Feeling the Heat

“Do you often have visitations?” the woman asked.

“Me?” I said.

It was deep in the summer of 2024, and I’d just given a reading at the Hudson Valley Writers Center where I sweated through my dress and filled my Smartwater bottle with the stuff from the tap. Visitations? No, I wanted to say, I’m a Virgo.

“Your poems,” she said. “The last two you read.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean the ones that reference Jean?”

“Yes,” she said. “Those.”

The reading was for the launch of an anthology, Braving the Body, which I co-edited with Pichchenda Bao and Jennifer Franklin. We were joined by a dozen or more contributors for the celebration, and as part of it, each editor read a beloved poem from the book and then a couple of our own poems. I read the title poem from my last book, This Strange Garment, which is the last poem in the book, as well as the prefatory poem from my new book, chigger ridge. I hadn’t realized until nearly halfway through the reading that in both poems Jean Valentine makes an appearance. In the first she says:

that on

the anniversary of her death
we should sit in lamplight,

sing to a bowl of lemons,
praise the resonant sac

And in the latter she comes to tell the speaker to go to bed and wait for an angel:

and when
the angel speaks
the poet said
listen to her
notice the color
of her dress
blue jean blue
then wake up
and write it
down.

---

I first met Jean in 1996 when I was 22 and had moved from Oklahoma to New York City where I was working on my MFA in poetry. I love trying to remember that time, that first fall in the city where I gawked at the fresh deli flowers and ashed in Diet Coke cans. I think of my classmate and longtime friend, Iris, in the “fancy jeans” she’d bought in Soho and me in that old, green army jacket I wore forever, how all week we’d pace around trying “to find a poem,” and then, nearly always at the eleventh hour, get something onto the page and print it where we’d carry it—still warm from the printer—into the workshop room to sit in a circle with the other poets in hopes we’d been struck by lightning (even if we didn’t yet realize it) or that turning whatever we had into tercets might itself create the lightning. Then we’d go drink a hundred beers at the Cedar Tavern where we believed Dylan Thomas had died on his barstool, and where we happily feared that we might someday, too.

It’s the moments in the classroom with Jean which truly stand out. Those were the moments from which all else radiated, the moments we were always leaving and always moving towards.

But it’s the moments in the classroom with Jean which truly stand out. Those were the moments from which all else radiated, the moments we were always leaving and always moving towards. If you’re familiar with Jean’s poems (full of luminous phrases: Cinnamon, Eyeshadow, Dove), it’s not too difficult to conjure what she was like as a teacher. (Orange peels, burned letters.) All morning I’ve wracked my brain hoping to describe Jean, her physical being, but she was metaphysical in her presence. Trying to describe her, I feel like the existential version of the third grader who has just seen his teacher at the grocery store AND with a bra strap showing! What do you mean she eats?!? What do you mean she’s real?!?

She is real, yes. Or was. No, is. But even then she was, and is, and would be.

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Sitting around our wooden workshop table, Jean had a thing where she’d hover her hand atop the page, almost like a teenager with a Ouija board, and then she’d stop—point to an image or a line—and say, “Here. Here is where the heat is.”

This, we devoured. 

Again, Iris comes to mind. We are in her dorm room; she is introducing me to a poet I’ve never heard of or trying to help me understand iambs, which I’ve never had an ear for; there are cigarettes and tortilla chips, and our poems are DUE in a matter of hours. Do we have heat? Is there a way to make heat? To harness it?! What if in line eight I mention my mother again and turn her sweater from blue to yellow? What about couplets? Bluegrass? Internal rhyme?! Mashed potatoes! Is misery too abstract? Who is your you? Wait. What even is heat?  

Heat grants us particularity. Perhaps this particularity is what Jean was guiding us towards: the moment of particular lucidity which the most powerful poems contain.

In his 2019 The Order of Time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli describes heat as “the microscopic agitation of molecules.” Offering the second principle of thermodynamics, Rovelli intones that it is through heat that we come to understand the passage of time—tea growing cold—and tells us that this principle contains “the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future.” Without heat (& its transfer), the universe is blurred and approximate. In such, heat grants us particularity. Perhaps this particularity is what Jean was guiding us towards: the moment of particular lucidity which the most powerful poems contain. This moment was last moment and will become the next (and each are the other), but if I burn my hand on the toaster oven, or when, as yesterday removing the toast to go with my daughter’s eggs, the moment suspends in time: I am in the moment. And later, icing it, or today just blowing on it, I am still there. And if it scars, well. . . .

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How is it that nearly 30 years later I remember these magical moments of heat with Jean? What exactly have I taken from that hovering hand? In my early days of teaching in New York University’s Expository Writing Program—a few years after having studied with Jean and learning so many unnamable things—my supervisor, Darlene Forrest, a supreme teacher in her own right and from whom I took a great number of inspiring and transferable tips, asked me how I’d designed my class on that particular day. What had I taught my students, she wanted to know. I stammered, surely citing some poem I’d brought in, and likely gesturing my hands in a “voilà” at the end. “Nicole,” Darlene said, “magic is not a pedagogical tool.” 

But it wasn’t actually magic I was trying to perform. My open hands were far less “voilà” and far more simply openness. That openness, I learned from Jean. She took each of the poets in the classroom seriously, and she encouraged us to take ourselves and each other seriously as well—as poets, as readers, as writers, and perhaps, most essentially, as beings who had the unique honor of occupying a particular intersection of time and space. The close readings, the rubbing of sticks together in hopes of catching flame, the silences around and within the work—it all operated towards a recognition of: I am here, and you are, and we are, and these are the poems—the ones we are reading and the ones we are writing—that we have access to in this particular dimension.

To be present and human and to witness the other’s presence and humanity—these are, perhaps, the greatest gifts we can offer our students, the greatest gifts we can offer each other.

I’m thinking of the work I sometimes do with children who have profound disabilities, ones who can neither read nor write, and how in the classroom—usually with some sun coming through the windows—I read to them. Dickinson, Frost, Valentine. And those words are felt in the room by all of us. It’s the same impulse that leads me to read a single poem over and over to advanced students, telling them they can stop me only once they feel changed. To be present and human and to witness the other’s presence and humanity—these are, perhaps, the greatest gifts we can offer our students, the greatest gifts we can offer each other. These are the threshold gifts, the ones that fundamentally change us, and thus stay with us. Ultimately, I think Jean’s heat had as much to do with acknowledging the warm blood coursing through our veins—there, side by side, at the turn of the century, in the heart of the Village—as it had to do with any particular poem we produced then or would ever produce. And yet, the acknowledgement itself guided us to write poems that would not have otherwise been written.

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Do I often have visitations?

Maybe. Maybe each time I sit down and open a page to read, or open a page to write, or burn myself, or ice my burn. But they don’t feel like visitations. Visitation is too fleeting. Jean stays with me; she carried me across the threshold. I was there, and she was, and we are, as are my students, each and all, my friends, you. Thirty years later, sitting at my desk reading an Italian physicist, circling all the words that help me understand the relationship between heat and poetry, time, and space, I feel it still—Jean’s hand hovering above each page. That warmth. That fire.

Featured photo by Tyler Flynn Dorholt.