| Name: |
Jane Kenyon |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
Jane Kenyon epitomizes many poets of the 1970s and 1980s: a feminist of sorts; an academic brought up through the ranks of little-magazine publication, followed by contracts with the independent presses. Her residence in New Hampshire and her marriage to well-known poet and editor Donald Hall have been major influences on her work.
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 23 May 1947, Kenyon attended the University of Michigan, earning her B.A. in 1970 and her M.A. in 1972. That same year, she married Hall (on 17 April). She has won several awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1981) and the New Hampshire Commission on the Arts (1984).
Her first book, From Room to Room (1978), is the poetic diary of a honeymoon, in which a young wife explores the spaces between her and her husband, and her new and former homes. Several poems concern short spates of the husband's absence; "The First Eight Days of the Beard" explores the gender gap; and a furtive poem, "Cleaning the Closet," shows the wife finding a dusty suit her husband has not worn since his father's funeral and turning to see her husband watching, whereupon she "fumble[s] to put the suit / back where it was." This last line of the poem tells the story of the book. There is no "back where it was" for either husband or wife.
The overlay of the new on the old continues as the main character progresses through her first anniversary, chronicled in "Year Day," revamping room after room of her new home. As she does so, she encounters the emblems, both universal and personal, of her female lineage, a grandmother's tablecloth here, an heirloom thimble there. And Kenyon's young wife is alert to these emblems, perceiving them with a new feminist consciousness. So it is that, when she finds one of her gray hairs floating in the mop water, she feels akin to those who have scrubbed the floor before her, feels her life "added to theirs."
This squarely narrative book dates itself. It is replete with back-to-quilting feminism, and the fact that it manages to sidestep all of its potential triteness lies in Kenyon's craft--her haikulike precision in rendering an effect and her clear regard for smooth sound.
It is redeemed as well by what has been called "quiet violence." Kenyon's violence is leashed, and thus more alarming. In "The Socks" one finds the wife folding her husband's socks into "tight dark fists," for example. The anger expressed is a woman's, more specifically a twentieth-century woman's, insofar as it expresses the conflict of a woman who has been trained to desire security but who is also very aware of its costs, the sacrificing of individuality and sensitivity. Clearer examples of this anger might be found in a poem in which the wife inures herself to the fact that she has crushed a pet cat beneath the wheels of her car. Her method is to focus on what color to repaint the house. In another poem she uses the vacuum cleaner's drone to block the noise of a man's felling of the eighty-year-old oak, the branches of which menace the house.
In From Room to Room Kenyon asserts her connection to the New England poetic tradition less in her fairly standard rendering of that setting than in her vocal style. She is, in fact, frequently compared to Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, though such comparisons should be viewed as more evocative than exact. And one can hear some Anne Sexton in Kenyon's poetry, too, especially in "Starting Therapy," where the wife's repressed conflicts appear in a neurotic dream: a brain, "hovering over" a porch, "won't come in and ... won't go away." Critics of this book hailed its simplicity but also mentioned Kenyon's thematic complexities and her masterful craftsmanship.
Kenyon closed From Room to Room with translations of six of Anna Akhmatova's poems; clearly the two poets share concerns--for example, desire as reflected in the natural world--as well as musicality and economical imagery. Kenyon's follow-up to her first book was Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985), which appears to be Kenyon's contribution to a feminist revision of the literary canon as well as a set of finger exercises in the economical poetic style Kenyon prefers. But her merits as a translator have yet to come under real scrutiny; most reviewers have read the translation without much reference to the original.
In The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986) Kenyon continues to employ a clear narrative framework for the poems, though a more flexible one than that of From Room to Room. According to reviewer Marianne Boruch, the poems in Kenyon's 1986 book read "like entries in a day book, patient commentary on things worth gathering" (American Poetry Review, March 1987). The themes of the first book persist as well. An eloquent short piece on an heirloom gravy boat, for example, recounts the speaker's grief in observing "a hard, brown / drop of gravy still / on the porcelain lip." And the wife's understanding of love has taken on new dimensions, as in "Song":
How lucky we are
to be holding hands on a porch
in the country. But even this
is not the joy that trembles
under every leaf and tongue.
These two examples also reveal Kenyon's range, her keen alertness to the concrete world, and her ability also to render the abstract.
The Boat of Quiet Hours is more concerned with literary tradition than From Room to Room. Allusions--to John Keats's Endymion (1818), William Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Bible, and the plays of Anton Chekhov--abound. And one anonymous critic (Women's Review of Books, July 1987) observed that the persona of these poems has clearly become a New Englander as evidenced, for example, in the lines "How long winter has lasted--like a Mahler / symphony, or an hour in the dentist's chair."
The reviewers of The Boat of Quiet Hours were unanimous that, within her select boundaries, Kenyon is formidable. But she was criticized for failing to flirt with excess, as if, having toed the tightrope above a host of similar poetry, she should attempt a somersault or two.
The title of Kenyon's Let Evening Come (1990) is perhaps a response to the critics, a resigned imperative, asserting security: the collection reads, in fact, like a continuation of The Boat of Quiet Hours, formatted still to the chores and routines of the same contemplative but disciplined speaker, one who, upon hearing news of a loved one's recurring cancer, retains the capacity to "snap the blue leash onto the D-ring / of the dog's collar," to attend to "that part of life / [which] is intact." Dog-walking is alarmingly recurrent in this collection of close to sixty poems, a repetition that may bring accusations of mundanity and manipulativeness. However, that Kenyon dares use this simple image of coping, of the mind strolling with itself as it waits for what the speaker dreads, is somehow affirming.
Keats, alluded to in The Boat of Quiet Hours, is a character in Kenyon's 1990 collection, evoked, in the speaker's knowledgeable reconstruction of his last days, in various reposes. This reference to Keats is refreshing on the part of Kenyon because it clarifies her awareness that she is subject, as was he, to the criticism that she is a poet's poet. She baits this criticism in her poems in which the speaker registers alarm at or resistance to public places, events, the uneducated, and the unwashed, opting for the privileged retreat to "the sound of pages turning, and coals shifting."
As one has come to expect, Kenyon's craft in sound and image is consummate. The poems, pointedly arranged so as not to concentrate linked themes and subjects, invite a slow, unaggressive reading, one that recapitulates the rhythms of water, leaf, and wind--despite all the clamor for something more stimulating. Faith and meaning, Kenyon urges, as in all of her works, lie in a rhythm so constant one might view it as cliché.
This is the complete article, containing 1,316 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Jane Kenyon
