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Jean Valentine
USA
Photo Credit: Max Greenstreet
Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A.
from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York
City. She won the Yale
Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her
most recent collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems
1965 - 2003 (Wesleyan Poetry, 2004), is the winner of the 2004
National Book Award for Poetry.
Author of eight other books, most recently The Cradle of the Real Life
(Wesleyan Poetry, 2000), Jean has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and
awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller
Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York
Foundation for the
Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize,
and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000.
She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program
of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in
Manhattan. |
To the Bardo
I dreamed I finally got through to C on the phone
he was whispering
I couldn't make out the words
he had been in the hospital
and then in a home
M was sick too
You know how in dreams you are everyone:
awake too you are everyone:
I am listening breathing your ashy breath
Old Chinese poet:
fire:
to see the way
The Blue Dory, the Soul
--I left the blue dory
there had been so much news
so many flashbulbs breaking
up the dory
so many people
following their names
eating their third heavy car
their third book
I left the blue dory
on its hip on the fence
left my soul not "mine"
"my" clothes off
I left the edges of "my" face
"my" hands
The Coin
While you were alive
and thought well of me
there was always a coin in my fish-mouth
off in the night
or the day lake. Now
the little coin doesn't need itself...
Once
Once there was a woodcutter,
when he asked me to marry him
the woman in the grocery store said
You look like you lost your last friend.
First love!
When we broke up
it was as if the last egg in the house
got dropped on the broken floor.
This world is everywhere! The woman said,
You won’t go unsampled!
My old body
My old body:
a ladder of sunlight,
mercury dust floating through--
My forgivenesses,
how you have learned to love me in my sleep.
All poems from DOOR IN THE MOUNTAIN winner of the 2003 National Book Award
© All Copyright, 2005, Jean
Valentine.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By
Permission.
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