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Of Jane Kenyon and Lyric Survival
Han VanderHart
January 30th, 2025
Jane Kenyon, at the Eating of the Pig dinner party in Ann Arbor, 1978
I’ve been continuing my Jane Kenyon deep diving, reading the book Simply Lasting, writers on Jane Kenyon, edited by Joyce Peseroff, who was one of Kenyon’s closest writer friends along with the fiction writer Alice Mattison. I can’t recommend the book enough, whether you are lightly or deeply interested in Jane Kenyon, as it has both a personal recollection section with letters, poems, personal essays, and then a critical essay portion, and in general is so well curated in edited by Kenyon’s intimates. In her own essay, which directly follows Peseroff’s introduction which you should not skip (I won’t spoil the details, but there are some delightful ones there—okay, a teaser: Jane Kenyon discovered house gutters were the perfect shape for baking french bread?!), Alice Mattison describes their small group workshop meetings, which took place three or four times a year:
We three met as a workshop in Joyce's house, in Lexington, Massachusetts, in January of 1983. Later we sometimes gathered at Eagle Pond Farm, sometimes at my house, and twice at the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst (where Don kept us company when we weren't working), but we met most often at Joyce's. We'd begin just after lunch, work through the afternoon—pausing for coffee and dessert—then go out to a Chinese restaurant. In the evening we'd chat with Joyce's husband, Jeff, and go to bed early, Jane and I sleeping on cots in his study. In the morning we'd work again. Exhausted, I'd take Amtrak home in the afternoon.
I love how much food and rest and companionship are included in these meetings. How much intimacy and conversation. Alice describes a workshop that took place immediately after receiving the (much-relatable!) disappointment of an adjunct teaching job rejection (ah, the the amplified slights of academia’s underpaid labors), and helping Jane find a preposition she was happy with in a poem, because Jane did not want to repeat a preposition. Alice offered the preposition “through,” and after some discussion, that pleased Jane: “[…] She wrote down the word with a satisfied flourish. After that first workshop, I took the train home and stepped into Edward’s arms saying ‘I’m healed.’ I’d put behind me the disappointment about the teaching job. I was going to be a writer. The train pulled out and I realized I’d left my wallet on the seat.” This kind of delightful relating is how the personal reflection section IS, so yes, you need this book.
Against my will, I love the Wendell Berry essay “Sweetness Preserved,” although he does peer at Jane Kenyon from without a bit like an art object, as a “beautiful” and “spiritual” poet. The closing paragraph is so beautiful and heartfelt, I forgive him for how the essay necessarily developes, and in fact I think it takes a humble soul to write it as he did. He does some beautiful close reading of both Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon’s poetry in the essay as well, and I definitely recommend you read it.
The Gregory Orr essay “Our Lady of Sorrows” is not to be missed. I’m going to give you a minor feast here of some quotes I loved, especially because what Orr is advocating here, and what we find in Kenyon’s poetry, is going directly against our current administration, against ICE raids, against our profit over people and communities mentality in the United States, and I think it is heartily important to affirm with our students, in our classrooms, with each other, and to ourselves:
If Sylvia Plath was Our Lady of the Rages, Jane was Our Lady of the Sorrows, Our Lady of Vulnerability.
The reason we write love poems is to try to make order out of chaos. This disorder exist, both subjectively and objectively. It exist in war; it exists in weather. One thinks of addiction, dysfunctional families, the loss of a loved one–are these outside or inside events? The answer, of course, is that the exist in both places.
Maybe what I want to say is that this opening of the self to disorder seems to be the way the lyric teaches us to survive. The dominant ideology in our culture says the way to survive disorder is to put on armor and pick up a sword, to survive by the way of the warrior. You overwhelm; you control. The lyric poem proposes a different path. It says that the way to survive disorder is to become vulnerable to whatever the disorder is.
Jane's work is superbly exemplary of that path of vulnerability, that opening to the disorders of subjectivity.[…] the point is not about whether disorder manifests itself in our lives, but what the act of admitting that can do, what the act of writing a poem can do. […] How does a poet do this, how does Jean Kenyon do this? The poet survives by writing a poem. The act of writing is itself the struggle to survive, and it works. The proof is that the poem exist; it's that simple. The existence of a poem is proof that the suffering self survived whatever the disorder was by creating a symbolic drama of its struggle. In this light, you can see that even Sylvia Plath’s fiercest and most apocalyptic poems are poems of survival. Certainly Jane's poem, “Having It out with Melancholy,” is an instance of somebody opening up to disorder and surviving through the ordering powers of imagination.[…] The way of the lyric poem is a terrifying way; the order only lasts for that moment.[…] Because unfortunately that is the problem with lyric poetry: it's only as good as the moment it helps you to survive. Every poet can tell you this. We can't write a poem of enormous desolation, survive that desolation, and then read it next week in order to be consolled; somehow it just doesn't work past the moment. But there is more at stake than the survival of the poet. The second survival is the survival of the reader. The lyric poem reaches out and helps the reader to live by echoing or representing some kind of analogue to an experience he or she has had. In other words, the personal lyric extends an invitation by presenting an experience with which the reader can sympathetically identify.
Other things I love, love about this book: Donald Hall’s gorgeous essay “Ghost in the House” where he so beautifully and frankly writes about Kenyon’s Bipolar Disorder as well as her joy after sex (her orgasms! how beautiful, this frankness about a woman’s sexuality and desire; how simply it is spoken of), Mike Pride’s interview with Jane as well as his relating of the below anecdote, one of many which highlights Kenyon’s spirit and sense of righteous anger:
Yes, I am delighted by Kenyon’s human-ness, by her desire to be praised (“I want to be praised all the time,” she told Alice Mattison, and isn’t that the poet’s desire? Want to calm a poet down? praise them), her anger when slighted, her despair at the world’s injustice, her lily and peony gardening, her love of her dog Gus, her treasury keeping at her local church, her afternoon lovemaking, her honesty about mental health and depression and medications, her pleasure that her initials were the same as John Keats, her love of fine scarfs and cooking Indian food and earrings and more.
Jane Kenyon and Gus
Kenyon’s poetry, her desire to focus her work on one thing, seems to me to offer real relief from the overcrowded and frantic narrative poem I sometimes read, the crushing, overwhelmed poem that seems to take its tone existentially from our news and social media rather than looking for some kind of stillness balance or ballast in the poet’s own self.
Kenyon said in an interview with Marian Blue (in A Hundred White Daffodils):
[Don] is writing large, ambitious, loose-limbed poems, these days, poems in which all his wisdom appears. I am working at one thing–the short lyric. It is all I want, at this point: to write short, intense, musical cries of the spirit. I am a miniature artist and he is painting Diego Rivera murals. I'm not being modest about trying to write short lyrics in the tradition of Sappho, Keats, and Akhmatova.
To write the lyric—to survive by way of the lyric, and the vulnerability it welcomes into its lines, isn’t that exactly what we need right now?
In the Grove: The Poet at Ten
She lay on her back in the timothy
and gazed past the doddering
auburn heads of sumac.
A cloud—huge, calm,
and dignified—covered the sun
but did not, could not, put it out.
The light surged back again.
Nothing could rouse her then
from that joy so violent
it was hard to distinguish from pain.