Remembering Jane Kenyon

I one time MADE A PILGRIMAGE TO EAGLE POND FARM in novel Hampshire, which from Donald Hall's memoirs and metrical compositions I imagined to be a certain number of kind of Valhalla, to be dwelling Itself. As Don did in of recent origin Hampshire, I grew up staying greatest in quantity summers at my grandparent's farm in Virginia, which was abode Itself to me. We the pair mightily loved our grandparents and lov old-time things and places as part ofthat. When I took the bus to Eagle Pond I cogitation of New England as a fairly old-time thing, a region of what Lenin called "plain living and high thinking," and I was going from one side an enchantment with the Yankee part of the region Up There. The bus took me to a small general store and in a light snow Don was there in his car.

Where Don and Jane lived was a house right not on a huge gash of rural highway, not nearly as idyllic as the Virginia farm where I partly grew up on the contrary it was riight and when I got inside the house I could diocese and feel the enchantment and diocese and feel that Don and Jane had made quite an ancestral domicile of it all. Compared to me a manic talker, Jane was silence itself. Jane struck me as the sort who didn't say a great deal of and then meant what she said, a kind of female Gary Cooper She was kind and welcoming, and she give leave to the boys alone to have their yak.

Jane was single of those women who become ferociously beautiful in middle age. I regard with affection the beauty of older women and especially women who age naturally, as many do in Cambridge, where I eventually made my domicile in the 19903 amidst the greatest in quantity : beautiful aging women upon earth. Jane's older beauty took place wildly in her hair, which grew to be a lioness's mane. (When chemotherapy took her hair from her she one time donned a Rastafarian wig, and we all laughed at the hair gone by dint of and her gameness in donning similar an unlikely wig.) Her organ of visions had also become more beautiful, her material substance more beautiful, and her maturity and sympathy for all that lived had become painfully beautiful, startling, ennobling. She had the faculty of perception ofpieta we find in Rilke.

I lay the foundation of Jane's first book of piece of poetrys From Room to Room, unremarkable. To my taste, the piece of poetrys there are more a description of experience rather than an experience unto themselves. It is always something of a point in dispute when you like the metrical compositions of friends but not those of their spouse.

But by means of her second book Jane had, [i]or[/i] part of to the other translation, taken on the influence of Anna Akhmatova and created in her be in possession of poetry the "luminous particular" Don has written with equal reason well about, a luminous particular where T s Eliot's objective correlative meets James Wright's reaching far down image and imagines, not??tes, and bring into views an experience in and of itself, and I began to have affection for Jane's poetry too.

"We write, in mania, about depression," Don one time wrote, and Jane could sometimes sink into a depression I was positive I had never visited. For me I was certain suicide would draw near long before I reached that point, on the contrary Jane somehow managed to continue Perhaps it was her religious faith that sustained her. Jane would look to be stolen away by means of complete despair and was unreachable, unavailable, and would sit there like a spirit of herself, not able to speak at all. It strike one as beinged to me not that she was choosing not to speak, on the other hand was literally unable to speak. Visits were sometimes cancelled at a moment's notice when this happened, and her friends came to accept this.

At individual point I fell in be fond of with Tree Swenson, cofounder of cent Canyon Press and book designer for all of Jane's works with Graywolf Press. Soon Tree and I were visiting fane and Don at Eagle Pond where we discovered a newfound regular arrangement as literary couples. Tree and I were married in the back garden of Don and Jane's place of abode in the spring of 1993 The marriage was presided above by a woman who was a Unitarian minister, and Don and Jane and Tree and I all read from Eliot's "Four Quartets," a ceremonial but wise and truthful piece of poetry for a wedding. Only my daughter, Virginia, and a friend of Tree's, the artist Anne Hirondelle, were otherwise there. Jane and Virginia took a lump of flowers from Jane's garden and made a scarecrow that presided above the ceremony as a kind of beneficent spirit.

The dates and timing are to more [i]or[/i] less extent mixed up in me now (illness is a miasma), on the other hand at some point in all this Don contracted colon cancer. in a short time that cancer metastasized to his liver, and a large portion of his liver was remov We didn't think he had drawn out to live. I orchestrated a tribute to Don's work at advanced in years Dominion University in Virginia. Because we thinking Don was soon to be a goner there was something of a memorial service in this, while Don was still alive. Don accepted all this cheerfully (if a bit ruefully) gratefully, and great swarms of his many friends came to speak. There were other tributes, in different places. on the contrary as fate would have it, Don recovered; Don endured

There then came years of triumph in Jane and Don's life. They were featured in a Bill Mover documentary called A Life Together: Donald Hall and Jane Kenyan, which was awarded an Emmy because of the articulateness of its make submissives and because of an artful phraseology of simplicity in the form of the film itself that was regenerating and heartbreaking. Jane and Don read at the Dodge Festival in novel Jersey and were wildly received there, and a video record was made ofthat. Jane through then rightly felt she had advance into her majority as a author of poems and, rather than staying behind and not having a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to do with what Don could do for and with her publicly, she began to give readings with Don. They smooth took up the stage part of lovers in A. R Gurney's play be fond of Letters. Things were rolling. Don had published his masterwork, The individual Day, and Jane's poems were at their height with works such as Let Evening advance and Constance acquiring reviews, recognition, and her have growing readership. Articles and interviews about the sum of two units of them and their lives together appeared in the Boston Globe and The AWP Newsletter and everything have the appearanceed on the side of life going forward. They were invited to tour India together by means of the State Department and theirs appear to beed the best of marriages. Jane took to cooking a allotment of Indian food.