Kenyon, Jane 1947-1995

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Kenyon, Jane 1947-1995

PERSONAL:

Born May 23, 1947, in Ann Arbor, MI, daughter of a jazz musician and a singer; died of leukemia, April 23, 1995, in Wilmot, NH; married Donald Hall (a poet), April 17, 1972; children: Philippa Smith, Andrew Hall (stepchildren). Education: University of Michigan, B.A., 1970, M.A., 1972.

CAREER:

Poet.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Avery and Julia Hopwood Award for poetry, University of Michigan; fellow, National Endowment for the Arts, 1981, and New Hampshire Commission on the Arts, 1984; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1992-93.

WRITINGS:

POEMS

From Room to Room, Alice James Books (Cambridge, MA), 1978.

The Boat of Quiet Hours, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1986.

Let Evening Come, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1990.

Constance, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1993.

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1996.

Collected Poems, Graywolf Press (Saint Paul, MN), 2005.

OTHER

(Translator, with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham) Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Eighties Press (St. Paul, MN), 1985.

A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem, Graywolf Press (Saint Paul, MN), 1999.

Work represented in anthologies, including The Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, 1976. Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Magazine, New Criterion, New Republic, New Yorker, Pequod, Ploughshares, and Poetry.

ADAPTATIONS:

Kenyon's poetry has been adapted for song in Briefly It Enters: A Cycle of Songs from the Poems of Jane Kenyon for Voice and Piano, 1994-6, William Bolcom, E.B. Marks Music, 1996, and Let Evening Come: For Soprano, Viola, and Piano, E.B. Marks Music, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

New Hampshire's poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Jane Kenyon was noted for verse that probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against the depression that lasted throughout much of her adult life. Writing for the last two decades of her life at her farm in northern New England, Kenyon is also remembered for her stoic portraits of domestic and rural life; as essayist Gary Roberts noted in Contemporary Women Poets, her poetry was "acutely faithful to the familiarities and mysteries of home life, and it is distinguished by intense calmness in the face of routine disappointments and tragedies."

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Kenyon spent her first two decades in the Midwest, attending the University of Michigan in her hometown through completion of her master's degree in 1972. It was while she was a student at the University of Michigan that Kenyon met her future husband, the poet Donald Hall, who taught there. After her marriage, Kenyon moved with Hall to Eagle Pond Farm, a New Hampshire farm that had been in Hall's family for generations and where she would spend the remainder of her life.

Kenyon published only four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance. She also translated a volume of works by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Despite her relatively small output, her poetry was highly lauded by critics throughout her lifetime. As fellow poet Carol Muske remarked in the New York Times when describing Kenyon's The Boat of Quiet Hours, "These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats's terms, is a capable poet." Indeed, Kenyon's work has often been compared with that of English Romantic poet John Keats; Roberts dubbed her a "Keatsian poet" and noted that, "like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things."

The cycles of nature held special significance for Kenyon, who returned to them again and again, both in her variations on Keats's ode "To Autumn" and in other pastoral verse. In Let Evening Come, her third published collection—and one that found the poet taking what Poetry essayist Paul Breslin called "a darker turn"—Kenyon explored nature's cycles in other ways: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death. Let Evening Come "shows [Kenyon] at the height of her powers," according to Muske in a review of the 1990 volume for the New York Times Book Review, with the poet's "descriptive skills … as notable as her dramatic ones. Her rendering of natural settings, in lines of well-judged rhythm and simple syntax, contribute to the [volume's] memorableness."

Constance began Kenyon's study of depression, and her work in this regard has been compared with that of the late poet Sylvia Plath. Comparing the two, Breslin wrote that "Kenyon's language is much quieter, less self-dramatizing" than that of Plath, and where the earlier poet "would give herself up, writing her lyrical surrender to oblivion, … Kenyon fought to the end." Breslin noted the absence of self-pity in Kenyon's work, and the poet's ability to separate from self and acknowledge the grief and emotional pain of others, as in her poems "Coats," "Sleepers in Jaipur," and "Gettysburg: July 1, 1863," which imagines a mortally wounded soldier lying in wait for death on the historic battlefield.

In Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, a posthumous collection containing twenty poems written just prior to her death as well as several taken from her earlier books, Kenyon "chronicles the uncertainty of living as culpable, temporary creatures," according to Nation contributor Emily Gordon. As Muske added in the New York Times Book Review, Kenyon avoids sentimentality throughout Otherwise. "The poet here wears a housewife's apron, hangs wash on the line, walks a family dog and draws her thought from a melancholy, ecstatic soul as if from the common well, ‘where the fearful and rash alike must come for water.’ In ecstasy," Muske continued, Kenyon "sees this world as a kind of threshold through which we enter God's wonder."

A second posthumous collection, A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem, collects ephemera of the poet's work, as the subtitle suggests. However, the gathered journalism and essays are not minor work, in the opinion of most critics. Scott Hightower, writing in Library Journal, praised the essays as "accessible, earnest, and devoid of urbane ironies." Kenyon's essays in this volume range from the joys of gardening to a frank discussion of her depression and to theories on writing. For Hightower, the volume "succeeds in illuminating a poet and woman of remarkable presence." Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, had similar praise for A Hundred White Daffodils, noting, "These writings present [Kenyon] most appealingly—hopefully, even to those who don't know her verse." Likewise, a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that "the woman who comes to life in these pages is witty, guileless, humble and heartbreakingly intelligent."

Kenyon's longtime publisher, Graywolf Press, released in 2005 the poet's Collected Poems, a gathering of her previously published volumes of verse that, as New York Times Book Review critic Dana Goodyear wrote, is "the best argument for [Kenyon's] place in history." While Goodyear thought that Kenyon could be "inconsistent," she also observed that the poet could be "capable of devastating clarity." Writing in O, The Oprah Magazine, Mark Doty felt that Kenyon "wrote with quiet authority and conviction." For Doty, "Every page of Jane Kenyon's offers a pleasure: clarity, gentle humor, calm and acute observation, and a movingly rendered struggle to understand the life she sees before her." A contributor for Internet Bookwatch reviewing the Collected Poems added further praise, terming it "a definitive and emotionally absorbing volume of life's work." And Joyce Peseroff, writing in the Women's Review of Books, concluded of the collection, "Here is the world made palpable by a patient intelligence—honest, radiant, and rare." Peseroff directed special attention to Kenyon's longest piece of verse, "Having It Out with Melancholy," which the critic thought "turns the language of spiritual ecstasy inside out," and to later poems in the oeuvre, such as "Happiness, Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter 1993," and "Woman, Why Are You Weeping?," in which the poet "becomes more discursive and speculative, directing her scrupulous attention to broader details of history, politics, and philosophical inquiry."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

"Bright Unequivocal Eye": Poems, Papers, and Remembrances from the First Jane Kenyon Conference, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2000.

Carruth, Hayden, Letters to Jane, Ausable Press (Keene, NY), 2004.

Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets since World War II, Third Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Hall, Donald, Without, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1998.

Peseroff, Joyce, editor, Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2005.

Timmerman, John H, Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life, Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, MI), 2002.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, September 1, 2006, "Falling Upward," p. 13.

Booklist, September 1, 1999, Ray Olson, review of A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem, p. 58; September 1, 2005, Ray Olson, review of Collected Poems, p. 43.

Internet Bookwatch, October, 2007, review of Collected Poems.

Library Journal, September 1, 1999, Scott Hightower, review of A Hundred White Daffodils, p. 191.

Michigan Quarterly Review, fall, 2006, "The Presence of Jane Kenyon."

Nation, April 29, 1996, Emily Gordon, review of Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, p. 28.

New Yorker, October 11, 1999, review of A Hundred White Daffodils, p. 96.

New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1987, Carol Muske, review of The Boat of Quiet Hours, p. 13; March 24, 1991, Carol Muske, review of Let Evening Come; January 5, 1997, Carol Muske, review of Otherwise; November 20, 2005, "‘Hundred-Proof Water,’" p. 20.

O, the Oprah Magazine, September, 2005, "Life Lines: Jane Kenyon's Shimmering Poems Illuminate the Profound in the Everyday," p. 182.

Poetry, July, 1997, Paul Breslin, review of Otherwise, pp. 226-240; November, 2004, Donald Hall, "The Third Thing," p. 113.

Publishers Weekly, July 19, 1999, review of A Hundred White Daffodils, p. 171.

Sewanee Review, summer, 2005, "The Abiding Presence of Jane Kenyon."

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1979, review of From Room to Room.

Wisconsin Bookwatch, November, 2005, review of Collected Poems.

Women's Review of Books, September 1, 2006, "The Luminous Particular," p. 22.