The Writer’s Almanac began in 1983 as a radio program hosted by Garrison Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” fame. It’s now available online and as a podcast. Each daily installment includes vignettes about authors and other people of note, often to mark their birthday or some significant event. On May 23, 2023, The Writer’s Almanac featured our classmate Jane Kenyon and opened its essay on her this way:
“Today is the birthday of American poet Jane Kenyon (1947), who once said, ‘A poet’s job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.’ Kenyon is best known for poems that explore depression, spirituality, and nature.”
Some fascinating things you may not have known about Jane is that her father was a jazz pianist who toured with dance bands and her mother was a nightclub singer. Their home was full of books, two upright pianos, an RCA Victor record player and a lot of records, fertile ground for a budding poet. She met her future husband, the poet Donald Hall (later Poet Laureate of the United States), as an undergraduate in his poetry writing class at the University of Michigan. He was one of my professors, too, and quite a memorable character.
Jane’s poems appeared in major publications such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic and her poetry became so popular that it was even featured in the Cameron Diaz movie In Her Shoes (2005), when Diaz recites a few lines of Jane’s most famous poem, “Let Evening Come”. She was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died on April 22, 1995, of leukemia.
At a couple of our class reunions, we displayed some of Jane’s books and heard from a number of you that you already had your own personal copies of them.
In a great quote from a famous essay about their marriage, Donald Hall said, “It took me half my life, more than half, to discover with Jane’s guidance that two people could live together and remain kind.”
Comments