Jean Valentine at Home in Poetry
by Madeleine Beckman
Jean Valentine is one of the most respected poets and translators in the U.S. today. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the National Book Award for poetry and a Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. We met in her Upper West apartment, and in her sunny kitchen talked about poetry.
Jean Valentine began writing in the sixth grade. “I mean, they called it writing,” she says smirking. “I don’t know if anyone else would.” She wipes the oak tabletop in her kitchen, the blue enamel teapot whistles, and her two cats walk in and out of the pantry. “I think I started writing because I wanted to get my older sisters’ attention. They were artistic and since I couldn’t draw I had to find something.”
Of Valentine’s work, Philip Booth, in American Poetry Review, wrote: “Jean Valentine’s poems have come to talk more and more quietly. In marvelously strange new rhythms, they talk intensely to everyone she loves – to each of us who knows how to listen, not only to words, but the human silences.” In a poem like “Sister, Morning Is a Time for Miracles,” Valentine’s sparse, subtle style is made clear:
A core of the conversations we never had
lies in the distance
between your wants and mine
a piece of each buried beneath the wall that separates
our sameness
For young women writers today, Valentine represents a woman and a poet who has remained true to her own individual voice. Despite pressure to become more visible in women’s anthologies and women’s readings, she has proceeded at her own quiet pace. In a time when quiet – anything – is easily overlooked, she is still teaching, writing, and giving readings. In 2010 Cooper Canyon Press published her 11th book of poetry, Break the Glass. A review of this book in the Library Journal states: "[Jean Valentine's] poems are a rare pleasure: serious and graceful, never glib, testimony to the strength and beauty of the lyric as a music of words, not ideas. As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."
But, Valentine can be a difficult poet. Her work requires a studied devotion by the reader. She is concerned with relationships, about beginnings and endings. In her poems, she often appears as victim, the woman left, who has lost, the one who is ineffectual, but it is because she trusts, that she can abandon herself to trusting in life and her work. The poem “The Messenger,” illustrates her style and tone within its pacing, word repetition, and grace:
In the strange house
In the strange town
Going barefoot past the parents’ empty room
I hear the horses the fire the wheel bone wings
Your voice
Later in the poem she writes:
The dogwood blossoms stand in still, horizontal planes
At the window. In mist small gray figures
Climb away up the green hill. Carrying precision tools wrapped in
Oilcloth.
Some push their bicycles. – Wait, I’m coming, no this time I mean it.
Her work invites the reader into a place where she the poet is child, woman, melancholy, and yet undiscovered. Her voice is vulnerable, as in the last line “Wait, I’m coming, no this time I mean it.” In her vulnerability she opens us up to our own. Born and raised in Chicago, Valentine attended Radcliffe College where she studied with William Alfred who encouraged her writing and recommended books that made her feel, “at last, someone is giving me this to read... I liked Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein for their plain style,” she says. She also learned from Elizabeth Bishop and Willa Cather. Valentine received the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1965, the highest award a young poet can receive in this country.
Valentine’s first job out of college was as a clerk working for the U.S. Navy in London. “My job was to copy numbers from one page to another,” she says. “Who was it? Dickens? I worked from 8:30a.m. to 5:30p.m. with a half hour for lunch. I remember never seeing daylight. But it was wonderful because I could buy cigarettes and booze cheap and I would have never known working with those English ladies having tea.”
When she moved to New York as a young woman, she thought she’d go into publishing. “I had nothing – not even a resume. I was standing in Grand Central Station and thought I’d call Knopf; I’d heard of them. I called Knopf and said, ‘I’d like a job and the switchboard operator said, ‘We haven’t any jobs,’ so I hung up. I thought that was very strange.” After she called the New York Times and received the same answer, she called the Daily News, where she did land a job as a secretary.
That quietly persistent and determined nature is always present in her poetry. Paul Zweig in the Village Voice wrote, of Ordinary Things, Valentine’s third book of poetry:
There is a breathless, almost whispered quality…one has the sense of being let into a private
place where the poems are going on with the discreet intonations of a voice trying to understand
itself…the words are echoless and hesitant. They seem a little unfinished… and that is Jean
Valentine’s skill: to unresolve the reader’s mind, to peel away its armor of opinions to make
solitary, vulnerable and attentive.
