Jane Kenyon

At 47 years old, Jane Kenyon physical status not available right now. We will update Jane Kenyon's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947 – April 22, 1995) was an American poet and translator.

Her work is often described as straightforward, spare, and emotionally resonant.

Kenyon was the second wife of poet, editor, and activist Donald Hall, who made her the subject of many of his poems.

Life

Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Ruele and Pauline, and she grew up in the Midwest. She received a B.A. M.A. and M.B. from the University of Michigan in 1970, 1970. In 1972, a young girl was born in 1972. At Michigan, she received a Hopwood Award. Also, while a student at the University of Michigan, Kenyon met poet Donald Hall; although he was nineteen years older, she married him in 1972, and the family moved to Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. When Kenyon died of leukemia on April 22, 1995, she was New Hampshire's poet laureate.

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Career

During her lifetime, four collections of Kenyon's poems were published: From Room to Room (1978), Constance (1993), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and Let Evening Come (1990). Anna Akhmatova's poems were translated from Russian to English (published as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1985), and she advocated translation as a vital art for every poet. If she died, she was experimenting on editing. Alternative and Selected Poems Letters from Jane, a collection of letters written by poet Hayden Carruth to Kenyon in the year between her illness and death, was released in 2004 by Ausable Press.

Kenyon's poems are full of rural photographs: light streams through a hayloft and shorn winter fields. She wrote often about bouts of depression, which dominated her life. "Having it out with Melancholy" Kenyon's poem "Because it out with Melancholy" depicts this struggle and the brief moments of joy she experienced when taking an MAOI, Nardil. The essays in A Hundred White Daffodils reveal the vital role that church played in her life when she and Hall moved to Eagle Pond Farm. However, two trips to India in the early 1990s led to a crisis of faith, as Hall (in introductions to her books and in her own memoirs) and her biographer John Timmerman described.

In a scene where Cameron Diaz reads the poem (as well as Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art") to a blind nursing home resident, her poem "Let Evening Come" was included in her film "In Her Shoes. Amanda Palmer on Brain Pickings has "having it out with Melancholy."

Kenyon was also a contributor to Columbia's A Journal of Literature and Art.

Kenyon's papers, as well as manuscripts, personal journals, and notebooks are on display at the University of New Hampshire Library Special Collections and Archives.

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Awards

• 1994 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry