Jane Kenyon
{{short description|American poet, translator}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Jane Kenyon
| image = Jane Kenyon.jpg
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| birth_date = {{Birth date|1947|5|23}}
| birth_place = Ann Arbor, Michigan
United States
| death_date = {{Death date and age|1995|4|22|1947|5|23}}
| death_place = Wilmot, New Hampshire
United States
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| occupation = Poet, translator
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| alma_mater = University of Michigan
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| spouse = {{marriage|Donald Hall|1972}}
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Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947 – April 22, 1995) was an American poet and translator. Her work is often characterized as simple, spare, and emotionally resonant. Kenyon was the second wife of poet, editor, and critic Donald Hall who made her the subject of many of his poems.
Life
Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Ruele and Pauline, she grew up in the Midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. She won a Hopwood Award at Michigan. As a university student Kenyon met poet Donald Hall; though he was some nineteen years her senior, she married him in 1972, and they moved to his ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate when she died on April 22, 1995, from leukemia.{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/27/obituaries/jane-kenyon-47-a-poet-laureate.html |title=Jane Kenyon, 47, A Poet Laureate |newspaper=The New York Times |date=27 April 1995}}
Career
Four collections of Kenyon's poems were published during her lifetime: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990) and Constance (1993); apart from the former being published through Alice James Books, all of her writing was released through Graywolf Press. She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English, and she championed translation as an important art that every poet should try.{{Citation needed|date=December 2022}}
Kenyon's poems are filled with rural images: light streaming through a hayloft, shorn winter fields. She wrote frequently about wrestling with depression, which plagued her throughout her adult life. Kenyon's poem "Having it out with Melancholy" describes this struggle and the brief moments of happiness she felt when taking an MAOI, Nardil.{{cite web |url=http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15920 |title=Having it out with Melancholy |first=Jane |last=Kenyon |work=POETS.org |publisher=Academy of American Poets |accessdate=12 December 2012}} However, two visits to India in the early 1990s led to a crisis of faith, as Hall (in introductions to her books and in his own memoirs), Alice Mattison, and her biographer John Timmerman have described.{{Citation needed|date=December 2022}}
Kenyon was also a contributor to Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.{{Citation needed|date=December 2022}}
Prior to her death, she was editing the collection Otherwise: New and Selected Poems.{{Citation needed|date=December 2022}} Kenyon's papers, including manuscripts, personal journals, and notebooks are held at the University of New Hampshire Library Special Collections and Archives.{{Cite web |title=Jane Kenyon Papers, 1961-1995 {{!}} University of New Hampshire Library |url=https://www.library.unh.edu/find/archives/collections/jane-kenyon-papers-1961-1995 |access-date=2018-03-29 |website=www.library.unh.edu |date=23 May 2017 |language=en}}
In popular culture
"Let Evening Come" was featured in the 2005 film In Her Shoes, in a scene where the character played by Cameron Diaz reads the poem (as well as "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop) to a blind nursing home resident.{{Citation needed|date=December 2022}}
"Having it out with Melancholy" has been read by Amanda Palmer on [https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/27/having-it-out-with-melancholy-jane-kenyon-amanda-palmer/ Brain Pickings].{{Citation needed|date=December 2022}}
Awards
Bibliography
- From Room to Room (November 1, 1978)
- The Boat of Quiet Hours (October 24, 1986)
- Let Evening Come (April 30, 1990)
- Constance (July 12, 1993)
- Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (March 2, 1996; posthumous release)
- Collected Poems (September 1, 2005; posthumous anthology release)
References
{{Reflist}}
Notes
- {{cite book |title=Bright Unequivocal Eye": Poems, Papers and Remembrances from the First Jane Kenyon Conference |first=Bert G. |last=Hornback |date=1 September 2000 |publisher=Peter Lang |pages=11–26 |isbn=978-0820445854}}
- {{cite journal |last=Mattison |first=Alice |title=Let It Grow in the Dark Like a Mushroom: Writing with Jane Kenyon |journal=Michigan Quarterly Review |volume=39 |pages=121–37 |publisher=University of Michigan |year=2000 |issn=0026-2420}}
- {{cite book |title=Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life |first=John H. |last=Timmerman |date=September 2002 |publisher=William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company |isbn=978-0802839435 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/janekenyonlitera0000timm }}
External links
- [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3720 Poems by Jane Kenyon and biography at PoetryFoundation.org]
- [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/361 Biography from the Academy of American Poets]
- [http://www.tear.com/poems/kenyon/ Three poems by Jane Kenyon] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20041207160412/http://www.tear.com/poems/kenyon/ |date=2004-12-07 }}
- [https://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/050.html Her poem Otherwise at the Library of Congress]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20110909224138/http://al.gcsu.edu/hall_12.php "The Grandmother Poem", a reminiscence by Donald Hall]
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{{NH Poets Laureate|state=autocollapse}}
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Category:20th-century American poets
Category:Writers from Ann Arbor, Michigan
Category:People from Wilmot, New Hampshire
Category:English–Russian translators
Category:Russian–English translators
Category:University of Michigan alumni
Category:Poets from New Hampshire
Category:Poets Laureate of New Hampshire
Category:Deaths from leukemia in the United States
Category:Deaths from cancer in New Hampshire
Category:20th-century American women writers