While we don't have a PennSound author page for Valentine, we do have one recording from her in our Singles database. Recorded on April 6, 2010, when Valentine read with Cindy Savett at our own Kelly Writers House. Bob Perelman provided introductions for the evening; here's what he had to say about Valentine:
I think her poems have at their core a tenderness toward existence and attention to the rhythms of our life on earth, of birth and death and renewal, of time sometimes standing still for a time and allowing us to be attuned to everything happening in the always-present. The poems seem to me to be like beautiful translucent doors swinging easily in the wind without trying to keep anything in or out. The sound of the swinging like the sound of the lightness we wish to feel — the wind's lightness perhaps — and as if the body could open all its own doors, letting the world pass through it to become the world, to become everyone in it.
I think it is most boundaries that separate us from each other — one condition of being we think entirely different from another — though Jean Valentine's poems in a sense are poems celebrating an erasure of all that keeps us separate from each other, and from one life, and the next, and the next after. Perhaps that's why her poetry is also as fluid as it is, something like a clear lake on which we may float for a time, as if we were little boats gliding across it, buoyed by the generous force of its uplifting.
