“CINNAMON. EYESHADOW. DOVE.”
The work of Jean Valentine taught me that the word “eyeshadow” could belong in a poem. Before I read her work, I had only seen that word in advertisements and fashion magazines. But far from describing surface femininity or sexiness, “eyeshadow” was the spiritual bedrock of Valentine’s ars poetica called “Yield Everything, Force Nothing.” Astonishingly, Valentine understood eyeshadow as a proper name, an allegorical figure, and an incantation:
The contest is over:
I turned away,
and I am beautiful: Job’s last daughters,
Cinnamon, Eyeshadow, Dove.
The contest is over:
I let my hands fall,
and here is your garden:
Cinnamon. Eyeshadow. Dove.
(Door in the Mountain 213)
“Cinnamon. Eyeshadow. Dove.” This is a garden of spice, cosmetics, and the symbol of peace. Or does “Dove” refer to the soap brand instead? In its latticing of wit and enigma, Valentine’s list reflects her own literary struggle and accomplishment over more than half a century. Though the speaker of the poem has dropped her hands in a gesture of abandonment, her offered garden is, in twenty-first-century parlance, a “win.” She shows us that relinquishment can be a vanquishing.
Valentine, who died in December of 2020, called herself “a well-kept secret” in New York, where she lived in the same Upper West Side apartment for over twenty-five years (188). She always wore this modesty well—but her bountiful awards included the Yale Younger Poets prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the National Book Award. Though “Yield Everything. Force Nothing” dramatizes the gesture of turning away, her work succeeded and thrived without the buffering of public literary life.
“Yield Everything, Force Nothing” is, of course, much more than a meditation on literary competition. It is also about the untranslatable materiality of the list itself. “Cinnamon. Eyeshadow. Dove.”: Valentine repeats the list without the italics that accompany its first iteration, then ends the poem without explanation. Like any proper name, the list resists translation or paraphrase. In this way, it brings to mind onomatopoetic aspects of early Stevens, whose birdcalls of “… ki-ki-ri-ki brings no rou-cou, / no rou-cou-cou” are usually not analyzed much beyond their sounds’ evocations. At the same time, Valentine’s list does very specific work: it renders the poet a transformer who, by renaming Job’s three daughters (called Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-happuch in the Biblical story), offers the reader a contemporary Garden of Eden. In the Old Testament, Job’s daughters are praised for their beauty, but they are introduced at the end of their father’s narrative and don’t play a central role in it—in a sense, they constitute Job’s “happily-ever-after.” Here Valentine revivifies them in her renaming, offering an odd new mythology of poetic creation. This creation is feminine and even quietist, but also authoritative—even as the poem’s title counsels acquiescence.
Writing about “Yield Everything, Force Nothing” in , Mark Doty accurately notes that Valentine’s poem is “not much interested in the textures and particulars of the outside world” (136). His comment also suggests why the large body of her work resists arrangement in a clear progression. Certainly, her poetry doesn’t follow the formal turning points that we see in such poets as Yeats and Roethke. But in a deeper sense, though perennially fresh, it feels as if it were created by an old soul from the beginning. Changes in the outside world, or in the life of the poet, are not exactly extraneous to the work, but they don’t feel essential to it either. Though Valentine often appeared to be governed by (“Feelings: / oh, I have those; they / govern me,” the flower says), Valentine’s poems never feel predictably determined by life events like her divorces, the birth of her children, or the death of her friends. Her poetic geography seemed broader than the experience of a single person without reaching for the scope of a universalizing “Everyman.”