Valentine creates a feeling of seeing or being an apparition on the page, indicating long pauses, breaths, time for thought – through words, punctuation and format – and then she continues. Her poems walk the line between total control and complete abandonment; this is what she is concerned about: what we can and cannot control.
“Dearest,” a poem in her second book, Pilgrims, is about her daughter Sarah. The poem illustrates Valentine’s concern for “human silence” and her skill, using words, meter, and word placement, to create a sensation of the experience:
this day broke
at ten degrees. I swim
in bed over some dream sentence lost
at a child’s crying: the giant on her wall
tips the room over, back: I tell her all I know
The walls will settle, he’ll go.
Valentine’s poems demand that the reader gives herself over to the poet, trust where she is going, what she has to say, and where she is taking us. She is interested in saying new things, even though she may not know from where these ideas have emerged. “That is the surprise in writing – to look at the page, wonder where that line or thought came from,” she says… “and be pleased with yourself because it came from you.”
Time is particularly important in Valentine’s poems. The space/time continuum they inhabit is strategically important and recognizable in how space surrounds the words on the page. The type of time that is most important in her work is the moment when the reader and the poet come to terms with the experience of the poem on the page. In the last stanza of “Autumn Day,” she writes:
Strange quiet,
With time for work, our evenings, you will write long letters
This winter, you have your friends,
And the names of friends of friends
Even in this fragment of the poem, we can surmise the loneliness that the poem is addressing. She believes that seriousness of language is a vehicle through which we, as poets, can communicate. “If you want to abandon grammar, do it with control,” she says. “If you’re going to be unconventional about punctuation then know how and why you’re not using it. But if you’re not sure about punctuation, the poem could suffer and lack energy.”
As a young poet, Valentine wrote primarily in forms like the villanelle because that was how she had been taught. “Master the forms, master the metrics,” she says. “It was a commonplace. It isn’t today. It was like you had to learn to draw before you learned to paint.”
She stresses structure in her work, but when she abandons structure, her work remains tight. In the poem, “Fidelities,” from Ordinary Things, she conveys a fabric of past, present, alliances, losses, and reveries through a couple of crafted jottings:
Here, sitting up late, with a friend,
listening, talking, touching the
hand, his hand
I touch our hand. No one
says anything much. No one
leaves anyone
She says that she'd like to write more politically, but doesn’t feel she’s been successful; however, she’s not giving up. “I think all you can do, if you have a wish, is keep trying it from different angles,” she says. She recalls trying to write a political poem about Cambodia, which, she believes was disastrous. She went so far as to ask her editor, Robert Giroux, to take it out of the book that was to be published. Although Valentine has remained essentially outside political feminist circles, many of her friends and colleagues are widely anthologized in these publications. “It’s hard for me to think about more than one thing at a time,” she says. “If I’m thinking about a woman poet then I’m not thinking about a poet. It draws my concentration from the poems.” She recalls reading an interview with Elisabeth Bishop to encourage herself to write more politically, but Bishop said, ‘she wished the sexes were not separated.’
In addition to her poetry books, Valentine has published translations of the Dutch poet Huub Oosterhuis and the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. She is particularly fond of the work of the Swedish writer Tomas Tanströmer. “I think there are ways of being quiet, of being in your time and place in a meditative way,” she says. “He’ll talk about our world yet he’ll be talking about what it is to be just one person.”
She pours another cup of tea, “When the children were little I used to write at night or early in the morning,” she says. “What I find is that it’s hard to get writing and then it’s hard to stop.” Valentine admits to having phases – months where she has not written, even years when she has felt she hasn’t liked anything she has written.
She recalls, at one point in her career, she was feeling less interested in poetry all together. “I called my friend Grace Paley and said, ‘I don’t know about this teaching because I’m not interested in poetry or even literature anymore.’ And Grace said, ‘That’s correct...That’s all right. The literature people will teach literature.’”
Valentine, who has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, breathed a sigh of relief, took a puff of her cigarette, and said, “I could go on teaching.”
