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Secret Book Written in the Dirt: Jean Valentine’s Lucy: A Poem
- University of Michigan Press
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CELIA BLAND Secret Book Written in the Dirt Jean Valentine’s Lucy: A Poem Lucy, three million years in the earth. Lucy, sentry to our history. Lucy, a vessel for our woe, gone to earth. Lucy, the fossilized skeleton of a hominid, a kind of ape-human half our size, nearly chthonic, her face reduced to fragile bone unbelievable in its endurance. For longer than humans have walked the earth, her orbital bones have been silently watching. She is god and a bulb of iris or daffodil. She is animal and rough hammer. A paleontologist holding the puzzle of her skull in his hands named her Lucy, perhaps after Wordsworth’s Lucy, who “dwelt among untrodden ways”; whose grave beauty is “Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky.” Perhaps after “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Australopithecus afarensis, the “southern ape of Afar”—she is afar off, distant, waiting in the deserts of Ethiopia, once-Abyssinia. The Ethiopians call her “Dinkenesh,” meaning “you are beautiful” (Break the Glass 59). One might argue that for Jean Valentine, Lucy is the Abyssinian maid whose song entrances the poet, inspiring her—beware! beware !—to sing. Lucy was written in a wild burst, the poems coming nearly effortlessly in a manic week of inspiration. At the poems’ center: Lucy, the honeydew upon which the poet feeds. St. Augustine described memory as a vast, immeasurable sanctuary . . . Although it is part of my nature , I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it that it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and within it? (Confessions 126) Lucy is sanctuary, a memory that exists both outside itself and within it. The chapbook Lucy is a chain of poems. No table of contents, 214 few titles, many repeating images—spiders, stars, wild›owers, lost ones—and voices: Rilke, Chekhov, Williams. One can read its nineteen pages in one sitting, then read them again. (All collections of poetry should be chapbooks.) Turn her this way and that and, like a prism, Lucy shines. Her faceless presence is repository of Valentine’s grief—“when my scraped-out child died Lucy”—and source of her comfort—“you hold her, all the time.” Lucy is effectively one long poem of long enjambed sentences, bone fragments stubbornly punctuated, end-stopped: “My life is for. / In its language. / Your voice.” This from one of the few titled poems, “My Work of Art,” perhaps the center-poem, in which organic reproduction and artistic composition are comparable and the experience of a work of art aligns with the making of a work of art. Lucy dreams in the earth, artist and skeleton-mother. Valentine’s epigraph, Lucy your secret book that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt— Not having to have an ending Not having to last (Breaking the Glass 61) sounds the theme of the series: Lucy as creative impulse. Lucy comforts, pities, and gives birth to beauty. This is most explicit in the end-poem, “Outsider Art,” about Martín Ramirez, who— mad? hiding? certainly silent—for decades inhabited a California asylum. Essentially buried in the asylum, he was inside, and yet his strangely precise and ‹ligreed line drawings of highway overpasses, bridges, cowboys and goddesses, are masterpieces of Outsider art. Like Lucy, tracing her book in the dirt, this poem de‹nes ephemera—“Not having to have an ending / Not having to last”—and is rife with short i’s—Ramírez, clitoris, lipstick—and long i’s—vagina, I, I—as the poet describes the making of art (or the living of life) despite its transience: When writing came back to me I prayed with lipstick on the windshield as I drove. (Breaking the Glass 75) 215 [44.221.87.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:52 GMT) Valentine, inside the car, writes on the inside of the glass. It is a religious act. Lucy is in the earth; we, as genomic possibilities, are inside her womb, in the marrow of her bones. The connection? Art is mutable—birthing, being born—as the her shifts to you, as the reader transforms from observer to participant, hearing the screams of an animal-woman giving birth, and becoming that mother, screaming still: did you hear animal-woman screams in the night? Were you afraid? Was it you last night your scream over and over...