Letters to Jane

by Hayden Carruth

Jane Kenyon, who was married to the poet Donald Hall, earned wide acclaim for her clear, vivid, deeply spiritual lyrics, many of them written in the face of her own -mortality. During the year of her dying, Carruth’s faithful correspondence, collected here, is a testament to the depth of their friendship, and a rare window into the inner life of a major poet as he confronts the loss of a dear friend. Both Carruth and Kenyon have devoted followings; Letters to Jane offers unique and personal new insight into their poetry. Of this book, Francine Prose has written, “Reading these beautiful, eloquent, moving letters from one poet to another, you keep forgetting (as you are meant to) even as, paradoxically, it never leaves your mind for a moment, that this is no casual correspondence. Its occasion is urgent and extraordinary. The recipient is dying. “. . . Carruth writes again and again—honest, direct, affectionate accounts of everyday writing and reading, visiting friends, traveling to give poetry readings, enjoying good moods and good health, enduring physical and emotional setbacks, feeding the dog and watching bee balm bloom in the garden. What’s most mysterious and marvelous about these letters—which end around the time of Kenyon’s death in 1995—is how they manage to be, simultaneously, so relaxed and so intense, so concrete and so reflective, and how every word and every sentence reminds us of the preciousness of ordinary life, and of the enduring and -sustaining consolations of friendship.” Hayden Carruth is the author of more than 20 books, predominantly poetry. His work has been awarded many honors, including the National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Whiting Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has also written widely on jazz and the blues. He lives in Munnsville, NY.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

120 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2004

About the author

Hayden Carruth was an American poet, literary critic, and anthologist known for his distinctive voice, blending formal precision with the rhythms of jazz and the blues. Over a career spanning more than sixty years, he published over thirty books of poetry, as well as essays, literary criticism, and anthologies. His work often explored themes of rural life, hardship, mental illness, and social justice, reflecting both his personal struggles and his political convictions.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Carruth studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago. His early career included serving as editor-in-chief of Poetry and as an advisory editor of The Hudson Review for two decades. He later became poetry editor at Harper’s Magazine and held teaching positions at Johnson State College, the University of Vermont, and Syracuse University, where he influenced a new generation of poets.
Carruth received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Collected Shorter Poems (1992) and the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1996). His later works, such as Doctor Jazz and Last Poems, further cemented his reputation as a major voice in American poetry. His influential anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us remains a landmark collection of American verse.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful little book. Both poets now gone, but this collects Carruth's letters to Kenyon as she was dying, and they both knew that was the case. Is this a good example of the last generation of writers to write actual letters that are given substance by the time it takes them to move through the post?

I conclude an essay/review I did on Kenyon with this book. You can link to it here:

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...

[Athena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This slim book collects letters that Carruth wrote to Jane Kenyon in her last year of life. In the first letter, Carruth reports that he's heard of Jane's illness, and says to her, "About all I can do . . . is reassure you of our love." These are, then, letters of love, letters of assurance in the face of death. They are full of tender observations, brief rants, old stories, and the details of life lived in attentiveness.

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fiddling around with my home library yesterday and ended up taking my copy of Hayden Carruth’s LETERS TO JANE off a shelf. With all the books I haven’t read and new temptations being published on a regular basis, I don’t do much rereading. But after spotting Carruth’s book for a while, I turned back to the first page and continued to the end. At just 107 pages, it’s an easy and richly satisfying read.

The book collects letters Carruth wrote to fellow poet Jane Kenyon (the wife of poet Donald Hall) during the year in which she was unsuccessfully battling cancer — from April 25, 1994, through April 9, 1995.

Carruth chose to live as “far from the madding crowd” as he could get. His letters reflect on the natural world and weather in a small community in upstate New York and the vicissitudes of aging. I was frequently reminded of A. R . Ammons’ underappreciated book-length poem TAPE FOR THE TURN OF THE YEAR.

