N.Y. Poet Laureate visits Alfred
It is not everyday that a writer is fantastic at their craft, a talented orator and an overall fabulous person. Alfred University was graced on Nov. 20 with the presence of a poet who shines in all three of those categories: Jean Valentine.
The current Poet Laureate of New York State, Jean Valentine is, as Assistant Professor of English Juliana Gray puts it, “sublime.” With a voice that could melt butter, Valentine read to a captive audience selections from her most recent book “Little Boat, Lucy” (a chapbook that will be released in February 2009) and some of her unpublished work.
Every word the poet chose was picked for perfection, evoking not only the image it was chosen to construct, but also a thousand different ideas for her spellbound listeners. With a single phrase, Valentine had the audience in a world of spirits, bones and little boats on tablecloths: “You are my skeleton mother/I bring you coffee in your cemetery bed.”
Valentine shared not only her poetry, but also herself with the audience.
One member asked the age-old-question of “what made you become a poet,” to which Valentine, with a smile, responded, “I don’t think I became a poet,” explaining, “all I could do was write poems.” She said she was “lucky” to get published.
No question was silly or irrelevant; the poet had an answer for everything and took the same care with each inquiry posed to her. When did she write? In the morning, Valentine told us, it is when she has her “best energy.”
How did she like to write? By typewriter, hand, or otherwise? Valentine writes by hand with a pen. She likes the way handwritten manuscripts look, and jokingly told the audience “like the Declaration of Independence, if ‘independence’ was crossed out and replaced with ‘happiness’ or something.”
Favorite questions for a lot of the students were “how many times do you revise?” and “how heavily do you revise?” There was a certain glee to learning that “Lucy” wasn’t revised much, if at all, but reality set in as we were told that most of the time she revises “quite heavily.”
After the reading, a handful of the audience trekked onto the first floor of Howell, and received an extraordinary reception, where we were not only fed delicious food, but continued to have splendid conversation with Valentine.
Her poems, she told us, were “expressions of gratitude.” We were simply grateful she had chosen to read to us, to share both her craft and her love of it. Nobody in the audience went away without a smile, a signed copy of a book of poetry, or a feeling of joy after deciding to hike up that snowy hill to Susan Howell Hall and being rewarded with a fabulous reading by Jean Valentine.
If you missed her reading, or are just interested in learning more about Jean Valentine, check out her website at: http://www.jeanvalentine.com/