She has a small but devoted following, and believes people are better able to understand poetry when they hear it, which is why she likes giving readings. “I’m interested in working the private and public together – to make it everybody’s poem, a poem that’s taking place in this world.”
Jean Valentine began writing in the sixth grade. “I mean, they called it writing,” she says smirking. “I don’t know if anyone else would.” She wipes the oak tabletop in her kitchen, the blue enamel teapot whistles, and her two cats walk in and out of the pantry. “I think I started writing because I wanted to get my older sisters’ attention. They were artistic and since I couldn’t draw I had to find something.”
Of Valentine’s work, Philip Booth, in American Poetry Review, wrote: “Jean Valentine’s poems have come to talk more and more quietly. In marvelously strange new rhythms, they talk intensely to everyone she loves – to each of us who knows how to listen, not only to words, but the human silences.” In a poem like “Sister, Morning Is a Time for Miracles,” Valentine’s sparse, subtle style is made clear:
A core of the conversations we never had
lies in the distance
between your wants and mine
a piece of each buried beneath the wall that separates
our sameness
For young women writers today, Valentine represents a woman and a poet who has remained true to her own individual voice. Despite pressure to become more visible in women’s anthologies and women’s readings, she has proceeded at her own quiet pace. In a time when quiet – anything – is easily overlooked, she is still teaching, writing, and giving readings. In 2010 Cooper Canyon Press published her 11th book of poetry, Break the Glass. A review of this book in the Library Journal states: "[Jean Valentine's] poems are a rare pleasure: serious and graceful, never glib, testimony to the strength and beauty of the lyric as a music of words, not ideas. As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."
But, Valentine can be a difficult poet. Her work requires a studied devotion by the reader. She is concerned with relationships, about beginnings and endings. In her poems, she often appears as victim, the woman left, who has lost, the one who is ineffectual, but it is because she trusts, that she can abandon herself to trusting in life and her work. The poem “The Messenger,” illustrates her style and tone within its pacing, word repetition, and grace:
In the strange house
In the strange town
Going barefoot past the parents’ empty room
I hear the horses the fire the wheel bone wings
Your voice
Later in the poem she writes:
The dogwood blossoms stand in still, horizontal planes
At the window. In mist small gray figures
Climb away up the green hill. Carrying precision tools wrapped in
Oilcloth.
Some push their bicycles. – Wait, I’m coming, no this time I mean it.
Her work invites the reader into a place where she the poet is child, woman, melancholy, and yet undiscovered. Her voice is vulnerable, as in the last line “Wait, I’m coming, no this time I mean it.” In her vulnerability she opens us up to our own. Born and raised in Chicago, Valentine attended Radcliffe College where she studied with William Alfred who encouraged her writing and recommended books that made her feel, “at last, someone is giving me this to read... I liked Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein for their plain style,” she says. She also learned from Elizabeth Bishop and Willa Cather. Valentine received the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1965, the highest award a young poet can receive in this country.
Valentine’s first job out of college was as a clerk working for the U.S. Navy in London. “My job was to copy numbers from one page to another,” she says. “Who was it? Dickens? I worked from 8:30a.m. to 5:30p.m. with a half hour for lunch. I remember never seeing daylight. But it was wonderful because I could buy cigarettes and booze cheap and I would have never known working with those English ladies having tea.”
When she moved to New York as a young woman, she thought she’d go into publishing. “I had nothing – not even a resume. I was standing in Grand Central Station and thought I’d call Knopf; I’d heard of them. I called Knopf and said, ‘I’d like a job and the switchboard operator said, ‘We haven’t any jobs,’ so I hung up. I thought that was very strange.” After she called the New York Times and received the same answer, she called the Daily News, where she did land a job as a secretary.
That quietly persistent and determined nature is always present in her poetry. Paul Zweig in the Village Voice wrote, of Ordinary Things, Valentine’s third book of poetry:
There is a breathless, almost whispered quality…one has the sense of being let into a private
place where the poems are going on with the discreet intonations of a voice trying to understand
itself…the words are echoless and hesitant. They seem a little unfinished… and that is Jean
Valentine’s skill: to unresolve the reader’s mind, to peel away its armor of opinions to make
solitary, vulnerable and attentive.
