This Week, I'm Reading...

Jane Kenyon: The Making of a Poet, by Dana Greene

I was surprised how slim this biography was when it showed up in the mail a few weeks ago. (I had to special order it.) Weighing in at only 156 pages, not counting notes and index, it may be the shortest biography I’ve ever read. But I’m realizing why—because Jane Kenyon was private, and smart. Aside from her poems themselves, she left behind relatively little material for Dana Greene to work with. No journals. Just some letters, and some people, among them my friend Alice Mattison, a New Haven writer who was one of Kenyon’s closest friends and a major source for this book. Before I bought the book, I checked with Alice. She approved. A major part of Greene’s project is to “separate the artist’s life story from that of her husband, the award-winning poet Donald Hall,” the jacket copy notes. The two poets had a relatively happy marriage, but she was 19 years younger. They met when she took a class from the charismatic Hall at the University of Michigan in the spring of 1969, “Introduction to Poetry for Non-English Majors.” Kenyon switched her major to English, gained entry to his creative writing class in the fall, and so began her career as a poet. Not surprisingly, though, she was stuck under his wing. He continued to call her “a talented kid poet” even after they were married. Today, she is arguably the more famous of the two—literally, poetic justice. Each night before I pick up The Making of a Poet, I read a dozen or so of Kenyon’s poems from the collection Otherwise, which was published shortly before her death from leukemia in 1995 and which includes both new poems from that time and selections from her previous collections. I’ve read a little bit of Kenyon’s poetry before, but what’s striking me now as I pay closer attention is her imaginative, targeted metaphors.

The toy her mother brings her from a downtown shopping trip stands in for their relationship:

...She hands me the new toy: a wooden paddle with

a red rubber ball attached to it by an elastic string. Some-

times when she goes downtown, I think she will not come

back.

Describing the feeling of being a newcomer in her husband’s ancestral farmhouse, she riffs on a hymn:

“Blessed be the tie that binds…”

we sing in the church down the road.

And how does it go from there? The tie…

the tether, the hose carrying

oxygen to the astronaut,

turning, turning outside the hatch,

taking a look around.

What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comment section below!