this collection. In the second stanza, this “I”
is “the guest,” someone invited to enter but
foreign, unfamiliar with the space entered—a letter
herself, still in formation. “These words / are my
life,” the narrator says—an admission of emotional
connection between self and language, but also of physical
connection: if words are, literally, self, then nothing
is stable.
Jean demonstrates this instability as she
shifts and reorders language: “The effort of becoming”
is, a line later, “[t]he effort of loving the un-become”
and later, “[t]he un-become love.” What we lose
is also what we cherish; what we become is also unbecoming.
Metaphor shifts our perception of the physical: a “leaf”
is a book’s page; a letter is a “seed-pod”
sent, is “this red ribbon,” is “my tongue.”
The body is the physical letter. If we are words, after
all, we are subject to the manipulation of writers and,
of course, readers.
Throughout this collection, Jean’s
poetry works hard to articulate a self that is struggling
to articulate itself (“the suffering visible”).
“Letter” enacts both the necessity of self-articulation
and the perpetual process of it: no letter is sent; completed
action is not attainable; completed, defined self is not
the point. Perhaps the point is to love what is still undefined.
In a recent interview with Kate Greenstreet,
Jean says, “Don’t turn away from something that’s
difficult because it’s difficult. Try to go toward
it. Try to bring the same degree of necessity to reading
it that the writer brought to writing it.” To read
Jean well is to commit to plumbing the depths of each poem,
to wrestle with their wrestlings. “[I want to] get
to a place that has some depth to it,” she says. “Certainly,
I’m always working with things that I don’t
understand—with the unconscious, the invisible. And
trying to find a way to translate it.” Jean’s
poetry echoes the irrevocability of Sylvia Plath, the political
of Adrienne Rich, the gravity of Dickinson. She asks her
readers, explicitly in “Letter” but more subtly
in other poems of the collection, to read her, to commit
to the relationship and the responsibility of interpreting
the letters sent.
Door in the Mountain collects
her life’s work and orders her eight books of poetry
chronologically, with the exception of the new poems, which
appear first. So many of these poems feel like shards to
me: ragged, sometimes dangerous fragments—utterances
of a self as it navigates literal and linguistic space.
Her good friend and poet Adrienne Rich says of her writing:
“Looking into a 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.” Beneath the
surface of many of these poems, Valentine’s own personal
struggles with alcoholism, depression and divorce lurk.
I read Jean’s collection on the same
December day I heard the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil
dazzle the student body assembled in the Fitzgibbons Convocation
Center. I had left staggering, filled with new knowledge
of the exponential speed of progress, with the limitless
nature of human exploration and invention in the worlds
of biotechnology and artificial intelligence. Immediately
following, Jean’s poetry felt like an antidote to
the breathlessness, even recklessness of change: a concentrated
slowing; a relentless focus on interiority and on the process
of self-narration. Maybe now more than ever, in the face
of so much change, we need such attention to how we “become,”
and how we love the “un-become.”
But the longer I spend thinking about Jean,
the more I consider. The last stanza of this poem “Letter”
presents, in my mind, a world beyond word-bound identity.
The language is unfettered by punctuation: a rush of consumption,
of nourishment, of natural productivity, left open at either
end with dashes: a nod to Dickinson, but also the promise
of limitless white space unmarred by words. This last moment
of this poem feels hopeful, possible—an undefined
place for identity to exist, free of the (uncertain) certainty
of language. Maybe this is Jean’s image of the subconscious
or subliminal, the womb-like space where the self swims
before it rises to meet consciousness.
The irony, of course, is this: words are
inescapable; they are the poet’s medium, the only
way to connect the imagined and the “real.”
And now I picture a projected, virtual,
three-dimensional Kurzweil, all orchestrated by the “real”
Kurzweil from his home in Cambridge, lecturing to Asian
scientists about our imminent ability to move in and out
of various selves in an extraordinary space beyond the physical—all
imagined by the very “real” neurons that fire
throughout our human brains, and I wonder if this scientist
and this poet are more connected than not. And I wonder
if Jean would mind the comparison.
Lisa Baker
English Department
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