Jean Valentine: This-World Company

“This Close to God this Close to You”: Incarnation in Jean Valentine

AMY NEWMAN “This Close to God this Close to You” Incarnation in Jean Valentine Myths think in men, unbeknownst to them. claude lévi-strauss1 I. Jean Valentine’s work evokes the clarity of known life and the intangible other that is also life, that certain portion of living that is made up of interior wanderings that, because of their inexpressibility in words, seem to us more applicable to dream. Critics often note that Valentine’s poems can seem cast from the energy of dream.2 The rational component of our humanity seeks to translate all into clarity, and mystery must therefore disappear, even if whatever is in that mystery is a musky marker of the human; in rationality , something essential is missing, the term itself a recognition of something made known through absence. A. R. Ammons has described poetry as “a verbal means to a nonverbal source.”3 Language—the tool of poetry—is imperfect, words pretending to de‹ne anything and everything. How imperfect to evoke true life, the con›uence of what is known and felt, with a language that tends to pin down, locate, and identify, rather than suspend. “To de‹ne a thing,” wrote Georges Braque, “is to substitute the de‹nition for the thing.”4 Words gesture toward real experience. A poem that seeks to know the real world in all its dimensions would gesture in ways measured and unmeasured, keen and also soft, simultaneously toward knowing and toward diffusion , toward all that we know of loss. No matter the existence, it’s complicated to be alive. Valentine’s caring for the world is matched by her sense that such a place may be linguistically impossible . 126 Her lost book said, “Your search to ‹nd words that will devour meaning will devour you.” (267) “Her Lost Book,” the long poem sequence that comprises the second half of Valentine’s The Cradle of the Real Life, includes poems of interiors, separations, little exiles, incompletion. The sequence is classic in its contrast and simultaneity: porous and hidden, pervious and allusive, demanding and welcoming, like a transom, like a lighted window. Across the transom factors the world as words murmuring through walls and skin. Gaps, stops, half-utterances, and—except for a mermaid embryo still connected within the body—constant gestures toward separations, breaches, interims, limits. Unlike the others in the sequence, the embryo that listens to “the Real Life” is in a state of paradise, not yet exiled out of her garden into our world. Several other poems in “Her Lost Book” attend to the un‹nished, the layered, and the wandering: there is the woman unable to ‹nish the story in “In the Public Library ”(263–64); we hear the duality of voices in “At the Conference on Women in the Academy” with “the woman talking / in the split-open room / under the room of what we say” (265) (hear both the openness and the division, and the veiled “under”?); there is the dying Margaret, holding tight to her iron bed and to empty us of every illusion of separateness (264) Attending these divisions are implied, imperceptible attachments— invisible lines, like radio signals, between the entities. Valentine emphasizes these connections even as she maintains their mystery, conveying the phenomenon without undoing the phenomenon. The dislocation in Valentine’s work is foregrounded precisely because of the acknowledgment of an underlying coherence; Valentine is all about the tether—how these dislocations contact, link, bond, and bind, though invisible. There are ways other than visibility to be traceable, present. The ‹rst of the three sections of 127 “Her Lost Book” includes “What God Said,” a poem that closes with a quote from St. Mechtilde of Magdeburg: Do not fear your death, for when it arrives I will draw my breath and your soul will come to me like a needle to a magnet. (267) This juncture is echoed immediately in the epigraph to the second section, which reproduces a sign in Braille along a nature walk on the Miwok Trail in Muir Woods: Some of the signs suggest that you feel a leaf or other part of a plant. A string leads from the top of the sign to the plant. (267) Imagining for a moment the transition from the conventionally sighted way of seeing the plant to this other way of looking: moving along a tether toward a different experience of leaf. We feel, seeing...