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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 199
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PERSONAL
Born August 13, 1958, in Baltimore, MD; died of entometrial cancer, September 8, 2019, in Napa, CA; daughter of Giles and Nancy Mead.
EDUCATION:Vassar College, B.A., 1982; Syracuse University, M.A., 1996; University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, M.F.A., 1988.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet. Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, poet-in-residence, beginning 1996; Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Iowa City, instructor; former co-owner of Prairie Lights (a bookstore), in IA; managed the family vineyard in Napa, CA. Taught at several universities, including Colby College, Waterville, ME, Drew University, Madison, NJ, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, and New England College, Henniker, NH; Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, 2002.
AWARDS:Whiting Writers’ Award, 1992, and Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, 1995, both for The Lord and the General Din of the World; completion grant, Lannon Foundation, for House of Poured-out Waters; Ploughshares Cohen Award, 2004; Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist, 2017, for World of Made and Unmade.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Jane Mead, born in 1958, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and eventually spent time in New Mexico, California, and London. Much of the American poet’s inspiration for her works came from the natural environment. Mead died of endometrial cancer in 2019.
Mead’s first book, The Lord and the General Din of the World, was chosen by Philip Levine as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry in 1995. In his foreword to the book, Levine states that “We, the readers, eavesdrop on a passionate internalized debate that is about no more and no less than the question of whether or not we should live and, should we choose to, how we might go about it.”
The poems in this collection deal with a wide range of human suffering (suicide, isolation, addiction), but show a fight against despair, and a struggle toward hope. Mead presents her experiences clearly and honestly. In her second collection, House of Poured-out Waters, Mead again runs the range of human emotions expressing anger, sorrow, sarcasm, in what Booklist critic Donna Seaman terms “an even more powerful work” than The Lord and the General Din of the World.
Mead published The Usable Field, her third book, in 2008. The poems cover the cycles of life and death through expressions of joy and enlightenment. Reviewing the collection in the Antioch Review, Malinda Markham reasoned that “often, the unornamented diction produces startling moments…. Occasionally, though, the diction flattens out into an image that seems too thin to bear the weight of meaning.” Writing in Library Journal, Kathleen A. Welton insisted that Mead is “justly compared to Emily Dickinson for her brilliance, inventive syntax, and emotional richness.”
In 2014 Mead published the poetry collection Money Money Money Water Water Water. In this collection, Mead writes on the consequences of environmental destruction. Conversations are created between the texts on each side of the page as the environment is imagined through the human body.
In an interview in Bookslut, Mead talked with Erin Lyndal Martin about the small poems that she inserted in the bottom left corner of the left-hand pages. She admitted that “at some point in the writing of the poems in the book, a more interior voice started coming to me—these little fragments which often arose independently of the poems to which they are now linked. Some of those fragments are found poems too, from agricultural journals, and that kind of thing. In any event, I started seeing that they were a part of the conversation that the poems were having with one another, and formalized them structurally for that purpose.” In the same interview, Mead also commented on her use of repetition in her poetry and what she finds attractive about it. “I’d say the attraction is both musical, which is to say physical, and temperamental. Musically, the return of the similar but not identical sound is very appealing. And I think I am by temperament inclined toward repetition as a structuring element, one that tempers the adventure, structures the movement toward the unknown.”
Writing in the Antioch Review, Benjamin S. Grossberg remarked that “after a sustained engagement with this knotty, ambitious” collection, “I found myself grateful … for what I couldn’t unravel–as it allows space for the irreducible in Mead’s quest, and beckons me” to reread these poems. A contributor to Publishers Weekly noticed that Mead’s “delicate, elliptical maneuvering of subjects amplifies the collection’s ecopoetic concerns.”
World of Made and Unmade and To the Wren
Mead published the poem World of Made and Unmade in 2016. While contemplating her mother’s mortality, she questions the ways in which one can live their life bravely. Writing in Library Journal, Karla Huston insisted that “this accessible work will appeal to a wide range of readers.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly opined that “incorporated archival documents such as ledgers, photos, and drawings lend a stark palpability to the work.”
In 2019 Mead published To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019. Across nearly thirty years of writing poems, Mead shares personal stories about her family, emotional stability, and the California wine country. A contributor to Publishers Weekly observed that “in her commitment to representing experience faithfully, Mead engages fundamental questions about the nature of knowing.”
