SOURCE: Kenyon, Jane, and David Bradt. “Jane Kenyon: An Interview.” Plum Review, no. 10 (winter 1995): 115-28.

[In the following interview, which was conducted in March, 1993, Kenyon discusses art and politics, the necessity of the arts in the schools, poetry translations, and the importance of poetry and the poet in today's society.]

A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jane Kenyon won the Avery and Jule Hopwood Award before completing her degrees at the University of Michigan. She has also won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New Hampshire Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Voelker Award, and the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry. Her books of poetry are From Room to Room, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance. The following exchange took place at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, in March of 1993. Jane Kenyon died at the age of 47 in April of 1995.

[Bradt]: How did the Guggenheim fellowship you won last year affect your life?

[Kenyon]: I was immensely heartened by it. I can't tell you what a thrill it was for me to look at the directory of Guggenheim fellows. To be listed with astrophysicists and dancers and mathematicians and novelists—every kind of human endeavor—was the biggest thrill. Winning has been such a support to me, more than financial, by far. What it says to me is that it matters whether I bother to work or not, whether I bother to build that fire in the stove and warm up the room and get going. It matters.

It came at a time just before Don knew that he was sick. We had three days of unalloyed happiness before we found that he was going to have to have more than half his liver out. While he was mending, I lived in the Upper Valley Hostel, a cooperative house where people stay who are in treatment or whose family members are in treatment. I spent all my time at the hospital, except when I was sleeping. The Guggenheim sustained me through all that. Then, starting in June, and running for seven months, I couldn't write. I don't know what happened. I was tired from all the stress. It wasn't just Don's illness. His mother had a heart attack. We went to Connecticut while Don was still recuperating, and when she came home from the hospital, I took care of her. So I was taking care of Don and taking care of his mother. Then in early autumn, my mother had a bad fall, and I took care of her here for twelve days. All the time I was doing these other things, the thought that I had a Guggenheim kept me going. It said to me, “Okay, you're going to work again, and we hope you will go back to work when you can.” It sustained me through terrible times.

In your “Proposal for New Hampshire Writers” you talk about these as lean times for writers in terms of the political climate. How do you see politics affecting the arts in general?

A governor or president who actively encourages the arts makes a difference—in the schools and in public gatherings such as the inaugural. A public official who thinks to include the arts is important to us as working artists. I think we have a good advocate in the White House now. Things are definitely looking up. We're hoping that Clinton's appointment to chair the National Endowment for the Arts will be a good person.

The Bush administration was not friendly to the arts. Bush's appointed chair at the Endowment was a disaster. By the end of her term she was vetoing anything with sexual content. Moderate Republicans were bullied by the conservative right—the born-agains and southern conservative legislators. There were a number of encounters between the Endowment and the conservative right. The Mapplethorpe incident was just one. People don't want to fund something that makes them uncomfortable. I guess I can understand that, but I don't agree with it. Art does challenge us, and sometimes makes us uncomfortable.

It should, shouldn't it?

Yes, it should. Obviously as an artist I want to see art funded, but I can see the other point of view. There are people who really don't want to confront the things that serious artists confront. I think of certain people in this town, taxpaying citizens, and I wonder, could I in good conscience ask Dot to pay for art that is on the edge? But art is the mirror of the soul, individual and national. It tells us who we are, where we're going, what's valuable and what isn't.

In light of recent political history, do you think writers and artists have an obligation to take political stands?

Yes. Politics, when it gets into art, may not make for the best art, but any thinking person in this nation has to be political. If you're going to complain, then you better vote. If you're going to vote, don't you have to inform yourself? It's part of living in a democracy.

What about the romantic notion of the artist as someone who lives in an ivory tower and is apolitical, concerned only with his or her small slice of the artistic world?

There are as many different kinds of poets as there are engineers or dentists. I'm trying to think if I know any poets who are not political. I can't think of a single poet who is not inclined to get into demonstrations, sign petitions. How can you be a reasonably intelligent person and not, in this time and place, be involved? You can't. The alternative is absolute despair.

In your “Proposal” you urge your fellow writers to give public readings and performances. Why is it important to make the arts public? How important is it that your work, say, gets to the public?

I want it to get to the public. Art isn't a luxury for the privileged few, and it isn't just private. It may begin in solitude, but it is communication with the reader or the listener. It does matter that my work be published, made public, go out into the world and work whatever effect it has. After the “Proposal” was in the newsletter, everybody called me and asked me to do a reading, so I was traipsing all over the place for months after that, doing readings for nothing as I had advocated in the article.

