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Jane Kenyon:A Literary Life
John H. Timmerman
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
2002, 257 pages
Reviewed by Pamela Johnson
Critical biographies are sometimes more about the literary theories of the author of the biography than they are about the subject of the biography. Not so here. John Timmerman’s writing is both invocation (a formula for conjuring) and evocation (imaginative re-creation) and I found myself drawn deeply into the life, craft, and presence of Jane Kenyon through his work in Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life. It is Jane Kenyon that I see more clearly. It is the fierce work of poetry that I see more clearly. It is the truth and shadow of my own life that I see more clearly as a result of Timmerman’s careful and care-filled exploration.
Timmerman is interested in Jane Kenyon’s spiritual journey and he uses her own words to trace that path through “Woman, Why Are You Weeping?” -- where belief is honed on the edge of doubt and anguish -- to the quiet assurance of “Let Evening Come.” He shares a story about a spiritual awakening in Jane’s early adulthood that she says changed her whole way of being in the world. She “relaxed into existence,” she once told Bill Moyers, after a particularly strong vision in which she took her place in a buoyant, shimmering, undulating stream of light. She relaxed into existence and the intertwined, simultaneous nature of beauty and suffering became powerful themes made visible by the intense, sparse, precise, luminous particularity of her poetry. “Jane’s spirituality,” says Timmerman,” was never a means for escaping existence. Rather, it enabled her to embrace reality with all its gritty beauty and intrusive suffering.”
Timmerman is also interested in Jane Kenyon’s craft, and he begins by inquiring into her understanding of the poet’s purpose and her abiding belief that poetry matters. Poetry matters, says Kenyon, because “it is beautiful. It matters because it tells the truth, the human truth about the complexity of life. . . . It matters because it is consolation in times of trouble . . . it has an unearthly ability to turn suffering into beauty.”
When asked what she thought the job of the poet is, Jane outlined a set of principles that guided her writing:
The poet’s job is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in such a beautiful way that people cannot live without it; to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important and yet so difficult to name. The poet’s job is to find a name for everything; to be a fearless finder of the names of things; to be an advocate for the beauty of language, the subtleties of language. I think it’s very serious stuff, art; it’s not just decoration. The other job the poet has is to console in the face of the inevitable disintegration of loss and death, all of the tough things we have to face as humans. We have the consolation of beauty, of one soul extending to another soul and saying, “I’ve been there too.”
Timmerman takes Kenyon’s words and outlines five key elements that help us appreciate the architecture of all of Kenyon’s poetry:
1) The poet is a truth-teller.
2) The task of the poet is to render the truth in beauty.
3) The task of the poet is to locate and evoke those feelings that are important to us because they define us as humans rather than robots.
4) The task of the poet is namingcapturing the force of a specific emotion in a specific situation.
5) The task of the poet is to extend beyond the poem to bring consolation.
“Here we see the specific poetic principles guiding Kenyon’s work: emotion embodied in the particular, the supremacy of the luminous image and the pentad of truth, beauty, naming, evocation of feelings, and consolation,” says Timmerman.
One of the most intriguing features of this critical biography is Timmerman’s access to poems in process. He shares, among other poems, the first, second, and subsequent drafts of “Let Evening Come” and his comments about tone and melody, theme, architecture, sense of place, simplicity of language, diction, and sharpening and clarifying images, gives a sense of the labor of the poet: the breath, the contraction, the stamina it takes to deliver a poem alive. Having stood in the birthing room as silent witness I will never read her (or any other poet for that matter) in the same way again.
I had only one regret as I read this fine biography. I wished the final version of each poem discussed had been included in the text. I longed to sit with each poem after hearing and seeing so much about its conception and gestation and so I read this book with Kenyon’s books beside me. Perhaps this is the author’s intent . . . and wisdom.
Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall were married for twenty-three years and their marriage, says Timmerman, shaped their poetry and the contours of their lives. The book concludes with reflections on Hall’s “Without”, a scream of pain made into art. The chapter opens with a black and white photo of Hall and Kenyon shortly before her death, she with her arm encircling his shoulder; he resting inside the embrace; both leaning into love despite fear.
John Timmerman is a skilled writer. He has fully grasped the transforming power of “show, don’t tell.” I am grateful for his invocation and his evocation.
Pamela Johnson is an editor for The Pilgrim Press. She and her husband live at Still Point Farm in Winona, Minnesota where they raise fifty-two varieties of cut flowers and welcome sojourners into their home.
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