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The poetry of Jean Valentine is as thematically diverse as it is stylistically unpredictable. Valentine conjures dreamlike images and ethereal rhythms whether she is exploring the most seemingly mundane subject matter, such as a young girl spilling milk on the floor, or life’s most profound turning points. Her concise, but thrillingly evocative work has earned her the Maurice English Poetry Award (1991) and the National Book Award (2004). In 2008 she was named the State Poet of New York.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Childhood of Yearning

Jean Valentine was born on April 27,1934, in Chicago, Illinois. As a child, Valentine held an intense spiritual curiosity. In an interview with Poetry Society.org, Valentine said of this interest in religion, ”It wasn’t particularly in my family. Maybe one has a guardian angel. It’s really a mystery where that comes from. Here, in America, you would never presume that the person next to you would share your religious feelings.” This kinship between religion and mystery would often work its way into the poetry she would compose as an adult.

When she was a young girl, Valentine and her parents (John and Jean Purcell Valentine) moved to Massachusetts. There Valentine attended Milton Academy Girls’ School. After turning eighteen in 1952, she enrolled at Radcliffe College in Cambridge where she majored in English. During her time at school, she developed a love of writing that resulted in her first published piece. The poem, simply titled “Poem,” appeared in the Harvard University publication The Harvard Crimson in 1955. The following year, Valentine graduated from Radcliffe with dreams of continuing upon her poetic path.

Struggling for Success

Establishing herself in the world of poetry was not as easy as Valentine had hoped. The following decade found her settling into domesticity in New York while struggling to get further work published. In 1957, she wed her first husband, the late historian James Chase, with whom she would have two daughters, Sarah, in 1958 and Rebecca, in 1960. Mean-while, she received rejection letter after rejection letter from publications to which she submitted her poems. Perhaps it was the sparkling originality of her work that caused poetry journals to turn away, but Valentine was unwilling to alter her vision even as she longed for acceptance. ”I had no choice,” she told Poetry Society.org. ”It was just the only thing I could do. I did often wish I could do something more popular, but I can’t. It would be fun to be having people love your work.”

Valentine’s earliest poems are more formal than the work for which she would later become most renowned. Her poems were more likely to consist of regular metric and rhymes schemes. She would often tender allusions to the Bible and classical literature in order to lend depth and weight to her work. Her concerns often swirled in the realm of womanhood: romance, marriage, home life, motherhood, feminism, as well as the more personal issues of her struggles with alcohol and depression. Yet, she also relied heavily on fantastic imagery, which leant an aura of mystery and obscurity to her work. The intensity and elusiveness of her imagery proved a stumbling block to some readers, but it also distinguished her as a writer with a singular, startlingly original vision. As she would continue to create, she would continue to develop this style and expand her worldview.

The Breakthrough

In 1964, Valentine experienced a career breakthrough when a collection of her poems beat three hundred other entries to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The following year the collection was published as Dream Barker and Other Poems, thus beginning her highly successful and prolific career as a publishing poet and leading her to seek a life away from traditional family life. Valentine and Chace were divorced in 1968. The following year she published her second collection titled Pilgrims.

During the 1970s, Valentine released two more collections, Ordinary Things in 1974 and The Messenger in 1979. Her next anthology, Home Deep Blue: New and Selected Poems, would not appear until 1989, when she left the United States to live with painter Barrie Cooke in Ireland. During her time in Ireland (1989-1996), Valentine’s poetry reached full maturity, becoming more encompassing in subject matter and distinctive in approach. Stylistically, her work always tended toward the brief and the dreamily evocative, yet her way with rhythm, rhyme, and meter had now grown increasingly free, verging on the experimental. The issues she now tackled in her work were legion, ranging from politics and social issues to the most ordinary daily activities. No matter what a particular poem might be about, Valentine would fashion it with trademark fearlessness and honesty, even when evoking surrealistic, dreamlike images. Unlike her earlier works, which often found the poet focusing her gaze at herself, her more recent poems often zeroed in on characters notable for the down-to-earth way Valentine portrayed them. Even at her most obscure, Valentine displayed a true gift for making her characters seem like living, breathing humans. Her personal feelings of empathy and sympathy for those working across life’s myriad obstacle courses are consistently palpable in her work.

Honoring an Original Poet

As well as publishing, Valentine has also worked as a poetry teacher at a number of institutions, including City University of New York, Columbia University, Hunter College, Pierson College at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, Swarthmore College, the University of Pittsburgh, and the 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association. No longer able to think of herself as an ”unpopular poet,” Valentine has received multiple honors, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Book Award for Poetry (2004) for her collection Door in the Mountain and the Jean Kennedy Smith New York University Creative Writing Award of Distinction (2005). In 2008 Valentine received one of the highest honors an American poet can receive when she was named poet laureate of New York State, a title she will hold until 2010.

