[Jennifer Reeser]

I'm a fierce afficionado of Jane -- who was, in my opinion, a rare and sublime spirit -- but have only just found this quote today, and found it almost overwhelming in its simplicity:

"The poet’s job is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in such a beautiful way that people cannot live without it; to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important and yet so difficult to name. The poet’s job is to find a name for everything; to be a fearless finder of the names of things; to be an advocate for the beauty of language, the subtleties of language. I think it’s very serious stuff, art; it’s not just decoration. The other job the poet has is to console in the face of the inevitable disintegration of loss and death, all of the tough things we have to face as humans. We have the consolation of beauty, of one soul extending to another soul and saying, 'I’ve been there too.'"



[This message has been edited by Jennifer Reeser (edited July 19, 2004).]

[nyctom]

Sorry but I have always found Kenyon to be vastly overrated--and that quotation is no exception. So much for satires, histories, parodies, comedies, etc etc etc--she essentially limits poets to lyrical impulses. We're all thuppothed to be tho thentitive, so full of "deep" and "profound" "feelings." Unfortunately, this often translates to the "poetry as diary entries" so often found on internet workshop sites.

Not that I'm cynical or anything.

[Michael Juster]

Well, it's not hard to be somewhere between THOSE two extremes. I'll admit to fondness for some of Kenyon's work. I find it more accessible and less self-indulgent than much contemporary lyric poetry, and that it sometimes achieves a wonderful quiet elegance, but I do also agree with Tom that she did not challenge herself enough by choosing a broader range of topics and styles, and she wasn't so good that she earned the luxury of repetitiousness. I think of her as a less successful version of Linda Pastan, who is of the same ilk to my mind but wittier and deeper and a little more insistent on the precision of her language.
Perhaps we can agree on this, though? Kenyon's husband, Donald Hall, strikes me as one of the saddest squanderings of poetic talent of the last three decades.

[Jennifer Reeser]

Well, I still love you

[Michael Juster]

Likewise.

[Jodie Reyes]

Originally posted by Jennifer Reeser:
The poet’s job is to find a name for everything; to be a fearless finder of the names of things...

I think the act of naming is a very political act--particularly if the thing named is outside of the dominant/mainstream consciousness--and so I see no contradiction between the Kenyon quote and the non-lyric modes of poetry.

I'm currently not a particularly huge fan of either Kenyon or Pastan; there was a time I was quite taken by Pastan's Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems and felt it should have won the National Book Award over Gerald Stern's This Time: New and Selected Poems. (I know, this is debatable, but right now it doesn't really matter to me the way it did then.) But very few of the poems from that book resonate with me anymore. And I'm generally not taken with her recent work, with the possible exception of one that just came out in Paris Review.

In contrast, "Otherwise," the title poem of Kenyon's posthumous selected poems volume, strikes me as one of the most moving poems I've ever encountered. "Pharoah" is also quite striking. [So, Mike, your comparison between the two was interesting, because I would have expected the opposite conclusion. But it doesn't really matter to me.]

Donald Hall is currently outside my radar.

[Jennifer Reeser]

By the way, Michael, Jodie, I'm not at all familiar with Pastan, so thanks for the sidenotes on her.

Not to be defensive or even blindly apologetic -- I certainly wouldn't disagree that Jane was limited -- but I might have stayed in college, had I been given her stuff to study, over what I had instead. As it was, I was too independent (even on the edge of seventeen) to believe a degree built on Olds and Plath meant much!

Confronted with Mr. Hall, I may very well have set fire to the English department.

[Mark Allinson]

Jennifer,

I am with you - I love that quote.

I would add this thought from DHL:


The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and "discovers" a new world within the known world.



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Mark Allinson

[nyctom]

Sorry Jen, I have either a terrible cold or allergies and am in a cranky mood. There is one Jane Kenyon poem I like, but I wonder how much of her reputation is built on sympathy. Certainly Hall is making a new career for himself as a Professional Widower. I was in a bookstore with a friend of mine who saw one of the newest Hall books and she said, "Oh God, not another 'Jane Is Dead And I Will Never Be Happy Again' screeds. It isn't that I'm not sorry he lost his wife, but there are limits!" I guess what I object to most in that statement is that it limits poetry to feelings, as if that is the ONLY reason people read and write it. In some ways, it is such a middle-class statement: "We have the consolation of beauty" is quite a lovely sentiment, but if I were late with my rent I could not tell my landlord, "But let me cheer you up with a beyooteeful po-eme." (But wouldn't it be nice if I could?)

Hall did edit a wonderful anthology I used in a college class: To Read Literature: Fiction, Poetry, Drama." It may be out of print, but snatch it up if you find it. He does a devastating deconstruction job on Rod McKuen that alone is worth the price of the book. And it has the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Good stuff.

This is the Kenyon poem:


Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.


Oh, and being a fan of the paintings, I like this one as well:


Dutch Interiors

(for Caroline)

Christ has been done to death
in the cold reaches of northern Europe
a thousand thousand times.
.........................Suddenly bread
and cheese appear on a plate
beside a gleaming pewter beaker of beer.

Now tell me that the Holy Ghost
does not reside in the play of light
on cutlery!

A woman makes lace,
with a moist-eyed spaniel lying
at her small shapely feet.
Even the maid with the chamber pot
is here; the naughty, red-cheeked girl. . . .

And the merchant's wife, still
in her yellow dressing gown
at noon, dips her quill into India ink
with an air of cautious pleasure.


There--perhaps I am not so unredeemable!

[Mark Allinson]

Ah yes, Tom, but what is "beauty"?

Beauty, to me (as for James Hillman) is what arrests my attention, and holds it. This could be a versified intellectual argument, as much as a poem filled with "beautiful" images. The old saw that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" has become such a horrid cliche, because it is so true.

Here is a great passage from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy(early 17th C.), where he shows how some find beauty through their love, where we see none.

Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler's platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis'd cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox-nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, nare simo patuloque [snub and flat nose], a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven brown teeth, beetle-browed, a witch's beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane's neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis, "her dugs like two double jugs," or else no dugs, in that other extreme . . . a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (si qua latent meliora puta) [think that what is not seen is better], and to thy judgment looks like a mard in a lanthorn, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world.

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Mark Allinson