Who is Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine (April 27, 1934 – December 29, 2020) was an American poet and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Biography

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 27, 1934. Her father was a Navy man. She received a bachelor of arts degree and a master of arts degree from Radcliffe College, and lived most of her life in New York City, where she died on December 29, 2020.

Her most recent book, Shirt In Heaven, was published in 2015. Before that, Break the Glass, published in 2010, was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.Valentine's first book, Dream Barker (Yale University Pres...
Read Full Biography of Jean Valentine


Jean Valentine Poems

  • I Have Lived In Your Face
    I have lived in your face.
    Have I been you?
    Your mother?
    giving you birth â?? ...
  • Dream Barker
    We met for supper in your flat-bottomed boat.
    I got there first: in a white dress: I remember
    Wondering if you'd come. Then you shot over the bank,
    A Virgilian Nigger Jim, and poled us off ...
  • Elegy For Jane Kenyon (2)
    Jane is big
    with death, Don
    sad and kind - Jane
    though she's dying ...
  • La Chalupa, The Boat
    I am twenty,
    drifting in la chalupa,
    the blue boat painted with roses,
    white liliesâ?? ...
  • Ghost Elephants
    In the elephant field tall green ghost elephants
    with your cargo of summer leaves
    at night I heard you breathing
    at the window Don't you ever ...
Read All Poems


Top 10 most used topics by Jean Valentine

Friend 4 Away 3 Life 3 Red 3 Water 3 Year 3 Blue 3 Beauty 2 Breath 2 Dream 2


Jean Valentine Quotes

Read All Quotes


Comments about Jean Valentine

Brianoliu: thinking randomly of jean valentine
Yettastein: jean valentine treating the line with care (always): “constant wind. the efforts of becoming. these words”
Oldbuffalo: gabbert posted a jean valentine poem and i needed to jot this down before i walked the dog. would you care to join me in a stroll?
Egabbert: jean valentine’s poems have this quality such that i always want to read them again, and then i still feel that i haven’t fully read them
_valentine_6969: i got jean
Read All Comments


Write your comment about Jean Valentine


Joan Sidney: Jean was a great poet, an incredibly caring human being, and a wonderful teacher. Her passing is a great loss to all of us. I met her in 2012 at the Artist’s Colony.

Poem of the day

Edgar Albert Guest Poem
Improvement
 by Edgar Albert Guest

The joy of life is living it, or so it seems to me;
In finding shackles on your wrists, then struggling till you're free;
In seeing wrongs and righting them, in dreaming splendid dreams,
Then toiling till the vision is as real as moving streams.
The happiest mortal on the earth is he who ends his day
By leaving better than he found to bloom along the way.
Were all things perfect here there would be naught for man to do;
If what is old were good enough we'd never need the new.
...

Read complete poem

Popular Poets