Mead once told CA: “I will give whatever help I can to organizations/groups active in discussing/alleviating problems stemming from drug abuse, domestic violence. I will participate in benefit readings, discussion groups, etc. I like to think that my poems can give some encouragement to people suffering in these ways.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Antioch Review, September 22, 2009, Malinda Markham, review of The Usable Field, p. 802; December 22, 2015, review of Money Money Money Water Water Water, p. 190.
Library Journal, March 15, 2008, Kathleen A. Welton, review of The Usable Field, p. 74; August 1, 2016, Karla Huston, review of World of Made and Unmade, p. 99.
Publishers Weekly, March 31, 2014, review of Money Money Money Water Water Water, p. 37; July 18, 2016, review of World of Made and Unmade, p. 184; May 20, 2019, review of To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019, p. 57.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/ (October 21, 2019), author profile.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (October 1, 2014), Erin Lyndal Martin, author interview.
Griffin Poetry Prize website, https://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/ (October 21, 2019), author profile.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (October 21, 2019), author profile.
OBITUARIES
Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/ (September 18, 2019), “Jane Mead Dies at 61.”
Jane Mead was the author of five full-length books of poetry, most recently 'To the Wren,' from Alice James Books. Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals and she was the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. She taught at many colleges and universities including Colby College, The University of Iowa and Wake Forest University. She managed the ranch her grandfather purchased in the early 1900's in Northern California, where she grew zinfandel and cabernet wine-grapes. She taught at the Drew University low-residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.
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Obituaries
Jane Mead dies at 61; poet’s work was inspired by the natural world
Jane Mead, author of “World of Made and Unmade,” has died at 61.(Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
By Dorany PinedaStaff Writer
Sep. 18, 2019 4:17 PM
Jane Mead, an American poet whose work was largely inspired by her love of nature and the interconnections between organisms and their environments, has died.
Mead died of endometrial cancer Sept. 8 in her home in Napa, said her friend Kathleen Finneran. She was 61.
In a literary career that spanned more than 20 years, Mead wrote five poetry collections and her work was regularly published in anthologies and journals.
She was a Griffin Poetry Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist for her 2016 book “World of Made and Unmade,” about her mother’s death. It also was long-listed for the National Book Award. Former Times poetry contributor Carol Muske-Dukes wrote in 2017 that “Mead’s poems reveal a compassionate aesthetic imagination.”
In an excerpt from the book, Mead writes:
The third time my mother fell
she stopped saying she wanted to die.
Saying you want to die
is one thing, she pointed out
but dying is quite another.
And then she went to bed.
American poet Jane Mead’s acclaimed work earned her grants from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.(Mary Shea)
Her previous book “Money Money Money Water Water Water,” a work of ecopoetry, explores the widespread destruction of the natural world.
In a 2014 interview with the now-defunct literary blog Bookslut, Mead talks about the relationship between poetry and nature: “Given the nearly complete destruction of an entire planet, the overpowering by greed of any sense of the basic logic of survival, or valuation of beauty — it would be odd if the urgency of this situation were not reflected in our poetry.”
She spoke also about the influence poetry can have in preserving nature: “But poetry has the potential to move people, which is where the potential for growth and change of a certain kind enters the picture.”
Remembered as gentle and intelligent, she was admired for her deep compassion.
“She was a poet who had a very singular voice,” said Anne Marie Macari, a poet and friend. “That’s one of the ways you know someone is a good poet. They are who they are…. She was authentic and tender and even though she was brilliant, that wasn’t the most important part of her work…. It was the compassion she felt for other creatures … the way she was grounded by the natural world.
“She brought that to her work” along with her love for her dogs, Macari said.
Mead’s acclaimed work earned her grants from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Jane Whitaker Mead was born Aug. 13, 1958, in Baltimore, Md.. Her father, Giles, was a Harvard professor of ichthyology and former director of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. Her mother, Nancy, owned a pecan farm in southern New Mexico.
Mead earned her bachelor’s degree from Vassar College, a master’s from Syracuse University and an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she studied in the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She held many teaching positions through her career and across the country, including Colby College in Maine, Southwest Texas State University, Washington University and New England College, among others, and was a poet-in-residence for many years at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
While living in Iowa, she co-owned an independent bookstore called Prairie Lights with a fellow poet. When her father died in 2003, Mead left her residency at Wake Forest and moved west to manage her family’s vineyard in Napa. She lived out her days on the land, growing closer to it.
