Reading Jean Valentine with C.D. Wright
“You are dreaming for humanity,” is what Jean Valentine once said to Hafizah Geter in a Paris Review interview on poetry.
If you’re a poet interested in line breaks, Valentine is the place to learn. Geter says of Valentine’s:
“It makes you trust yourself to the gap. Using everything you’ve ever known and forgotten, your mind and your imagination construct a bridge beneath you in real time. Suddenly, instead of “minding the gap,” you cross it. Studying her poems, I learned I could build a bridge between anything I loved—a poet, a song.”
And so when people are asking why they should read poetry, there, that. THAT.
Because we need to know how to bridge gaps. We need to get one thing talking to another through a gaping space, over a vastness, a chasm. Poetry can do this. We can.
If you’re a writer, a poet, a human really, and you haven’t read C.D. Wright’s The Poet, The Lion, etc. may I humbly encourage you to do so? Among so many other things, she teaches us by example how to be a writer in community, even when we are all alone. Especially when we are all alone. She teaches how to be a human who happens to write poetry and prose. (I’m still mourning the loss of such a mind, such a soul).
It seems this is the time of year I ponder C.D.W. Her messages. And Valentine, her messages, too:
I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence
of this world
no, not the world, not reticence, oh
Lord Come
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground.
In C.D.’s book she talks about Valentine by way of the artist Agnes Martin. “…happiness is the very thing we want to serve. Happiness is what we were born to serve.” But if happiness is too far, reach out for gratitude because happiness is far, but gratitude is closer. The gap is less perilous. Wright compares Valentine to Agnes Martin, to Anne Truitt, saying “theirs is not a system of theories” but “ a commitment to the labor. “Writing a word // changing it.”
And she also says, that “the work does not seek society” even though it’s composed in “a city register.” Of these women Wright says, “They are headed straight for the center of some unnameable flower.”
“They are headed straight for the center of some unnameable flower.”
Maybe every time I take Valentine’s books off the shelf I notice all her angels. The Archangels. The guardian angel in New York that “stood in the doorway in the snow.” All her messages.
When I take Wright off the shelf, each time, a new generosity. An encouragement.
She gives us Margaret Avison, saying “poetry results when every word is written in the full light of all a writer knows.”
That’s where we are now — we should be putting everything into everything. You can take every writing class in the world, and these are good things to do don’t get me wrong. But there is your secret. Put everything into every line. Which might mean backtracking to asking, what is the full light of what I know? Figure that out, claim that.
Lastly, be like C.D. Wright. Write about the things you love, the work you love. Write and love. Wright and Valentine. They go together don’t they?
Takeaways? Commit to the labour. Change a word. Change another word. Keep dreaming. You are dreaming for humanity.
If you can’t get to happiness, try gratitude. If possible, when possible, don’t be so fucking reticent. (It’s not always possible).
Throw yourself into the gap that is the line break. Your breath saves you there. Your breathing. So breathe! B r e a t h e
b r e a t h e
a g a i n