Valentine creates a feeling of seeing or being an apparition on the page, indicating long pauses, breaths, time for thought – through words, punctuation and format – and then she continues. Her poems walk the line between total control and complete abandonment; this is what she is concerned about: what we can and cannot control.
“Dearest,” a poem in her second book, Pilgrims, is about her daughter Sarah. The poem illustrates Valentine’s concern for “human silence” and her skill, using words, meter, and word placement, to create a sensation of the experience:
this day broke
at ten degrees. I swim
in bed over some dream sentence lost
at a child’s crying: the giant on her wall
tips the room over, back: I tell her all I know
The walls will settle, he’ll go.
Valentine’s poems demand that the reader gives herself over to the poet, trust where she is going, what she has to say, and where she is taking us. She is interested in saying new things, even though she may not know from where these ideas have emerged. “That is the surprise in writing – to look at the page, wonder where that line or thought came from,” she says… “and be pleased with yourself because it came from you.”
Time is particularly important in Valentine’s poems. The space/time continuum they inhabit is strategically important and recognizable in how space surrounds the words on the page. The type of time that is most important in her work is the moment when the reader and the poet come to terms with the experience of the poem on the page. In the last stanza of “Autumn Day,” she writes:
Strange quiet,
With time for work, our evenings, you will write long letters
This winter, you have your friends,
And the names of friends of friends
Even in this fragment of the poem, we can surmise the loneliness that the poem is addressing. She believes that seriousness of language is a vehicle through which we, as poets, can communicate. “If you want to abandon grammar, do it with control,” she says. “If you’re going to be unconventional about punctuation then know how and why you’re not using it. But if you’re not sure about punctuation, the poem could suffer and lack energy.”
As a young poet, Valentine wrote primarily in forms like the villanelle because that was how she had been taught. “Master the forms, master the metrics,” she says. “It was a commonplace. It isn’t today. It was like you had to learn to draw before you learned to paint.”
She stresses structure in her work, but when she abandons structure, her work remains tight. In the poem, “Fidelities,” from Ordinary Things, she conveys a fabric of past, present, alliances, losses, and reveries through a couple of crafted jottings:
Here, sitting up late, with a friend,
listening, talking, touching the
hand, his hand
I touch our hand. No one
says anything much. No one
leaves anyone
She says that she'd like to write more politically, but doesn’t feel she’s been successful; however, she’s not giving up. “I think all you can do, if you have a wish, is keep trying it from different angles,” she says. She recalls trying to write a political poem about Cambodia, which, she believes was disastrous. She went so far as to ask her editor, Robert Giroux, to take it out of the book that was to be published. Although Valentine has remained essentially outside political feminist circles, many of her friends and colleagues are widely anthologized in these publications. “It’s hard for me to think about more than one thing at a time,” she says. “If I’m thinking about a woman poet then I’m not thinking about a poet. It draws my concentration from the poems.” She recalls reading an interview with Elisabeth Bishop to encourage herself to write more politically, but Bishop said, ‘she wished the sexes were not separated.’
In addition to her poetry books, Valentine has published translations of the Dutch poet Huub Oosterhuis and the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. She is particularly fond of the work of the Swedish writer Tomas Tanströmer. “I think there are ways of being quiet, of being in your time and place in a meditative way,” she says. “He’ll talk about our world yet he’ll be talking about what it is to be just one person.”
She pours another cup of tea, “When the children were little I used to write at night or early in the morning,” she says. “What I find is that it’s hard to get writing and then it’s hard to stop.” Valentine admits to having phases – months where she has not written, even years when she has felt she hasn’t liked anything she has written.
She recalls, at one point in her career, she was feeling less interested in poetry all together. “I called my friend Grace Paley and said, ‘I don’t know about this teaching because I’m not interested in poetry or even literature anymore.’ And Grace said, ‘That’s correct...That’s all right. The literature people will teach literature.’”
Valentine, who has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, breathed a sigh of relief, took a puff of her cigarette, and said, “I could go on teaching.”
She has a small but devoted following, and believes people are better able to understand poetry when they hear it, which is why she likes giving readings. “I’m interested in working the private and public together – to make it everybody’s poem, a poem that’s taking place in this world.”