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    Three Mennonite Poets
    Three Mennonite Poets
    Three Mennonite Poets
    Ebook121 pages44 minutes

    Three Mennonite Poets

    By Jean Janzen

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              This well-received collection features three poets who differ widely in culture and style, yet are rooted in common values. Yorifumi Yaguchi is a well-known Japanese poet and professor. Jean Janzen is a Fresno, California, poet whose work has appeared in many literary magazines, and David Waltner-Toews is a Canadian with several books to his credit. Why publish a collection of this sort? Poetry as an artistic endeavor has been scarce among Mennonite people through the centuries. This may be because of their conscious separation from the larger world, or their struggle as an immigrant people, or a general suspicion of the arts held by many members of the groups.           The three poets in this collection are among the finest in the Mennonite peoplehood worldwide, today. The tension between their lives, their particular cultures, and their yearnings has resulted in poetry rich in imagery and full of conviction. What common themes might a woman from California, a man from eastern Canada, and another from Japan express? Perhaps most basic is an honesty, a bare-bones truthfulness, a disdain for pretense that threads through all the poems.           There is also in each a sense of design in which the individual is part of a community -- a family, or a tribe, or a people. The cultivation of that embrace is life; the loss of it is crippling, and sometimes even death. One hears, as well, a wish for peace -- with one's spouse, one's past, with all the "beasts" that beset us, both within and without. These poems reach for justice -- for both children and Grandpas who are victims, for the misunderstood who can't defend their behavior, for those alive only in our memories who can no longer explain their actions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Books
    Release dateDec 1, 1986
    ISBN9781680992731
    Three Mennonite Poets

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      Book preview

      Three Mennonite Poets - Jean Janzen

      Book One:

      Poems by Jean Janzen

      About Jean Janzen

      Jean Janzen was born December 5, 1933, in Saskatchewan, Canada, to Henry Peter Wiebe and Anna Schultz Wiebe, the seventh child in a family of eight. Her father was a schoolteacher who became a pastor, for which reason they moved to Minnesota in 1939. Her school years were spent in Minnesota and Kansas.

      She graduated from Fresno Pacific College with a BA in English and received her Masters in English-Creative Writing from California State University Fresno where she studied with poets Peter Ever-wine, Philip Levine, and C. G. Hanzlicek.

      Her first collection of poems, Words for the Silence (Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies), was published in 1984. Her work is included in a forthcoming anthology, Piece Work, Nineteen Fresno Poets (Silver Skates Publishing, Albany, California). She has also been published by various literary and Christian journals, such as Berkeley Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Quarry West, Radix, Yankee, Festival Quarterly, Christianity and Literature, Christian Century, Mennonite Life, and The Christian Leader.

      Jean’s husband Louis is a pediatrician in private practice. She has two sons, two daughters, three children-in-law, and a grandson. She also teaches piano and is minister of worship at the College Community Mennonite Brethren Church in Clovis, California.

      Separations

      All day the separate lakes

      of our bodies lap their shores

      in secrecy, and when we lie

      down to sleep they spill

      into the river of our dreams

      where soul and body meet,

      as when we pray, hand

      meeting hand, the one

      that reached up

      against the one that nearly

      rooted into the soil

      of the lilybed. You can see it

      in children’s eyes the moment

      they first awaken, and the way

      their hands go out in a slight

      motion toward what was there.

      Then they rise and stand

      beside us. Our hands touch,

      but our lakes, all luminous and blue,

      are separate, and the vast

      fields lie between us.

      Where the Wheat Sways

      Around us the summer air

      burns and blows so that

      where we once stood and kissed

      there is no memorial of place.

      No one will remember.

      Your mother, bent by a tumor

      has lain down under this wind.

      Old angers live on

      like barbed wire holding up

      fenceposts, and larks return

      to proclaim their territory,

      but our moment refuses

      to stand up. Who will ever know

      that I first saw you in a doorway

      surrounded by morning light

      here in this spot where the wheat

      sways to our hips, where we are

      trampling the stalks

      which, after we go, will slowly

      rise up like witnesses

      and fill this space.

      The Temperature of Cruelty

      We think of the beaten baby

      dead against the darkening stain

      on the bed, soldiers pulling out

      fingernails, the prisoner dangling

      for days. But also the years

      of bitterness in a family, the cold

      turning of the shoulder, the look

      that erases you. What is

      the temperature of cruelty?

      Fire? Boiling oil? Or the great

      weight of ice, gravel shearing

      rock in a slow grind. Or

      that April frost, so lacy

      and beautiful, whispering

      and biting the orchard to death

      in one slow night, when all

      the blossoms blacken, and all

      that was possible withers

      and shatters in the wind.

      These Words Are For You, Grandmother

      i

      I imagine you sitting on the doorstep,

      your dark braid undone and rippling

      down your back. You are plucking

      melodies from the guitar which

      he made for you, and he is there

      singing along, his arm soft around you

      in the Ukrainian dusk. And now it seems

      that we are both entering the darkening

      house to the pale bed, this bed

      of beginnings and endings, of arms

      encircling and then letting go,

      this bed which you have given me

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