The current state poet of New York, Jean Valentine
has lived most of her life in New York City.
She won the Yale Series Younger Poets award for her first book,
"Dream Barker" in 1965.
And in 2004, she garnered the National Book Award,
for "Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems."
Her most recent book from Wesleyan is "Little Boat."
She's the author of eight other books and numerous awards
and prizes that you can read about in the events guide.
If hinges are the physics that interest Catherine Barnett,
then Jean Valentine's poems may be said to swerve.
I'm borrowing from a Brenda Hillman essay
on Valentine in which she says, "Lucretius writes
that the swerve is what keeps atoms
from bumping into each other.
Just as they're about to make a mistake
and strike another atom, they deliberately swerve."
This is rather like the end of Jean Valentine's poems,
that a sound that is allergic to logic
swerves in the swerve of avoidance that
makes reality possible.
Valentine's swerve to avoid logic
propels the reader into unseen, unsayable spaces,
often apprehended through mystery of dream.
Her poems are paired to particulars and resonate
with after images that warrant our close attention.
The realities that she makes possible
gather energy in the void between things,
in what is being kept secret, what is not being said.
Something like the truth might be glimpsed here.
And somehow although you may not always know where you are
or what you think, you find yourself
immersed in total belief."
CD Wright says that Jean Valentine carries
the world in her arm bones.
I'm going to say that again.
She carries the world in her arm bones.
She takes the fracture line of everyone's contention
and wills it to mend.
"It is not consolation the poems offer," she says,
"but courage, a little human courage."
Maybe this is how the light gets in.
Please welcome our luminous guest, Jean Valentine.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]