Every year I do a certain number of things for free. I just did an afternoon workshop for the Sullivan County teachers of adult literacy. I go into schools; I think it's important that artists get into the schools and other places where they will encounter people who have never heard a poetry reading, who have no occasion otherwise to encounter a writer. Lots of people think that the good writers are all dead!

We assume that poetry matters. Why does it matter?

It matters because it's beautiful. It matters because it tells the truth, the human truth about the complexity of life. As Akhmatova says, “It is joy and it is pain.” It tells the entire truth about what it is to be alive, about the way of the world, about life and death. Art embodies that complexity and makes it more understandable, less frightening, less bewildering. It matters because it is consolation in times of trouble. Even when a poem addresses a painful subject, it still manages to be consoling, somehow, if it's a good poem. Poetry has an unearthly ability to turn suffering into beauty. When Don was recuperating I had Elizabeth Bishop's poems with me, and I would disappear into that book for minutes at a time, go into that world, and it was a safe place, and a very interesting place. Someone with a marvelous mind and spirit inhabits those poems.

You've been called a contemplative poet and compared to Emily Dickinson. How do you respond to those comments?

To be mentioned in the same breath with Emily Dickinson makes my day. If by contemplative you mean one who meditates on religious matters, I guess we both do that in our work. Dickinson thinks a lot about her soul, and I think a lot about mine. She thinks about her relation to God—a God who is distant, and rather cruelly arbitrary. In many of my poems I am searching, clumsily, for God. We are both full of terror, finally, and puzzlement, at the creation.

What is the source of your poems? Where do they come from?

They come from a number of sources. Finally, I guess I do not exactly know. I would say that poetry comes partly from having had a fair amount of solitude in my childhood. I grew up in the country outside Ann Arbor, Michigan. We didn't have many neighbors, and the neighbors we had didn't have kids, so I turned inward at a fairly early age. That probably has more to do with my being a poet than almost anything else. That, and the fact that when I was first introduced to poetry, which was not till I was in junior high school, I was terribly drawn by the strong emotions that I could see were the stuff of poetry. It was okay to have strong emotions in poetry. I had a lot of emotions as a child—and still have as an adult—that are pretty frightening to me. I found that poets are not afraid of feeling. That's what poetry is about; that's really the great subject of poetry. Right away I recognized poetry as a safe haven.

So where do poems come from? Primarily, I think, from childhood. That's when I fell under the thrall of nature. I spent long hours playing at the stream that ran through my family's property. We lived on a dirt road near the Huron River, across from a working farm. I fell in love with the natural world when I was a kid, so my poems are full of the natural world. I use it again and again as a way of talking about something inward. If you read my poems you would not know you were in the twentieth century, because there are no airplanes or computers or E-mail.

At what point in the making of a poem do formal concerns, like lineation, stanzas, come into play?

Virtually from the beginning. If I showed you a poem with all of its drafts, you could see for yourself how the language changes, how the poem grows and comes into focus, pulls together. At first it's a kind of blind activity. Things come to me when I'm in a certain frame of mind. I sometimes have the feeling that I'm taking dictation. Words suggest themselves. Sometimes I'm not entirely sure of their meaning myself, so I look them up and find that maybe on some deep level I did know what that word means, and it just happens to be the perfect word. There's a tremendous sense, when I'm working well, that I'm getting a big boost from somewhere. I couldn't tell you where.

May Sarton says that poets are chosen.

It's pretty weird. I didn't choose poetry really. It seems to be the only thing I'm fit to do. I could be a landscape gardener if I needed to have a job in some other realm. They're both art, both arranging and rearranging things. Almost always if I search I can find something in the natural world—an objective correlative in Eliot's phrase—that embodies what I'm feeling at the moment. That's when a poem really takes off. For instance, I wrote a poem recently called “Coats,” in which I'm going into Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital and a man is coming out of the hospital with a distraught look on his face, carrying a woman's coat over his arm. I see that, and I know what's happened. That poem threw itself at my feet: “Write me! Write me!” I found that by talking about the coats—the man's coat and the woman's coat—I was able to write the poem. I made up the part about the man's coat in this poem. I say that even though the day was warm, he had zipped his own coat and tied the hood under his chin, “as if preparing for irremediable cold.” It's only three stanzas long, about twelve lines, and it's all about the coats. Maybe he was taking his wife's coat to the cleaner. I doubt it; the emotional truth for me was that he had lost his wife. Lots of people would walk past that man without seeing his situation. I couldn't help seeing it!