She is survived by siblings Parry, Giles, Richie and Gale.
October 2014
Erin Lyndal Martin
features
An Interview with Jane Mead
A friend of mine posed a question on Facebook: "What is water?" Jane Mead, author of the new poetry collection MONEY MONEY MONEY |WATER WATER WATER, might have the answer. "Clearly, I'm obsessed with water in various ways," says Mead, whose earlier collection is entitled House of Poured-Out Waters. Mead's new poems force readers to confront the multiplicity of water -- how it cleanses, nourishes, gets polluted, and can also claim us -- as well as bringing us face to face with actual nature by way of language.
Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poetry. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writer's Award. She teaches in the low residency MFA program at Drew University and farms in Northern California.
What role does nature or ecopoetry play in contemporary society?
Well, beneath this question is the deeper question of what role poetry plays in contemporary society, and it's hard to say. You hear all sorts of arguments about how irrelevant poetry is, which I don't accept. Neither, however, would I argue that poetry is of central cultural importance today, as it may have been at other times and in other cultures. I think that art of one kind or another -- music, poetry, painting, dance, whatever -- is important to every life as a way to connect the large mystery inside to the large mystery outside. And I think everybody makes that connection through one kind of art or another, but would I say poetry per se is crucial or central? Probably not, not for most people. Yet, somehow, I know we need it in the world -- that much I will say, although "we" might be a relatively small group of people. It is important to say, on the other hand, that poetry is alive and well: there is so much energy in the world of contemporary poetry, however small that world might be -- so many aesthetic avenues being explored, so much cross-pollination among traditions. I find it an incredibly exciting time to be writing.
What other poets do you think have done a skillful job at reporting poetically on the current state of the environment (whenever they were writing) and humans' role in it?
Lucia Perillo comes to mind immediately, because she goes all the way down through the tragedy into the comic absurd, and certainly we live in the world of the absurd, not the least in how we treat our environment, and the political machinations we will go to in order to protect the economic interests of the few for the short run. She was a park ranger in her young adulthood, and has remained a serious student of the natural world. You never get the sense, in reading her poetry, that the "natural world" has been sought out as material for the poem, yet it is central. It is all bound up in the way she thinks about things.
One of the most striking things readers notice first about MONEY MONEY MONEY | WATER WATER WATER is the small poems in the lower left corner of the left-hand pages. Did these poems arise concurrently with the full-length ones?
At some point in the writing of the poems in the book, a more interior voice started coming to me -- these little fragments which often arose independently of the poems to which they are now linked. Some of those fragments are found poems too, from agricultural journals, and that kind of thing. In any event, I started seeing that they were a part of the conversation that the poems were having with one another, and formalized them structurally for that purpose.
You frequently use repetition in your poems, which I find intriguing. When I consider the value of repetition, I think of how it makes readers confront the same language twice, but with a somewhat changed vantage. What draws you to repetition?
I'd say the attraction is both musical, which is to say physical, and temperamental. Musically, the return of the similar but not identical sound is very appealing. And I think I am by temperament inclined toward repetition as a structuring element, one that tempers the adventure, structures the movement toward the unknown.
Based on a few poems (mostly "Cove"), I'm forced to consider whether or not poetry can be a way to preserve nature in some way. How do you see poetry and the natural world interacting?
To the extent that poems can stir feelings of awe in the face of the natural world, or emphasize our place within it, the interconnectedness, that can be very powerful. And of course the political and the environmental are linked increasingly closely, there is no way back to the simple pastoral. As you know, there's increasing discussion about ecopoetry -- the question of how that is defined, even though it is a term that has been around for quite a while. Given the nearly complete destruction of an entire planet, the overpowering by greed of any sense of the basic logic of survival, or valuation of beauty -- it would be odd if the urgency of this situation were not reflected in our poetry. I haven't read the recent debates about ecopoetry, but I'm sure there are a lot of truly smart people with smart things to say about it -- and how could that not be a great thing. But poetry has the potential to move people, which is where the potential for growth and change of a certain kind enters the picture.
When you were working on this book, was there anything you were determined not to do?