Carruth had a lot of trouble with his teeth: “They (dentists) tell me I am very hard on my teeth; they tell me I’m a tooth-grinder in my sleep. When I tell them that I’ve had four wives and a number of other acquaintances and none has ever complained, the clinicians look at me askance. I know what the problem is. The Carruth family have been notable trenchermen for generations with extraordinary development of jaw muscle. I remember my father who held the fork in his left hand, the knife in his right, as older people often did, and he used the knife to build up na forkful in a positively artistic way, putting it on the sides and top until he had as much as the fork could hold, all compact and tidy. Then he would ram it into his mouth as if he were plugging a leak in a dyke. Whereupon would begin the most extraordinary chomping you can imagine, rippling jaw action, sliding and slithering at the temples, dancing ears. And the man had practically no trouble with his teeth as long as he lived. Well, I inherited my mother’s fragile teeth and my father’s robust table behavior, and the result has been devastating all my life. Up in the North Country it used to be a rite of passage for young people when they turned eighteen to go to Canada and have all their teeth pulled out and replaced by false teeth. I knew many of them, including many old people. False teeth are a problem, but I think those people has less pain and spent a hell of a lot less money than I have. Even when I was poorest I always went to the dentist and somehow scrounged up the money to pay him, all because my genteel mother told me when I was a child that false teeth were a sign of lower-class sloth and degeneracy. What nonsense!

“Anyway the pain has diminished and one of these days — or weeks or months — I’m told the dental reconstructions will be completed and I can get back to worrying about my arthritis and how to get downstairs in the morning.”

That’s just a sample. Here’s another, more succinct: “Economists seem to have no qualms about useless work. The whole country is featherbedding.”

And: “If one spends a third of life in bed, as I guess one does, then the bed needs to be at least as comfortable as a billiard table.”

I hope that Jane Kenyon during her final, difficult days found comfort in these letters from a loving friend, and I would think that any reader might find deep pleasure in them as well. 


[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Letters to Jane inhabits an especially poignant niche in collections of literary correspondence. All of the letters were written from Hayden Carruth to Jane Kenyon during the last year of her life. Carruth knew that Kenyon was losing her battle with cancer, but as he wrote the letters he couldn't have known how long she would live. In retrospect, this timeline juxtaposed against Carruth's attempts to provide normalcy and succor to Kenyon make the letters that much more tender and bittersweet. Both Kenyon and Carruth are (were) acclaimed poets, married to other poets. But, for the purposes of this collection, Kenyon's life and work are less important than Carruth's. The correspondence is one-sided; we are aware throughout the book that Kenyon periodically responded with a note or postcard, but we never read them. She was simply too weak. And Carruth, to his credit, encourages this one-sidedness. He encourages her to save her strength. Through his closely observed, often humorous and wonderfully cantankerous observations of rural life in his home of Munnsville, NY, Carruth soothes Kenyon (and, thus, readers of this collection) with charming stories of raking leaves and appreciating animals, plants, mud puddles, and family with equal relish. A typical passage finds Carruth comparing a visit from his cousin to a mushroom infestation he has been forced, to his chagrin, to clean out of his house: "The last time I saw Olive she was about ten years old and I was in my mid-20s, a long time ago. Strange. I felt no kinship whatever. Bloodlines mean nothing. I was closer to the mushroom."

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Jane referred to in the title is Jane Kenyon, a poet (New Hampshire's poet laureate at the time of her death). Hayden Carruth, likewise a poet and writer, was her dear friend. When he heard that she was suffering from leukemia he began writing her letters; the letters started in April 1994 and abruptly end in April 1995; they span the entire year of her dying. The letters are, for the most part, simple accounts of Carruth's life in upstate New York. He writes about the weather, the animals (pets and otherwise) he observes and serves, his works and travels, friends that he and Jane have in common -- simple accounts of a simple life. The best letters are not written in response to extraordinary events. The best letters are every day conversations in written form. These letters are among the best I have read.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the tenderness in these letters, their lack of sentimentality that belies the caring apparent in every word. You could read this book for Carruth's description of a monster fungus alone, but it is a keeper for his insights and acuity, and for a friendship that transcended age, illness, distance and all of the many foibles of the poetry biz.

[Sherry Elmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable, despite the poignancy of knowing that Hayden Carruth's optimism in Jane Kenyon's recovery was not warranted, nor would it be rewarded. Yet anyone who appreciated Jane Kenyon's poetry would appreciate these faithful letters by a cantankerous but loveable old man.