Works in Literary Context

Imagism The poetry movement called imagism dates back to the early 1910s when poets like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell used vivid, precisely described visual images to bring their poems to life. They composed concise, clear verses focused on a specific visual image. Early imagists rejected the romanticism and sentimentality of the Victorian poetry of the mid- to late nineteenth century. While the movement only lasted a few years, its influence has continued to spread throughout the years, seeping into the objectivist poetry of the 1930s (which treated poems as objects) and the Beat poetry of the 1950s (which rejected traditional American values in favor of drug and sex experimentation and Eastern spirituality). Imagism has also greatly influenced the work of Valentine, who excels at creating specific, visual images the imagists revered.

Feminist poetry

The feminist movement developed over the course of the twentieth century with the intent of providing women with all the civil, human, personal, and legal rights afforded to men in the United States and Britain. The feminist movement was integral in winning women the right to vote in the late 1910s, the legalization of abortion in 1973, and numerous workplace rights, such as maternity leave, protection against sexual harassment, and equal pay. Feminism birthed a movement in poetry that not only championed feminist ideals but distinguished itself through experimentation with style and form. Free verse, rather than formally metered and rhymed verse, was prominent in feminist poetry. Valentine’s ”Seeing You” is considered to be a prime example of feminist poetry.

Works in Critical Context

In 1992, poet Seamus Heaney remarked, ”Jean Valentine opens a path to a mature place where there is ‘no inside wall’: rapturous, risky, shy of words but desperately true to them, these are poems that only she could write.” Other critics of Valentine’s poetry have echoed Heaney’s sentiment and praised Valentine’s uniqueness even further. Poet Adrienne Rich once said,

Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry ofthe highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in any other way.

Indeed, Jean Valentine’s poetry is often described as a place where unlike things meet: the mundane and the intense, the dream-like and the real, the fragmented and the full. Valentine’s adeptness at making the simplest ideas and images complex fosters a certain kind of trust within a reader; once grounded in the recognizable, the reader will take risks in following the poet into the unexpected. David Rivard, who reviewed Valentine’s work for Ploughshares, a literary journal, finds ”[t]his intimacy is both unsettling and comforting.” With the release of Valentine’s career-spanning Door in the Mountain, Library Journal called Valentine ”one of the best [poets] at work in America today.”

Growing Darkness, Growing Light

Valentine’s dreamlike images may seem inaccessible to some readers, but she has long found favor in the critical world. Her 1997 collection Growing Darkness, Growing Light inspired Praxis to applaud Valentine for her ability to express ”an empathy toward her subjects and a desire to convey their struggles, their attitudes and their feelings” while the book caused Publishers Weekly to declare Valentine ”a commanding poet” and the book ”one of [her] best collections.” Carol Muske of The Nation described Valentine as ”a writer of deep-image, projective verse” before stating that ”the poems in [ Growing Darkness, Growing Light]are indeed dreams, but precise dreams of waking: startling junctures of the abstract and the carnal.”

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965—2003

Valentine’s relatively recent collection Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 (2004) was hailed in the Harvard Review as a ”beautiful volume” that is ”a tribute indeed to one of our most interesting and accomplished poets.” The review went on to specify that ”Valentine makes a virtue out of spareness, producing increasingly elliptical lyrics to entice readers. The new style, which has its roots in the poems in Home Deep Blue from 1989, makes for an art that is less immediately accessible but perhaps all the more powerful for the challenges it puts forth.” Of the same volume, John Freeman wrote in the Seattle Times, “While her contemporaries have turned the blank page into a confessional, Valentine fashioned a magic carpet out of it instead. Using an eerie sense of poise, she transports readers to cloudy dreamscapes where ordinary things take on secret menace and poignancy.”

References:

Davis, Ellen. Review of Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003. Harvard Review (December, 2005). Koch, Crystal. ”Jean Valentine Poetically Enchants Audience.” Praxis (October 16, 1997).
Muske, Carol. Review of Growing Darkness, Growing Light. The Nation (July 21, 1997): 36.
Review of Growing Darkness, Growing Light. Publishers Weekly (March 31, 1997): 70.
com. Jean Valentine. Accessed November 28, 2008, from http://www.answers.com/topic/jean-valentine.
Harvard University Library. Valentine, Jean. Papers, 1952-2004 (inclusive), 1970-2004 (bulk): A Finding Aid . Accessed November 28, 2008, from http:// oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch00369.
Valentine, Jean. Bio/Books. Accessed November 28, 2008, from http://www.jeanvalentine.com/bio06.html.
Poetry Foundation. Jean Valentine. Accessed November 28, 2008, from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ archive/poet.html?id=7021.
The Poetry Society of America. A Conversation with Jean Valentine. Accessed November 28,2008, from http:// www.poetrysociety.org/journal/articles/valentine. html.
Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. Writers at Rutgers: Jean Valentine. Accessed December 12, 2008, from http://english.rutgers.edu/news_events/war/ calendar/0405/valentine.html.
Seattle Times 2004 National Book Award Winners: Poetry and Nonfiction. Accessed December 12, 2008, from http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/ archive/?date=20041128&slug=nbapoetry28.