Jean Valentine: This-World Company

The Gift of the Double Swerve (Jean Valentine’s Endings)

BRENDA HILLMAN The Gift of the Double Swerve (Jean Valentine’s Endings) Some poets remake the invisible. Along the way, they retool abstractions into linguistic substances. Jean Valentine is such a writer, circulating among ideas of the invisible in which nothing is tired, tried or previous. Yet Valentine rides in a possibility of nothing being there. Hers is an existentialist vision in motion, as if existence and essence were in a cab heading uptown, essence got out at Nintieth and Amsterdam , and Jean Valentine got in. Her murals are small, her strokes are modest. Her swath is wide. I have been thinking particularly about her endings, especially the last couple lines of some of her poems. Writers develop familiar moves over the spans of lifetimes of writing; they have characteristic gestures for ‹nishing poems. In the work of the best writers, however , new tones are built of information that keeps yielding, becoming more than the sum of word-meanings. Jean Valentine expands the familiar in such a way as to shrink the predictable. Many writers from Modernism to the present write “against closure”—to use the title of Lyn Hejinian’s wonderful essay on the subject.1 Valentine writes against closure with her use of fragment, abbreviated punctuation, open syntax. It is even more interesting however that she enacts various kinds of “anticlosure/closure/anticlosure,” sometimes keeping the possibility of the declarative sentence that doesn’t conclude the poem or even ‹nish it, sometimes issuing a cryptic concluding sentence as a lottery ticket, sometimes sidestepping an algebraic logic for a geometric one, ‹nding a place in which the lines wrestle with themselves for the rights to intuitive lyric or dream. Or she uses a one-of-a-kind rhyme. I spoke to her about her use of dream logic; she told me how at one point, in a felicitous conversation with the ‹ne Irish poet Den152 nis O’Driscoll, she was enticed by the idea that she could simply apply the magical realist principles of the “tall tale,” in which magical things simply occur without explanation, without resorting to the disclaimer of dreamdom, that inexplicable things are continuous with linguistic and conscious realities.2 She began simply to posit the norm of dreams as conditions. In her last three books, she shows how dream material makes human mental function more profound than logic. The dream transforms itself into meaning-making functions; in her stanzas, the illusory is imbricated with other thought; orderly or systematic re›ection folds back to itself with ›ecks of description, declarations of the present conditions of mind, emotive traces. She writes in valentime, which yields increasing intensity; her poems bring to mind those of Osip Mandelstam, who, in the face of terrible conditions of extremity, writes a seemingly orderly, deeply crafted verse. Her images or sounds set up either a feeling or profound expectation based on strange propositions. Thinking about her images, I recall from Lucretius the idea of the swerve in atoms in De Rerum Natura, and the idea in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift of a yearning set up in an object as a source of power, enabling the thing itself to have an idea that holds a sign, until the thing is taken back to the place of origin.3 The end of each poem, fed on a maintenance dose of baf›ement and change, holds up a mirror; the rest of the poem is a mirror held down to the end by a hand that trembles slightly. I. The Swerve Lucretius writes that the swerve is what keeps atoms from bumping into each other. Just as they are about to make a mistake and strike other atoms, the atoms deliberately swerve; Lucretius is not speaking metaphorically. This is a proposal for how matter keeps itself going, just as imagination does. He writes: Another fact I wish to have you know: When the atoms are carried straight down through the void By their own weight, at an utterly random time And at a random point in space, they swerve a little, 153 Only enough to call it a tilt in motion. For if atoms did not tend to lean, they would Plummet like raindrops through the depths of space . . . So Nature never could have made a thing.4 This is rather like the end of Jean Valentine’s poems; a bit of sound that is allergic to logic ‹nds a swerve...