MPR’s Greta Cunningham talks with poet Donald Hall about his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon, who passed away in 1995. Hall reads Kenyon’s poem “The Needle.”

Poets, friends and fans of poet Jane Kenyon gather at the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul to celebrate her life and the paperback publication of her book "Otherwise: New and Selected Poems". Kenyon became well known for writing honestly about her struggles with depression and cancer. "Otherwise" was published after Kenyon died from leukemia. The Fitzgerald tribute includes readings by Robert Bly, Tess Gallagher, and Hall.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) I did not interview students for this. I asked him to submit their poems to so I wouldn't be interested in them by their charm and their personality or whatever one summer summer of 1969. I got maybe 50 packets of poems from from students wanting to be in my course and I would usually take 10 or 12 and the one from Jane Kenyan had a poem in it, which is in otherwise her posthumous new and selected poems. It's called the Needle, it's one of the early poems. And what is so strange about it is that it's really characteristic of Leyte Kenyan later ganyan and she were a lot of different sorts of things in between. But I remember that poem and being tremendously impressed by it and the maybe I would have let her in without it. But I remember that poem in particular and I'm so glad that she had written that tonight. I had seen it.
(00:00:52) Can you read that poem for us from her book otherwise, which is published by graywolf,
(00:00:56) press the needle grandmother. You are as pale as Christ's Hands On The Wall above you when you close your eyes. You are all white hair skin down. I blink to find you again in the bed. I remember once you told me you weighed a hundred and twenty-three the day you married grandfather. You had handsome legs. He watched to working at the sink. The soft ring is loose on your hand. I hated coming here. I know you can't understand me. I'll try again like the young nurse with the needle. What's who characteristic their two things really? They're both toward the end when she makes that turn you expect piety and affection from her and perhaps regret and she says I hated coming here and suddenly you realize. Oh, of course, we do hate to do these things and her over honesty or vulnerability shotgun into attention, but then it's especially Last image I I'm trying to get through to you like the young nurse with the needle and of course the needle hurts and then they'll also is attempting to help at the same time. So so much doubleness and conflict is worked into that not by stating it by an abstraction not saying I am conflicted and this Annette but today like the young nurse with the needle and that was an enormous characteristic of her to be able to embody in a thing or in an image. The requisite and precise conflict or doubleness that is characteristic of human nature
(00:02:45) when I picked up the book. Otherwise, I started reading the poems as poems themselves and then I began to read more material about the book and got some background about the things that were happening in your lives with with Jane and specifically the death of your mother that you were struggling with and then of course her own diagnosis and bad. With cancer and it made it that much more powerful for me to read the book,
(00:03:12) but we had a lot of troubles there. There's quite a bit in the book about the death of her father some years earlier, but shortly after the death of her father. She herself had her first cancer, which had nothing to do with her eventual leukemia and deaths and then I had cancer twice for the same cancer twice for the metastasis and one half my liver came out in 1990. To my chances of surviving more than a couple of years were not supposed to be very good. She wrote a lot about that including the title poem otherwise and then Jane was 19 years younger than me, and she was by Actuarial tables supposed to survive Me by 25 years, but after a wonderful year of 1993 in January of 94, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She stayed alive for 15 months. And she had a very very long form of a very land disease, but we battled it. She had a bone marrow transplant and we had good hope that she would survive when we found out that the leukemia had returned and there was nothing to do. She lived on the 11 days then finally she died at the age of 47, but she had done a magnificent amount of work. One thing that haunts me is that when we came to the farm together. And lived for 20 years both writing all day. My age was 47 and the general consensus of people reading my own work is that it was at that time that I began to get good. Janie died at the age when I began to get good and Jane was superb tomorrow's potent, but what might she have done if she had lived
(00:05:00) what are your feelings as you page through the book as I'm sure you're probably do quite often. Can you Describe them. My feelings are all
(00:05:09) happy ones about him work and I'm very happy that so many people have responded when graywolf press published the book April of 96. The response was tremendous the sales and the commentary and so on people have really come to her they were beginning to while she was alive and she knew it and but she's ten times better known now than she was when she died.