Absolutely not. I actually never think that way -- in fact, I try to keep myself open to anything, try to go wherever the poem takes me, or wherever I have to go to follow the poem. For some reason, that's hard -- I have often to quiet the internal critic. But when the writing is going well and intensely -- then it is easy to "learn by going where you need to go," as Roethke would say in that great villanelle. I guess that is to answer your question in terms of individual poems, but in terms of the book, I'd say the same thing. It's an organic process for me, that of putting a book together, and I try to keep my willfulness at bay. As with writing a poem, in the organization of a book my process is one by which the necessary structural elements are discovered intuitively and then emphasized. This all relates back in some way to your questions about what I call "the foursies" and also the question about repetition. It's about finding structure as you go.
I have had some trouble with this book's speaker. Most of the times the "I" surfaces, there isn't much information given about the speaker, and I feel I feel like the speaker is a nonspecific entity. But then there are poems like "Tamoxifen" that are very intimately about your own mother. How do you see this book's speaker?
For the most part, the "I" is just me, but of course that doesn't imply a consistent distance from or angle on the subject. Sometimes the voice talks about something; sometimes the voice enacts what's going on, in which case voice is a much more integral part of subject. Also, sometimes I'm speaking in the context of personal narrative, and sometimes the "I" is more lyric, and the narrative is only implied. And a poem like "We Approach Magna Carta" is grounded in cultural imagery and the thinking process. "Dorothy and Jane in Tesuque," on the other hand, is based in personal narrative and its imagery. Voice gets really complex when you start analyzing the different elements that contribute to it, and the different combinations thereof. These are great questions -- you are making me think about stuff I haven't noticed before in my own poems. In the end, I'd say that for me as a reader, there are two categories of voice: a) that which one believes and trusts, and b) that which one does not believe or trust. For me, as a writer, an important part of the process is finding, for each poem, the voice (meaning distance and perspective) from which I can engage the subject matter honestly. If you can do that, then you are doing your part in earning your reader's trust.
Your earlier poem "Origin" concludes: "My greatest desire -- / to exist in a physical world." Can you unpack that in relation to the work you do in MONEY MONEY MONEY? Unless you don't believe the two are linked.
Ooolala.
Both the titles of House of Poured-Out Waters and MONEY MONEY MONEY |WATER WATER WATER reference water, of course, and water is often a theme in your work. When you mention water in a poem, are you always going for the same meaning, or is it a versatile signifier for you?
Clearly, I'm obsessed with water in various ways, and I suppose that obsession is getting more and more literal. It's an easy thing to be obsessed with, extremely archetypal, and therefore tricky as well. In House of Poured-Out Waters the reference is a Biblical one -- it is one possible translation of the name of the pool at Bethesda where Jesus is said to have healed a man. In the title poem of that book, the biblical nature of the reference comes into focus in a way it doesn't in the rest of the book. In MONEY MONEY MONEY |WATER WATER WATER, on the other hand, the economic and political relationship between money and water underlies a lot of what's addressed. Bottom line? I love real fog. I love real rain. I love real water. From the handful of times I've been scuba diving, I can tell you I feel a much better sense of equilibrium underwater than above -- I love it under there, from where we all come. I feel really at home underwater -- the deeper the better. It's freeing and quiet.
I feel like your poems are often cartographies of a liminal space. In one poem, you write, "neither nor nor." In another, you say, "I am neither here nor elsewhere." Do you think it's important to have poetry be written in the cracks between the notes, as some jazz players might say?
Absolutely. In writing the two books previous to MONEY MONEY MONEY |WATER WATER WATER, I had a deep desire to go as far into uncharted waters as I could without losing communication with the mainland. In this most recent book, that reach is most apparent in some of the "foursies," and the biggest reach may be between the right and left hand pages (the "foursies" and other poems). This reach is "the cracks between notes."
How do you feel like this book continues or does away with growing seeds you've planted in other books?
I think that this book, more than my others, is founded on a spiritual confrontation with the world that's based on an intellectually framed worldview. To say it another way, this book, more than those previous, engages a part of myself that trained in economics and has thought some about politics and the environment. Another way to get at this would be to say that in this book there's a parallel between personal and cultural narrative that's not so apparent in the earlier books. And when I think about it further -- thank you for asking -- I think each of my books moves further out into the world. I don't have them with me, in front of me, but that seems right.
