I want here to celebrate one of Vermont’s literary
treasures, Jean Connor, a poet who, after a long career as a librarian in
upstate New York, now lives at Wake Robin, a retirement community in
Shelburne. I offer such
celebration for no especial reason save that I’ve lately been rereading her
2005 collection, “A Cartography of Peace.” The book is beautifully produced by
Passager Press, whose savvy editors specialize in the work of older writers.
I’m not sure I can improve on the jacket comment of my friend
and former Vermont College colleague, poet Robin Behn, who notes that “only
some art knows how to teach us how to live, and in a way that we are ...
ardently willing to be taught.” Ms. Behn quite rightly puts Jean Connor at the
head of this rare class.
Though W.H. Auden once advised us that “poetry makes nothing
happen,” I feel things happening in myself at every turn in “A Cartography of
Peace.” Ms. Connor, given her wonderful modesty, will likely balk at hearing me
say so, but hers is a poetry of moral instruction. It is that very modesty, in
fact, that allows such instruction. The poet’s lessons on how to live both a
practical and a spiritual life are far from hectoring; they’re offered
obliquely, and her work therefore demands particularly close attention. One can
too easily miss its thematic forest for the trees of its keen observations,
particularly of nature.
Consider, for one of myriad examples, Ms. Connor’s response
to a natural harbinger in “Late August”:
Then,
not as an intruder,
but
as one accustomed to the place,
the
hour, a cricket began to sing,
steady,
sure, and as he sang
the
world slowed to meet
his
pace, found itself webbed
about
in peace. The grasses
sleep-heavy,
wet with dew.
As I say, one can easily –and profitably– dwell on the
sureness of notice here, but as we meditate on these passages (and these poems
demand just that, meditation)– as we meditate on these words and many others in
her opus, we understand that the beauty and clarity of her language is itself
the product of a meditative soul. Here the cricket is a perfect stand-in for
the writer, who has the same capacity to induce peace. No, she is not an
intruder but part of a composed scene.
There is simply no physical context, nor, so far as I can
see, any season that escapes this fine author’s contemplative and ultimately
redemptive response. In “Now, in March,” for instance, she speaks of a month
that most upper New Englanders might consider the year’s least redeemable.
Outside,
drifts of brazen snow
and
the bitter hour glass of cold.
Inside,
pressed against the pane,
pots
of green and the first white
geranium,
tenuous, unfolding.
and
hidden deep within, the stubborn
candle
of my will, ablaze,
steady,
before that duality,
death,
a February thing, and life,
which
reaches out to April
and
on occasion sings.
What quiet brilliance here! If we recall that at the
publication of this, her very first book, the author was 86 years old (at 96,
she continues to write beautifully), one might suppose that the poet herself
would be the “bitter” one, the sands in her personal hour glass falling apace.
One might also consider her very urge to write a “brazen” impulse. But no, those attributes belong to the
apparently inauspicious landscape. Ms. Connor is subtly “stubborn,” not brazen;
she willed herself in 2005, as she has done ever since, to sing about those
things that can sustain us no matter where or when we look on ... if we allow
them to.
Again, however, my object is less literary criticism than
appreciation. The poet’s own words always seem sufficiently convincing on their
own, as is manifest in another short poem, quoted here in its entirety:
Overcast
The
day, of no great merit,
ended–
a dandelion gone to seed,
minutes
squandered, hours spent,
no
bright gold. Yet in the ledgered
plainness
of the day, overcast, common,
some
subtle brush of meaning
held
me. Was it those unexpected
words
of thanks, or the single lilac
plunged
in a paper cup,
there
on a stranger’s desk?
Something,
a fragrance,
lingered
well past dusk.
When I consider much contemporary poetry, which is premised
on highfalutin intellectual theory, and which glories in wordplay for its own
sake, I wonder if its authors, let alone its readers (such as they are) can
possibly be moved by what is presented on the page? As Maxine Kumin once
remarked to me in conversation, “If you aren’t moved by what you write, why do
you bother?” Jean Connor’s poems move me greatly, in part because, although her
intelligence is clearly profound, she wears it lightly, rightly implying that
intellect on its own is not, as Wallace Stevens said, “what will suffice.” Here
is a poet who believes that words not only have meaning but also consequence.
I’ll close with an observation, based in part on the
passages below and many others in Ms. Connor’s work. Some may consider it
quaint, even sexist, but so be it. I say what I do only because I believe it:
Jean Connor’s verse is feminine. Mind you, I use that adjective in no way but
honorifically: I mean that her poetry is short on ego, astoundingly attentive
to eloquent detail– and long on charity, in the sense that Paul describes it in
Christian scripture. She manifests a love so deep that the mere word “love”
can’t describe it. To my mind, charity is what makes the world go round, and
Ms. Connor herself mounts no effort to describe it. She simply enacts it.
In a poem aptly entitled “The Women,” she notes, among other
things that
...there
are more women than you might imagine who
take
care of old men who have forgotten
the
names of the women
and
the names of the sons and the daughters .
These
are the men who are not sure
of
a spoon. Sometimes they can be told
how
to hold and lift it.
I urge any reader of this blog likewise to read “A Cartography of
Peace” for her- or himself, because I reduce its value by suggesting a single
overarching moral gesture. Be that as it may, one sure thing we learn from this
woman’s personal and artistic example is the virtue, not of resignation, but of
acceptance, two very different matters. We learn that what is immediately
before us, no matter what it be, is the thing that should demand our
participation.
:
Nothing
here should surprise us.
More
women than you imagine
teach
themselves to live
in
that slim space between now and tomorrow.
Jean Connor is one of the women who have taught themselves
to occupy that space, and having done so, she can teach us all.