Jean Valentine: This-World Company

Orpheus and Eurydice and Gestures of Turning: Palimpsest in the Poetry of Jean Valentine

KATHLEEN FAGLEY Orpheus and Eurydice and Gestures of Turning Palimpsest in the Poetry of Jean Valentine Jean Valentine writes in her poem “To the Memory of David Kalstone ,” “here’s the letter I wrote, / and the ghost letter, underneath —that’s my work in life.” These “ghost letter[s]” underneath Valentine’s poems often shadow forth the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. These lovers haunt many of her poems and seem to linger on a threshold—what Ann Lauterbach calls a “hinge”—between being here and not being here (3). These “ghost ‹gures” embody her major themes: abandonment, death, eroticism, relationship with the Other/other, and transcendence. The dream serves Valentine’s lyrical intelligence well. In an interview Valentine stated, “the way another poet might write from an outer experience is the same way I write from a dream” (“Interview ” 39). Valentine presents three dream sequences in “About Love.” The images (“white running water,” “milky light on water ,” and “beads of water”) in each of three respective stanzas give this poem its focus and power. Against the backdrop of spare language , white spacing, the absence of connectives, and missing grammar, images assume foreground, as they do in a dream. The poem contains a series of verbal slippages and a chain of associations . As Philip Booth points out, this is all “part of the central strategy . . . to preserve the mystery: to illuminate, not to explain” (5). The poem “Dearest” begins with white space Dearest, this day broke at ten degrees. I swim in bed over some dream sentence lost at a child’s crying: the giant on her wall 43 Notice how the narrator addresses the particular logic of the dream with the phrase “dream sentence.” And this poem begins at the juncture between sleeping and waking—fertile time for the occasion of her poetry—the “5 a.m.” of the poem “March 21st.” The narrator, suspended between two states—the unconscious dream state and the semiconscious waking state—thinks differently; fragments of dream linger, coalesce, and dissipate. Identities become interchangeable in “Sleep Drops Its Nets,” where she writes, “Sleep drops its nets for monsters old as the Flood; / You are not you, no more than I am I . . . And then day sweeps the castle dry.” Valentine’s creative process and preoccupation with relationship and dream enlarge and transform the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice . Like recurring dreams and déjà vu, the myth returns in many of Valentine’s poems in different guises, echoing the broad theme of being lost, then saved and lost again. The gesture of turning becomes a manifestation of the relationship with an other. The narrator turns to dream, to wakefulness, turns to an “other”—whether a lover, God, or mother—turns inward, turns toward, turns away, turns into something other than what she was—as in a palimpsest. This process of transforming one text into another was addressed by Derrida: “Above all it is necessary to read and reread those in whose wake I write, the ‘books’ in whose margins and between whose lines I mark out and read a text simultaneously almost identical and entirely other” (qtd. in Leggo 188). Valentine’s insistence on connection with the other reveals itself in the last stanza of “Silences : A Dream of Governments”: Then, day keeps beginning again: the same stubborn pulse against the throat, the same listening for a human voice— your name, my name (137) The myth itself is full of turnings backward, forward, and turning inward. As Sherod Santos writes in A Poetry of Two Minds, “At the crucial decisive moments of its drama, this story looks inward on its own creators, and that painful self-re›exiveness reminds us of the twofold nature of those truths. . . . as the scholar Elizabeth Sewell has observed, ‘In the Orpheus story, myth is looking at it44 self. This is the re›ection of myth in its own mirror. . . . Orpheus is poetry thinking about itself’” (24–25). These turnings make the myth indeterminate in some of its identifying characteristics. For example, who is Orpheus’s mother? The recursive quality both of Valentine’s work and of dreams predicts that some elements of the myth will reappear throughout her books, whether it is the idea of threshold, darkness, light, death, leave-taking, redemption, turning, or border. Themes recycle throughout her poems and some poems reappear in new versions . “For a Woman Dead at Thirty”—the second poem...