Not having to have an ending, not having to last

Reading, Jean Valentine, Writing, Luna Moths

One day I want to write a book about her. I am writing a book about her. I have thirty pages typed. I feel like I haven’t even begun writing about her.

Born in Chicago in 1934. Received rejection after rejection after rejection for all the first poems she, and then she picked up the phone one day and a voice said your manuscript, Dream Barker, is the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. Translator of Mandelstam. Translator of Marina Tsvetaeva, with Ilya Kaminsky. Alcoholic. Then, recovering alcoholic. Sometimes the spaces in her poems seem like the loss of memory after drinking. Or the memories you almost remember after drinking. Or the memories you do remember, finally, after drinking.

Deep friend of Jane Kenyon. With her, a disciple of Emily Dickinson.

Elegy For Jane Kenyon (2)

Jane is big
with death, Don
sad and kind - Jane
though she's dying
is full of mind

We talk about the table
the little walnut one
how it's like
Emily Dickinson's

But Don says No
Dickinson's
was made of iron. No
said Jane
Of flesh.

Also besides Dickinson and the Russian modernists, a lover of Celan, and Martin Buber. She seems to have fully accepted becoming a disciple of all these thinker/mystic/poets, that her poems arrived through doors they opened for her. Then she went through the doors herself: