Sometimes a book comes to you too early. Perhaps the spite of being assigned 1984 in high school drains the novel of its power to move you. Perhaps you were simply missing a key to let you in or an anchor to ground you. If you were a good student, you read the book anyway. Disdainful and rote as the experience may have felt, the seed of familiarity was planted. Should you ever return to those works at a later date, what might you find has changed?
During my undergraduate studies, I read Jean Valentine’s 2010 poetry collection Break The Glass. I nearly hated it. There was one relatively straightforward poem that I remember fondly, but the majority of the poems were lost on me. Their sparseness combined with literary references with which I was unfamiliar and life experiences that felt so distant frustrated me. It felt almost mocking that a poem of no more than 30 words could leave me so lost. After the class concluded, I placed the book upon my shelf never to be read again. Or so I thought.
In December of 2020, Jean Valentine passed away. I hadn’t thought about her work much in nearly 10 years. I read the New York Times article about her and like I always do when I find out the death of someone famous, I read her Wikipedia article too. I learned that in 86 years, she wrote 14 full-length poetry collections dating back to 1965. How could the work of someone who wrote so prolifically and who was celebrated by so many people not be worth a second look?
This year, I set a goal to read 100 books. I want a good portion of these to be books I’ve read before. Some that I remember fondly, if not for their plots and characters, then for the way I felt when I first read them. I want to see how they will affect me 15 or more years later. I also want to revisit books that frustrated me. Made me feel like I wasn’t allowed in. Left me with a sense that there was something there that I might like one day. Off the top of my head the list includes the likes of Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. However, the first book I picked up was Break the Glass.
I reread much of Break the Glass in the socially-distanced comforts of a Honda dealership while waiting for my car battery to be replaced. This was the perfect place and the perfect time. Nowhere to go, nothing to distract me, just a comfortable chair and a pair of vending machines filled with Coke and Frito-Lay products to munch on as I read.
In the 10 years since my first reading of Valentine’s book, I studied and wrote Japanese Tanka, took up a meditation practice, and read a lot about Buddha. In those 10 years, I got married, traveled outside of the country, and attended my grandfather’s funeral. And, just last year, I read or revisited Homer, Ovid, and Virgil. Each of these experiences deepened my connection with Break the Glass in ways I could not have predicted.
When I read what Valentine writes of bodhisattvas or the Buddhist practice of forgoing the household in favor of a contemplative life, I have the context of Dogen, Shantideva, and a number of historical texts on Gautama Buddha to enhance my reading. Poems recalling the cursed love of Eurydice and Orpheus grow immeasurably deeper now that I’ve read the myth in the Metamorphose. The great number of poems dedicated to deceased friends strike emotional chords that were once only theoretical. It is important to note that none of this is to say that Valentine’s poetry overuses reference as a crutch or that a breadth of knowledge and personal endeavors must be acquired to understand the poems.
Despite all of this, I can tell that there is still a lot in these poems that surely goes over my head, both referentially and technically. Perhaps recognizing this is a sign of growth on my part as a reader of poetry as much as a testament to the complexity of Valentine’s work. I believe Break the Glass contains greater depth that I might one day grow to recognize more fully. There is something special about this feeling, similar to when my wife shares a new story from the time before I knew her.
In her poem “Diana,” Valentine writes of the Roman goddess Diana’s polymorphing punishment of Actaeon, who inadvertently witnesses her bathing. In the myth, he is turned into a deer, but maintains his human mind while his hunting companions and their dogs chase him down. The poem plays with this myth, but ends with a salient thought that applies to the book-reader relationship nicely:
“Do we get another life? Oh yes. / Maybe not in this place. Maybe in different forms.”
As the second year of quarantine begins and we continue to adapt to an uncertain future, I look forward to revisiting the old friends who stare fondly from their bookshelf perch and repairing relationships with the ones that I wasn’t quite ready for all those years ago.
—Robert Annis
