Jean Valentine: This-World Company

Little Light on the Road: An Informal Primer on Reading Jean Valentine, in Six Brief Sections

CATHERINE BARNETT Little Light on the Road An Informal Primer on Reading Jean Valentine, in Six Brief Sections 1. In the Bardo Jean Valentine’s eighth book of poems, The Cradle of the Real Life, opens with “The Pen”: the pen The sandy road, the bright green two-inch lizard little light on the road the pen that writes by itself the mist that blows by, through itself the gourd I drink from in my sleep that also drinks from me —Who taught me to know instead of not to know? And this pen its thought lying on the thought of the table a bow lying across the strings not moving held “The pen that writes by itself”—how badly my young son wanted one. He used to hide under the booth at the local diner, where he’d copy the words from Jean’s poems into his ‹rst notebook. This is how he learned to write; in many ways, we both learned to write from this book. He learned how to write “pen” and began to understand longing. I learned how poetry can embrace confound11 edness, empathy, the known and the unknown, intuition, paradox, crisis. I learned how poetry can enact but not solve the mysteries. Since then, Jean and I have become close friends and she reminds me, both through our friendship and in her work, of Rilke’s words: “Try to live in the uninterpreted world.” 2. The History of the World (or walking outside of time) A few years ago Jean rearranged the furniture in her living room. A beautiful old antique clock, given to her by her great-aunt Frances, was on the ›oor. She lifted it up to the bookshelf and then she opened the clock’s little door to examine the pendulum inside. On the other side of the door was a yellowed label that said: “Warranted, when used well.” The directions explained how to adjust the pendulum to speed time up, or slow it down. In Jean’s poems, time both speeds up and slows down; her poems hover between memory and anticipation; time is not linear; past, present, and future often collide: On your sidewalk walking past your café the piano was being tuned, hard, trying it, one note at a time trying, walking outside of time —was that the night— & space (Little Boat) “You ought to go to bed at night,” she writes in a poem (“Truth”), “to hear the truth / strike / on the childhood clock / in your arms.” As Celan said (in “The Meridian,” a speech he gave in 1960), a poem “ceaselessly calls and hauls itself back . . . from its now-no-longer into its still-now.” Part of this ceaseless calling issues from Jean’s elegies, which refuse to accept disappearance; as Borges wrote, “the voices of the dead / Will utter me forever.” I was lying there (from Little Boat) I was lying there, half-alive in a wooden room at a Russian country place. 12 You sat by me quietly. It’s true you left sometimes, but came back, sat by me kindly quietly. Woodsman, would you go back to the littlelight -wrapped trees and turn them on again? The hide of the deer shivered The summer wind rif›ed through my hair. You are on a long, patient, summer visit from death. I am forgiven. Forgiving. To your place the next to be born. In her chapbook, Lucy, Jean addresses our “most adult human ancestor ,” who is over three million years old, and in the following poem she collapses time, especially in the last two lines, which assert an impossible temporal reality: #3 In the electricity of love, its lightning strike or in its quiet hum in the thighs like this little icebox here not knowing any better or in the dumb hum of the heater going on little stirs in the room-tone I rush outdoors into the air you are Lucy and you rush out to receive me At last there you are who I always knew was there but almost died not meeting when my scraped-out child died Lucy you hold her, all the time. (Break the Glass) In “Then Abraham,” also published in Break the Glass, Jean writes: “Still, all the history of the world / happens at once.” 3. To the Interlocutor In the middle of a ›ight to a conference out west, Jean’s cell phone rang. She picked...