This is The Poetry Foundation’s Essential American Poets Podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we’ll hear poems by Jane Kenyon. Jane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor Michigan in 1947. She grew up in the midwest and earned her bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Michigan. There she studied with her future husband, the poet Donald Hall. Soon after they were married, Kenyon moved with Hall to Eagle Pond, his family’s farm in New Hampshire, where they lived a quiet live of writing and farming until her untimely death from leukemia. Hall wrote of their life together in his memoir The Best Day, The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, and elegized her in his books of poetry, Without and The Painted Bed. Kenyon wrote poems about New England’s domestic and rural life. Pastoral imagery and the cycle of the seasons were constant themes, as were her depression and fight with leukemia. Critic Gary Roberts compared her response to illness to that of Keats, noting 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. Kenyon published four books of poetry in her lifetime; From Room to Room, The Little Boat, Let Evening Come, and Constants. Her poems, prose and interviews have also been collected posthumously. At the time of her death in 1995, Kenyon was serving as New Hampshire’s poet laureate. The poems you’re about to hear were recorded at the Library of Congress in 1988.

Jane Kenyon: I was born in Ann Arbor, but my parents house was in the country and I went to one school house for the first five years of my schooling. It was an equivocal time for me. I’ll read you one called “Trouble With Math In A One-Room Country School”.

The others bent their heads and started in.

Confused, I asked my neighbor

to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl

who brought raw milk to school from her family’s

herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark,

and on it Christ revealed his beating heart,

holding the flesh back with His wounded hand.

Ann understood division. . . .

Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk

and led me roughly through the class

without a word. My shame was radical

as she propelled me past the cloakroom

to the furnace closet, where only the boys

were put, only the older ones at that.

The door swung briskly shut.

The warmth, the gloom, the smell

of sweeping compound clinging to the broom

soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it

upside down, and sat, hugging my knees.

I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew

from my piano lessons. . . .

and hardened my heart against authority.

And then I heard her steps, her fingers

on the latch. She led me, blinking

and changed, back to the class.

Jane Kenyon: The Clearing

The dog and I push through the ring

of dripping junipers

to enter the open space high on the hill

where I let him off the leash.

He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss;

twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls

and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth;

his pink tongue lolls.

I look for sticks of proper heft

to throw for him, while he sits, prim

and earnest in his love, if it is love.

All night a soaking rain, and now the hill

exhales relief, and the fragrance

of warm earth. . . . The sedges

have grown an inch since yesterday,

and ferns unfurled, and even if they try

the lilacs by the barn can’t

keep from opening today.

I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens,

and the white-throated sparrow’s call

that borders on rudeness. Do you know—

since you went away

all I can do

is wait for you to come back to me.

Jane Kenyon: One that comes out of the experience of collecting money for the heart fund. In the last line, it to me is kind of a joke that I include something in this poem that may not have found it’s way into many other poems. I think that poems need to be true to the thingness of the world, things in all their particularity belong in art. You’ll see what I mean when I get to the last line I hope. This one’s called “No Steps”.

The young bull dropped his head and stared.

Only a wispy wire—electrified—kept us

apart. That, and two long rows of asparagus.

An ancient apple tree

blossomed prodigally pink and white.

The muddy path sucked at my shoe,

but I reached the granite step, and knocked

at the rickety porch door.

Deep in the house a dog began to bark.

I had prepared my Heart Fund speech,

and the first word—When—was on my tongue.

I heard no steps—only the breeze

riffling the tender poplar leaves,

and a random, meditative moo

behind me. . . . Relieved, I turned back

to the car, passing once more

under the bull’s judicial eye. . . .

Everything was intact: the canister,

still far too light and mute,

and metal boutonnières where they began—

in a zip-lock plastic sandwich bag.

Jane Kenyon: I’m a flower gardener. The heavy rains in summer that we invariably get when everything glorious is out, the peonies and the irises, I hate to see those rains come. You wait for 11 months for these flowers to come out, 11 and a half months, and they get smashed.

Heavy Summer Rain

The grasses in the field have toppled,

and in places it seems that a large, now

absent, animal must have passed the night.

The hay will right itself if the day

turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.

None of your blustering entrances

or exits, doors swinging wildly

on their hinges, or your huge unconscious

sighs when you read something sad,

like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,

where he traveled after Clover died.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:

white irises, red peonies; and the poppies

with their black and secret centers

lie shattered on the lawn.

Jane Kenyon: The Blue Bowl

Like primitives we buried the cat

with his bowl. Bare-handed

we scraped sand and gravel

back into the hole. It fell with a hiss

and thud on his side,

on his long red fur, the white feathers

that grew between his toes, and his

long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.

There are sorrows much keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,

ate, stared, and slept. It stormed

all night; now it clears, and a robin

burbles from a dripping bush

like the neighbor who means well

but always says the wrong thing.

That was Jane Kenyon, recorded at the Library of Congress in 1988 and used by permission of Graywolf Press. You’ve been listening to the Essential American Poets Podcast produced by The Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Jane Kenyon and other essential American poets, and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.