MPR’s Stephen Smith presents an audio obituary of poet Jane Kenyon, who passed away on April 22nd, 1995. Segment includes brief interview with poet, reading of poem, and musical elements.
Transcript:
(00:00:00) Jane Canyon lived in the old New Hampshire Country House on Eagle Pond that she and her husband Donald Hall wrote about so often in their poems and essays the frame House shouldered close against a well-traveled County Road a small hand scrawled sign on the kitchen door said no visitors today. This famous pair of writers often found fans wandering up on their porch. It was late March last year my wife and I had an appointment. Ointment, so we knocked Donald Hall met us at the door growling that we could only have a few minutes with his wife. She was too exhausted from chemotherapy to answer a lot of questions. We promised to be economical. But Jane Canyon wanted to talk. She wanted to explain depression. She'd suffered from that miserable and tenacious disease since childhood Canyon insisted that people understand the illness as a disease not as a failing her own battle against the Sorter was long her victories provisional and then Along came a new
(00:01:05) fight. Well, I've been confronted with with a surprise this winter. I found in the end of January that I have acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and I've been in treatment since then for the leukemia and a strange thing happened. I have not for the for the most part felt a grinding depression about it. What I have felt was this strange kind of survivors Rapture a feeling of being held and loved a great deal beautifully taken care of and loved this is not to say that I haven't felt a lot of fear and is not to say that I haven't grieved and sobbed a lot and felt sorry for myself. But I have been buoyed Aloft by something which comes from I know not where I find that I have a lot of fight in me that I wasn't aware
(00:02:10) of Jane Kenyan said in an armchair her body week her head wrapped in a scarf. She knew that Rapture like the last moments of a mild evening must dissolve.
(00:02:22) I'm beginning to really realize that that having leukemia is like bringing a gorilla to live with you and It's going to be a real thing. I mean two years of very aggressive treatment weakness in capacity inability to concentrate basically just keeping this Corpus alive until I can regain my my
(00:02:47) mind. We talked for three quarters of an hour then she grew weary and we left. I got a postcard from her a few months later saying I'm okay. It's just that the treatments are so punishing. Jane Canyons poetry appeared in many magazines including the New Yorker and the Atlantic for collections of her work has been published and st. Paul's graywolf. Press will publish a finished manuscript of new and selected poems next year Kenyon wrote intense searching poems about depression, but she also wrote about the pleasures of Rural Life The Complex currents of Human Relationships and about the optimism of dogs. In addition she wrote about her husband. Donald Halls lengthy struggle against his own cancer. He survives her Jane Kenyon died last Saturday at home in Wilmont, New Hampshire. She was 47 years old.
(00:03:41) Let evening come by Jane Kenya. Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn moving up the Bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles in her yarn let evening come. Let do collect on the ho abandoned in Long Grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. That the fox go back to its Sandy Den let the wind died down but the shed go black inside let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch to the scoop in the Odes to are in the lung let evening come. Let it come as it will and don't be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless. So let evening
(00:04:36) come.