Who are the writers you go back to for enjoyment and perhaps for inspiration?

I've been most excited about John Keats, Anna Akhmatova, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, and Anton Chekhov. I mention Chekhov last, but he really belongs at the head of the list, oddly enough. His compassion, his delicate humor, and his profundity seem to me most enviable. And of course his brilliant use of physical detail.

How did you become interested in Akhmatova?

Fourteen or fifteen years ago, Don's old friend Robert Bly was visiting. As he always does he asked me what I was working on. I showed him some poems that I had been working on, and he read them thoughtfully, then looked up and said, “It's time for you now to take a writer and work with that writer as a master.” I wasn't even sure what he meant, but I said, “I can't have a man as a master.” He said without missing a beat, “Then read Akhmatova.” So I began collecting translations of Akhmatova, and I found, much to my dismay, that I didn't think any of the translations were good. So as a kind of exercise in close reading I began collecting all the versions I could of a given poem, and then attempting to write my own version. That's how the door opened.

After I had been doing this for a while, I wondered if these “versions” had any real accuracy. I met a young woman at a party who was a Russian student at Dartmouth. I told her what I had been doing, and she agreed to read them for me. Lou Teel and I began working together and I began to bring the translations closer and closer to the originals. Then Robert came back for another visit. I showed him my translations and he said, “I want to do a book of these”—for the Eighties Press. So that's how it happened.

So you had some help with literal translation?

Yes. After Robert told me he wanted to do the book, he said that there was one Russian scholar he wanted me to work with—Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, an émigré and a very literary person who knows all the subtleties of both languages. Both he and Louis Simpson prevailed on Vera to work with me, and then the project really got underway. Over the next five years I made periodic trips to Vera's home on Long Island and we worked together.

In working on the translations I became so close to those poems that I forgot they weren't mine. It was only after I got that close that I could feel a bit of freedom in translation. Translation is a necessary evil, and especially difficult if you are uncomfortable with the notion of compromise.

My favorite observation on translation is Willard Trask's. Someone commented to him that translation is impossible, and he said, “Of course. That's why I do it.” It takes a lot of nerve.

It's a solemn pledge. You want to be as accurate as possible, but sometimes you have to change literal details to tell the emotional truth of the poem. You can get weak knees, and I think you should. Translation is an uncomfortable business. I struggled with Akhmatova, struggled not to change her images in particular. Then I would turn to my own poems with this tremendous sense of freedom, and I began to feel some power in my own work for the first time—I'm sure as a direct result of working with those translations. Now in my own work, I saw that there was nothing to limit me but my own imagination. Robert had told me that if I worked on translations they would repay me ten times over for the effort I put into them, and I thought Yeah. But I really got going in my own work after I did these translations. I know that if I had not worked so hard on Akhmatova I would never have experienced that surge of power. It was very exciting, and I wrote most of the poems in The Boat of Quiet Hours in the years during and right after I had been working on the translations.

To what extent is sound important in translation, do you think?

It is important. My translations were free verse translations of rhymed and metered poems, and a lot of people would get off the bus right there. They would say, “You've already lost a good part of what makes the poem wonderful.” That's why I say translation is a necessary evil. Either you sacrifice the sound patterns in order to keep the images intact or you sacrifice the images in order to keep the sound intact.

Sometimes you can do both in isolated moments.

It's rare when you can. You're going to sacrifice either image, or form and sound, and of the two the one I would be most reluctant to lose is the integrity of the images. The images in a good poem come from a deep place, and they give the poem a sense of cohesion. Almost everything else can be tinkered with, but if that is tinkered with, the whole work flies apart. Again and again I saw translations of these poems that had no respect for their psychic wholeness. The translators might have been fairly clever at their rhymes, but it was word games, not poetry. I came to believe in the absolute value of the image when I was working on these poems by Akhmatova. In one of her poems, talking about parting from a lover with whom she's had a spat, she says, “The glove that belongs on my right hand I put on my left hand.” Can't you see this flustered, red-faced, confused, frightened woman with a wild look on her face? It's all there in that image.

You've lived here at Eagle Pond for almost twenty years now. Have you become a poet of this place, do you think?

