262 Poetry for Students
As to how aware the poet is of “what goes on
beyond the words,” I just don’t know. Sometimes
a reader will see a lot in a poem of mine that I never
say; but I do always hope absolutely that what I did
see will be very clear, very precise. And when a
reader misses what I’m up to, well, then I know
I’ve missed getting it down.
More and more, I revere poets who are both
simple and endlessly resonant with meaning: Eliz-
abeth Bishop, Tomas Transtroömer, to think of just
a couple. Their poems remind me of a phrase of
Frost’s, about thought being “a feat of association.”
And their thought is always grounded in the real:
there’s a real bridge, a real gas station, and so forth.
Barthes also talked about literature’s subver-
sive activity. That is, for him, literature subverts by
undermining the ordinary ways we perceive and
think about the world. For him, as for, say, Susan
Sontag, literature ought to be unsettling. It ought
to provide new categories of thought. Do you see
anything like this working in your own poems?
Your “ordinary things,” to steal one of your titles,
become very extraordinary in your poems.
“New categories of thought”—well, the writ-
ing we remember does bring us something new,
does in that sense trouble our sleeping selves, keep
us from settling down in whatever we thought last
year, or last month; and that’s one thing writing
seems to be for, yes.
But my wish in using the title “Ordinary
Things”was not so much to be ironic as to look as
attentively as I could at the ordinary, at the sort of
feelings and events that are part of everyone’s daily
life in this time and place. It was a high ambition
which I still have (and which many writers must
have): an attempt at what Martin Buber calls “the
hallowing of the everyday.”
Source:Jean Valentine and Richard Jackson, “The Hal-
lowing of the Everyday,” in Acts of Mind: Conversations
with Contemporary Poets, Unversity of Alabama, 1983,
pp. 27–31.Sources
Cramer, Steven, “Self-defense—The River at Wolfby Jean
Valentine / Meetings with Timeby Carl Dennis / Apocrypha
by Eric Pankey / and Others,” in Poetry, Vol. 161, No. 3,
December 1992, p. 161.
Freeman, John, Review of Door in the Mountain: New and
Selected Poems, 1965–2003, in the Seattle Times, Novem-
ber 28, 2004, Section K, p. 7.Hoffert, Barbara, “Best Poetry of 2004,” in Library Jour-
nal, Vol. 130, No. 7, April 15, 2005, p. 94.
Jackson, Richard, “The Hallowing of the Everyday,” in Acts
of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 1983, pp. 27, 29.
Klein, Michael, “Jean Valentine: An Interview,” in American
Poetry Review, Vol. 20, No. 4, July/August 1991, pp. 39–44.
Muske, Carol, “Growing Darkness, Growing Light,” in the
Nation, Vol. 265, No. 3, July 21, 1997, pp. 36, 37.
Ostriker, Alicia, “Seeing the Way,” in American Book
Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, May/June 2005, p. 16.
Review of The River at Wolf, in the Virginia Quarterly
Review, Vol. 69, No. 3, Summer 1993, p. SS101.
Rivard, David, Review of The River at Wolf, in Ploughshares,
Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall 1993, p. 246.
Susskind, H., Review of The River at Wolf, in Choice,
Vol. 30, No. 5, January 1993, p. 798.
Upton, Lee, The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity,
Mastery in Five American Poets, Bucknell University Press,
1998, pp. 76, 77, 90–91.Further Reading
Howe, Florence, ed., No More Masks!: An Anthology
of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Perennial,
1993.
Originally published in 1973, this book is an impor-
tant collection of women’s poetry that portrays the
themes of individual identity and roles in society as
women have asked for justice and nonviolence across
the decades.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood, and Marilyn Yalom, eds.,
Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth
Century, University of Michigan Press, 1985.
The Center for Research on Women at Stanford Uni-
versity collected sixteen essays for this book on the
relationship of the American literary tradition and
women poets. The volume includes bibliographies.
Rankine, Claudia, and Julia Spahr, eds., American Women
Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language,
Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
This volume explores the influence of gender on
contemporary poetry with statements on aesthetics and
identity by the ten featured poets. The book includes
a critical essay on each poet and a bibliography of
works.
Zook, Amy Jo, and Wauneta Hackleman, eds., The Study
and Writing of Poetry by American Women Poets, 2nd rev.
ed., Whitston Publishing Company, 1996.
Designed for high school and college students, this
handbook provides explanations by fifty contempo-
rary American women poets about the techniques
used in writing poetry.Seeing You