A Conversation With Jean Valentine
I first was introduced to Jean Valentine’s poetry around the moment when I began to take my writing seriously, and it is perhaps no coincidence that these two events occurred simultaneously. Her work presented me with entirely new possibilities for what a poem could contain and the inertia it could carry. It was this sense of depth and charge, the humanity generated through her fragmentation and sparse depiction of people and objects, that enraptured me. The attentive space confined within her poems allows each word to resonate as two bells that have been struck together, and that generated electricity carves a space for the reader to enter.I remember being an undergraduate at Suffolk University when Jean Valentine visited and read from her chapbook, Lucy. During that reading, her poems strung us, her listeners, across a canvas of history and a gradient of experience, smudging the lines between reality and imagination. I felt I was pinpointing one of the very purposes of a poet—to enact the contradictory, near impossible task of retracing and bringing to form what has been lost over time, all while knowing that those things gone cannot fully be brought back.It was a thrill to meet and once again listen to Jean last month when she came to the University of New Hampshire as part of our Writers’ Series. Prior to her public reading, Jean sat down with David Rivard's poetry class to discuss her work, her process, and her influences. Here are a few of the most memorable moments from that wonderful conversation. -Kristen BulgerDavid Rivard: I want to say on a personal level that we’ve been talking nonstop since I picked Jean up at South Station around noon time. We’ve known each other for about twenty years, and I am pleased to discover how many common reference points we have in other poets, both as friends and in poets we admire. We were talking about [Tomas] Transtromer and I said whenever I teach Transtromer in undergraduate courses, often times I teach Transtromer and Jean together. I feel that they both have this way of integrating the image and voice into something that is truly mysterious. I’m not crazy about the word “mystery” because it seems to denigrate the real thing in some way, or falls short of the real thing, but they are two poets whose work I’ve felt an enormous resonance in what they’ve done for me psychically, and I keep going back to them over and over again in my life as a poet. It’s been a very sustaining thing for me personally. 
Jean Valentine: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here, to see you all, thanks for inviting me. We were just saying that we both adore Transtromer and to be mentioned in the same breath is more than I can imagine.On Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, and being a female poet in the 1950’s…JV: I’d actually never heard of Adrienne Rich until I got to Radcliffe, I knew nothing about anything really. But the dean was a wonderful person; she had a strong feeling for poetry. And well, the thing about Adrienne is that she had graduated the year before, but we met each other later and were very close friends. In fact, I’ve got a poem for her. But anyways, I was walking down the street in Cambridge and some kindly old gentleman mentioned to me that there was a very good poet there once and her name was Adrienne Rich. And it hit me that I was living on the same planet as people who talk about poetry! I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.On the other hand, Harvard was still extremely male, even though during the war they were having co-ed classes. But really the only poetry courses you could find were about Robert Frost. And he is very good, but every once in a while you’d like to hear that Elizabeth Bishop brought out a book. Or that there were writers in the world like Virginia Woolf. So times were changing, but in some ways were still very solid. You’d hear casually said, “Well, the girls just answer what the lecture has said, whereas the boys think.” And that was hard. And it directly affected what I wanted to do in life, which was to write poetry.But at the same time, I had a wonderful teacher who encouraged me and liked my poetry, who suggested to me Elizabeth Bishop. So from then I was given a poet I could follow and love for the rest of my life. So I was alright. You really only need a little bit, but you need that bit so much.On the influence or imitation of admired writers…JV: I don’t think I’ve ever been able to imitate. I love people without having to bring them into my work. I wish I could, but maybe I’m protecting myself so that I would still exist, you know? What Bishop and Rich gave me was hope, which was more important than their style or their gift. The person who blew me away was Plath. Somebody gave us her first book, and it took my breath away completely. It woke me up in some way. I think there are people who are so important to us that they can change us. Whether it changes your writing or not is not the most important – rather if it changes your way of thinking and seeing. And she did that for me.On isolation in writing…DR: Were you in touch with other women poets at that time?JV: Not really no. Or men poets. Or animal poets! I didn’t want to be isolated, but I was. But isolation is not completely a bad thing. I think I need a lot of solitude in my life. I don’t think every poet does, but I do. I love my dreams and I love to have the quiet to dream them. I don’t have to live alone, but I need a certain amount of quiet around me. I think what it did was narrow my vision of what life around me was. And at the same time it probably let me know more inward. And that’s not a completely bad thing either. I’d like to think my poetry begins there, in the inward.On the sound of language…Kristen Bulger: In the past two weeks in class we’ve been talking a lot about language and how words together can not only articulate an image but also have a charge between them. I feel like so much of your work has a sensitivity to that space between words. There’s a command in the silence or breaks between words. I was wondering if you could talk a little about that or your process with that.JV: Well, I don’t use a lot of punctuation except for spaces between words and stanzas. That space is very important to me. Sound and spaces are very important to me – they’re things I can’t live without in poetry. And I don’t know when they got to be so important. I feel like you can do so much with silence and pauses. All writers do that. It seems, if you’re lucky, to express emotion.I think a lot of the things I write, if they were just written out, wouldn’t be very interesting. The pauses are very important. As they are in music and speech. I love sound.On Robert Creeley…JV: Oh, Creeley. What a wonderful man. A wonderful poet. He was so beloved. The first time I saw him I just about died over his handsomeness. He was in Cambridge and had a black patch over one eye. Whoa. And what a poet.DR: Well, he’s a great example of a poet who uses minimal language, but in using punctuation and silences, he communicates a huge amount of meaning as well.JV: Well, maybe that’s where I got it.On lonely speakers… Justin Berkhart: You seem to invite a reader to walk with you in your poems and willingly suspend disbelief. What can I do to invite a reader to come on a similar journey? Besides paying close attention to stanzas and space…JV: Oh, I wouldn’t do any of that if you don’t feel like it. I think what we get from another poet is what we already have. I wouldn’t worry about that. Well… are you lonely?JB: I suppose many of my speakers are.JV: That could be a path towards wanting someone else to talk to at any rate, even if they’re not coming into the poem. For me, writing poetry has been greatly a matter of wanting to talk to someone. And I don’t know who they are, but it’s a matter of imagining that someone is listening. Sometimes I’ve done it in form of a letter, then taking the letter form away. For me, that’s been helpful.On the state of poetry today…JV: It seems there’s much more poetry now, which is very good. And there’s many more places where poets can gather when they’re young and be taught by wonderful teachers. I think we have a long way to go. Education helps. Too much education probably gets in your way. But I think knowing other poets has to be good and there’s much more opportunity for that now.I feel like women writers are being taken a lot more seriously than they were in my day. There were exceptions; we had Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop and that was it. Then Plath came. There were very few women poets. But every change I’ve seen in that has been good. Changes that I’d like to see today are racial and financial.I try to write political poems, and they’re terrible. But I’m still trying. There’s so much bad political poetry written that I think it’s more a dread of being harmful to an idea that I want. It makes me aware of trying.On trusting one’s own work…Mike Riello: Was there ever a moment when you came to find that you could trust what you were doing without doubting yourself? Does that just happen at some point?JV: Never. Sometimes I get a feeling that I like [a poem]. But once I did get to know other poets, I never walked away from them. I show them everything. I have a couple of poets that I show my work to; Jane Mead is a wonderful poet that looks at my work. I need somebody else to look at my work to see if I’m “right.” I get feelings about a poem, but I never believe them until I show it to someone I really trust. I don’t trust myself in that way. And you find that you become a trusted reader for them, too; it’s a good connection. I wish you all had a trusted reader like that.Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her 12th book of poetry is Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Her next book, Shirt in Heaven, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2015. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia. She lives in New York City.