Jean Valentine
reading at Boston University
April 10, 2008

 

Of the 16 other books from Poetry Society of America entrants that I feel all deserve awards, hoopla, and great notice, three are books that I’ve already reviewed here on the blog: Jean Valentine’s Little Boat, Jennifer Moxley’s The Line & Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets. It has now been five months, nine months & a year respectively since I first read & reviewed each of these volumes, and one of the substantial pleasures of judging the William Carlos Williams Award lies in seeing just how very well each stands up. It gives me great confidence that when (not if) I return to these books ten, maybe even twenty years from now, they will continue to shine just as brightly.

I’m not going to re-review these work here – you can click on the links above & go back to my original notes as well as get to further links through which each can be ordered. And you should – these are books that deserve to be in everybody’s library. But I want to note here one of the telling facets of this contest for me. Of the nineteen books that totally convinced me they deserve such kudos as these, 13 are by women. Just stacking the books from the next layer, the male pile is almost identical to the stack of books by women (I note however that more guys have “fat” books than gals). The implication is obvious: we have arrived at a moment when women have reached at least parity when it comes to the production of poetry – and at the highest levels it may be much more than just parity. Yet if I go back to the hoopla that surrounded the “numbers trouble” (PDF) debate several months back, I recall that Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young had tracked reviews in this here blog o’ mine and noted that I too skewed male, noticeably so, when it came to reviewing books of poetry. Yet even I’m willing to concede that of the 19 best books of last year, at least 13 are by female authors, a ratio of better than two to one. What gives?

I think there are a couple of things going on here. The most significant I think is my age: 61. I first came into the world of writing when the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, was at its height at defining the New American canon – and that book had just four female contributors among its 44 poets. Also hot news there in the mid-1960s was the Totem / Corinth mini-anthology, Four Young Lady Poets, edited by the notable feminist LeRoi Jones. The young ladies included Carol Bergé, Rochelle Owens, Barbara Moraff & Diane Wakoski. Today, that title – and all the attitudes it projects – sounds as dated as an episode of the Twilight Zone.

My generation really came of age as poets in the early 1970s, and while women were starting to write in great numbers in that decade, what Judy Grahn has called the “strategic decision” of separatism on the part of many women poets actually reduced the number who were participating in scenes that included the likes of me. If nothing else, this had the short-term impact of reinforcing the maleness of some scenes. When, in 1981 & ’82, I put together In the American Tree as an anthology of what had become known as language poetry, I had the opportunity to decide whether to stick to the historical record of who published what & where, or of puffing the book up in the name of a better political balance. As I’ve noted here before, there were just three poets who fit the objective qualifications for the anthology who were not included. Two were male – Curtis Faville & David Gitin – both of whom had at that point stopped publishing. But the omission of Abigail Child was, in retrospect, a flat out blunder on my part. Still, In the American Tree was 75 percent male & Abby’s inclusion would not have radically revised those numbers.

If you factor in the number of women on the scene who were obviously post-avant, but who consciously distanced themselves from langpo – the writers who would make up the core of (HOW)ever, for example – you can see that the overall balance in the 1970s was clearly changing, but it was still a far cry from what we have today.

To the degree that I am a creature of my generation, focusing on my own age cohort and those immediately older, say up to the age of my parents, the numbers you see here on the blog are, I think, pretty predictable. When I focus on writers who are older than I, the numbers will be a little worse, and on my own generation, a little better, tho still a far cry from parity. But to the degree that I focus on what is going on in poetry right now, recognizing that the real changes in contemporary writing are now being done by a group of writers all quite a bit younger than I, then I think it’s apparent that these figures have to change.

This isn’t easy. Of the poets of my parents’ generation, the one who really took an interest in younger writers, reading them, promoting them, actively engaging their concerns, was Robert Creeley. Of the poets from the intervening generation, between my parents & my own, the poets who have done this have been Jerry Rothenberg & the Waldrops. That’s not exactly a long list. Most poets as they age tend to stay fixed right where they focused when they first matured as writers & readers. And as the writers in whom they are interested die or go silent, most poets as readers find their world contracting, rather than shifting down to the next generation(s).

I have an active interest in trying to get to that next generation (or three) of younger poets – I want to see how the story of poetry itself continues to evolve, even as I have an increasingly complicated relationship to the question of “now.” So here’s to the idea that, over time, the percentages here of male to female will have to change, just to reflect the real world.

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 School of Quietude, dating back to 1919 with the lone choice of Ashbery in 1956 as a true exception. Yet several of its selections, particularly during this mid-century period, were noteworthy for how they stood out against that grain – Dugan’s dogged anti-formalism, for example, or the fact that Gilbert when he won was still as much a creature of Jack Spicer’s Magic Workshop as he was the protégé of Stephen Spender & Gerald Stern, Tate steering something akin to a new (for 1967) Third Way between the Boston Brahmin crowd around Robert Lowell and the more apostate ex-Brahmins around Robert Bly, Bill Merwin & James Wright.

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 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.

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.