Friend Genie Leftwich noted yesterday was the birthday of poet Jane Kenyon. Being born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1947, she would have been 67 years old if she had not died (relatively) young in 1995. The last I saw a books-in-print count, Jane Kenyons New and Selected Poems had sold more than 75,000 copies. The number might be higher by now. A best selling poet is a rare bird. She was complicated and to us outside viewers appeared to live in contradictory ways. For example, she struggled with depression in an on-going manner but she and Donald Hall had a relationship that seemed designed to provoke envy ... to the extent that a beautiful documentary film was made about it.. I like her poetry. I also like Anna Akhmatovas and Kenyon translated Akhmatova well for us. I felt a sadness when I discovered Jane Kenyon had died. Recalling that yesterday, it seemed like that was just a short time ago but then it dawned on me that it is actually close to 20 years now. It is interesting to note that she had composed a poem just a few years earlier that became very popular as a reading at funerals and remains so. It is definitely one of her best known poems now, if not *the* best known. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned / in long grass ... she herself wrote in that piece, Let Evening Come. You know youve made it when Cameron Diaz recites a couple of lines of one of your poems as part of her role in a movie. And thats not to detract from Ms. Diaz; when I watched In Her Shoes I was moved by her recitation ... and my wife loved the Jennifer Weiner novel on which the movie is based anyway. However, in the credits of that film, neither the poem title nor Kenyons name are cited. If you havent seen the film, Diaz character Maggie also recites from one of my favourite poems: E. E. Cummings I Carry Your Heart ... yep, I got a catch in my throat and had tears welling in the corners of my eyes when that scene unfolded. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art also plays a role in the movie. I Carry Your Heart has become popular as a reading at weddings and I have seen it used in that context in other films and T.V. shows. Coming back from that poems-in-movies-and-on-T.V. thought-path that seduced me to digress, if you are not familiar with Jane Kenyons poetry, it is worth exploring; if you do not know much about her, Kenyons life is interesting to research (same same for her husband, Donald Hall). Here is a poem by Anna Akhmatova translated by Jane Kenyon: * ** *** ** * Everything promised him to me: the fading amber edge of the sky, and the sweet dreams of Christmas, and the wind at Easter, loud with bells, and the red shoots of the grapevine, and waterfalls in the park, and the two large dragonflies on the rusty iron fencepost. And I could only believe that he would be mine as I walked along the high slopes, the path of burning stones.
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 11:22:34 +0000
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