Yes, I think so. I didn't really get going in my work until we came here. I have all the time in the world here. I had to do something to fill those hours, so I began to work more. I used to work only when the spirit moved, but when we came here I began to write every day, and that was a very important step for me. Inherent in that decision to work every day was the admission to myself that I was getting serious about this poetry business. It was not like learning to upholster furniture or growing plants under lights. It was something more serious.

Only two poems in all the things I've published were not written here. For one thing, living here gave me a subject. I was getting to know this place for the first time, and poetry depends a lot, I think, on the state of wonderment. Poets renew for us the awe we feel at creation. The things I noticed about this place were all subjects for poems, and I suddenly had a broad view. That was immensely important. This is such a beautiful place. It's still such an amazement that we live here among these mountains and hills. I think if Don and I had stayed in Ann Arbor and he had gone on teaching, our lives would have been very different, much more suburban and academic. Our move here permitted him to do something that he had wanted to do for a long time, to strike out on his own and go freelance, and that's precisely what he did. He was ready to do that but I think it took nudging from me to get him to do what he wanted to do. Moving here has been critical for both of us in our development as artists. This is the vale of soul-making, as Keats says. This place has made us both considerably different people. The sense of community here is something I never experienced in Ann Arbor.

Would you describe your work habits as a writer?

When things are going well for me, I wake early and I take the dog and go a couple of miles up Ragged Mountain. Then I come back and tidy up a bit and have breakfast and go to my study. I work all morning—on three or four poems at a time, if I'm lucky. I've found that working on one thing until it's done can make it harder to finish because if you get stuck you just have to put it down, whereas if you're working on a number of things, and you get stuck on one, you can put it down and turn to something else. After lunch, if things are really hot, I'll go back upstairs, but if not, I spend the afternoon doing chores. In gardening season I'm outdoors every day all afternoon, from June till September. I find I need that mix of sedentary work combined with something physical in the afternoon because I'm pretty restless. Holding still for a number of hours difficult. I have the best of all worlds. When Gus and I go up on Ragged Mountain in the morning, hardly a day goes by that I don't think, How is it that you have the phenomenal luck to live here?

One of your poems speaks about plants as companions. Does your sense of companionship extend equally to animals?

Certainly—and increasingly to plants and even stones if you want to know the truth. I see all creation as interconnected. But to get back to your question, we've had five cats in our eighteen years here. Gus is our first dog. I never had lived with a dog until Gus. I'm head over heels for this boy. I start every day of my life going for a run with him. He's my spiritual leader. He's entirely forgiving; he's silly; he has a wonderful sense of humor; he's earnest and hard working; he never comes back without a stick—sometimes they're five or six feet long. All the neighbors pass us on the way to work and laugh. He has an ardent nature, never discouraged. Dogs are wonderful Zen masters. He's very good at living in the present. That's an art.

I think it's important that we learn to live in the present, especially if we face health problems. If we don't, we're going to wake up one day and realize the present is all we have, that's all we ever have, and we've failed to be present to the present. We all have a tendency when we're doing one thing to plan the next thing. In Bill Moyers' program on healing and the mind there's an exercise that involves eating one raisin. The natural object is always the adequate symbol. Both Don and I, days later, were still thinking about this yoga teacher eating the raisin with complete attention. When I'm gulping down a sandwich on the run because I have to go someplace or do something, that crazy raisin will come back to me and allow me to slow down. It's become a mnemonic for “slow down.” We gulp down so much life, and it's never really ours that way. It reminds me of Christ saying in the gospels, “He who would save his life must lose it.”

What do you take that to mean?

You really have to turn your complete attention to something large, something that makes you forget who you are and where you are and what you have and what you don't have. You have to bring your awareness completely to this new thing.

Suppose you were a modern day Rilke, and let's say a Ms. Kappus wrote you for advice. And suppose she had at least a glimmer of talent. What would you say to her?

I'd say that your art comes out of your life, and you have to keep living until you have enough to write about. Be patient if you can. Find friends whose judgment you trust and work with them on everything you do. Read, read, read. Art begets art, and you need to read—not just English poets but poets of other cultures and times and traditions. Don't be discouraged if the world doesn't beat a path to your door. If anyone had told me when I was beginning to write poems with serious intent, in my twenties, that it would be another ten years before I published a book, I would have said, “I just can't take that kind of time. I'm running on a different timetable.” I think I've become more patient with the years; I'm learning to take the long view.

Suppose Ms. Kappus asked you, “What's the poet's job?”

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.” Remember Frost's lovely little poem, about going out to clear the pasture spring? “You come too,” he says.