Week Five: Jean Valentine

When we read Merwin I latched on to the idea of the aging poet reflecting on his life as my anchor in understanding. With Rich, as soon as I saw the date (2000-2004) on the cover I knew I would be reading poems that came from the time surrounding September 11^th, 2001, so that tragedy was my anchor. I also found she shared some ground with Merwin—since both of them were writing from advanced age, they had an often similar tone—soft even when discussing difficult things.  In Break the Glass, Jean Valentine reads like a cross between Merwin and Rich. She also, writes from a perspective of experience. Her sparseness of language reminds me of Merwin’s simple, yet complicated work. But rather than the more internal poeticism of Merwin, Valentine leans more towards Rich’s political and social agenda.

                As I began reading, noting these similarities and differences, I thought my newfound familiarity with Merwin and Rich would make Valentine easy to understand. No such luck. Her poetry is beautiful in its vagueness and its measured, careful use of words, but I found it difficult to unravel such simple, yet very complicated poetry. I then turned to Buber, looking for enlightenment and found it… to a degree. Buber’s writing, just like Valentine’s is hard to describe—it’s so simple that it’s complicated. The translation felt poetic—it was easy to see Buber as part of Valentine’s lineage, and I think his I-You I-It words pairs (Buber 54) and his concepts of you, I, and it are very interesting.

                Valentine’s “Lucy” and Buber’s I and Thou had similar effect on me. I liked the words I read, but had to work to gain any comprehension and earned only the smallest amount. It seemed like in “Lucy,” Valentine is using the discovery of the missing link to explore other missing things or things that were once missing but are now filled—similar, in my mind, to the kind of recursive logic that Buber employs in I and Thou. I’m really looking forward to discussing “Lucy”—I feel like there’s so much there and I want to understand it better.

                A poem that particularly lingered in my mind after reading Valentine (besides “Lucy”) was “The Young Mother.” This poem was one of the most clear to me and though my interpretation is likely wrong I found it meaningful. I thought it beautifully described conception and birth in just a few short lines—an impressive feat for sure. And I took it to be, overall, a statement about the status of the single mother in American society—that she is excluded from the “white ship Witholding” (Valentine 46)and left to sink or swim alone with her children. It was very memorable poem because of that image—an enormous ship that carries some to middle class and beyond while leaving others behind with no way to board.

                Overall, I found Break the Glass to be hauntingly beautiful. Though I often felt lost, too far from meaning to even reach for it, the words as they stood on the page were beautiful in themselves. I didn’t feel like I had to understand these poems to find them moving. But hopefully more understanding with come with our class meeting!