Draw the Black Straw: On Jean Valentine’s “Light Me Down”

Light Me Down: The New and Collected Poems of Jean Valentine by Jean Valentine I MET JEAN on my own creative quest at 22. The summer after I graduated college, I went to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to take her weeklong workshop. My doubts about whether I was a “real” poet had become as strong as my convictions, and on some level I knew that the best living poet to help with such a reckoning was Jean Valentine. Jean embodied a way of being a poet as a way of being beyond the page. For Jean, poetry is not something one makes, but a form of opening. We felt it in the way she spoke softly while cupping a hand over her ear and tilting it toward us when we spoke, or how she threw her limbs into her laugh or blew kisses to the dead. How could she be reaching toward so many and reaching inward at the same time? One day, I nervously stopped Jean on the gravel between where we had workshop and where we attended communal readings. The truth is, I don’t remember what I said or asked or if Jean just intuited my need for deep reassurance. I was in-between and she joined me there. Before turning away, she shared an anecdote. I spent the rest of my friendship with Jean from 2011 to 2020 reliving, forgetting, and asking her to remind me. It haunts me that I forget it now though I hold close the feeling of Jean’s vision. Had Elizabeth Bishop come to Robert Lowell in a dream? Had Bishop come to Jean in a dream? Had Bishop heard a voice in her own dream? Marianne Moore? The dream revealed one way or the other that the dreamer was a poet, despite her waking doubts. The memory itself feels more like a visitation. Jean might have touched her forehead and her heart at once like she was lifting her interior life out of her body to embrace me, but she also might have laughed and broken the silence […]

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