Jane Mead
Griffin Poetry Prize 2017
International Shortlist
Book: World of Made and Unmade
Poet: Jane Mead
Publisher: Alice James Books
Click here to read and listen to an excerpt.
Biography
Jane Mead is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Money Money Money | Water Water Water (2014). Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. She teaches at the low residency MFA program at Drew University and Farms in northern California.
With sorrow, we’ve learned of Jane Mead’s passing on September 8, 2019. Jane’s moving long poem World of Made and Unmade graced the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. From it, we can all glean that the process of death includes much to revere and to embrace. “Her language serves loss as a bell serves its chime,” the Griffin Poetry Prize judges exulted. In this loss to the poetry world, Jane has left us much to treasure and celebrate.
Jane’s publisher Alice James Books offers this lovely tribute.
Judges’ Citation
“Jane Mead’s poem, World of Made and Unmade, moves with elegance between elegy and harvest, between the work of practical care to the unmooring that loss precipitates. The poem allows for the intrusions of dogs and the laundry room flooding, acknowledging how the force of our days persists in the company of the dying. And how those disruptions are sometimes what can help carry us, sustain us through the experience, realign our spirit, or afford us reprieve. And in the midst of this is the poet’s mother, the life she has lived persuasive and just as vital. Mead moves from the days’ demands, engaged and articulate, to depict the service, the duty, and the company the dying require. Occasionally, the poem is still, reflective, posited at the bottom edge of the page, engaging in the ongoing conversation and the reckoning. Her language serves loss as a bell serves its chime. In her life, Mead’s mother planted and cared for 2001 pecan trees; her legacy, an orchard. In World of Made and Unmade, her life asks her daughter’s ‘How will you spend your courage?’ This poem seems that brave response.”
Summary
Mead’s fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We’re drawn in by sorrow and grief but also by the joys of celebrating a long life and by how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.
Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.
Jeramy Dodds reads from World of Made and Unmade by Jane Mead
…
…
The third time my mother fell
she stopped saying she wanted to die.
Saying you want to die
is one thing, she pointed out,
but dying is quite another.
And then she went to bed.
…
Outside her window the trees
of her orchard are heavy
with their load of ripening pecans.
The shadow of the Organ Mountains
creeps across the land,
and the blue heron stands on the shore
of the shrunken Rio Grande.
Wichita, Chickasaw, Wichita, Shoshoni:
her every tree, her every row.
…
I bring her coffee and a bun,
and a linen napkin, but –
Jesus Hapliod Christ,
as her grandfather the geneticist
would say, I mean how many
linen napkins does one person need?
How many linen napkins
the size of small tablecloths
does one person need – LVS
embroidered on each corner, and who
was L V S anyway?
…
Well, let’s see, my mother begins, LVS,
Lilian Vaughan Sampson, would have been
your great-grandmother, the name
going back to an orphan, a boy
who took his sister’s married name,
becoming Sampson in the ship’s log …
and in this way we lost track
of that side of the family.
…
In the hills above Rincon
a woman is leaving jugs of fresh water
outside the Rincon Water Works
before locking the metal doors.
Rincon, where the Rio Grande
turns back on itself –
like the crook of an arm
before heading south to become
Rio Bravo del Norte. Rincon, a stop
for water on the journey north.
…
The United States of America
Does not extend refugee status
To Mexicans.
…
And when there was nothing left
for her to do but die,
I brought my mother home with me.
I put her in the stone cabin
by the vineyard, cabin of her X
and now dead husband, my father,
cabin he called The Fortress
in those years his mother
came to live there. Came to die.
…
With the mediocre portraits
of her three children
hung at the foot of her bed,
I tried to joke that she now
was trapped into looking
at our heads. And, trapped thusly,
she did what nobody
could have predicted:
she developed a sense of humor.
An emergency sense of humor.
That dark room in which
we finally spoke.
From World of Made and Unmade by Jane Mead
Copyright © 2016 by Jane Mead
More about Jane Mead
The following are links to other Web sites with information about poet Jane Mead. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)
Jane Mead (official web site)
Jane Mead
1958–2019
Jane Mead received a BA from Vassar College in 1982, an MA from Syracuse University in 1986, and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1988.
She was the author of several poetry collections, including To the Wren, Collected & New Poems (Alice James Books, 2019); World of Made and Unmade (Alice James Books, 2016), which was a finalist for the Griffin Prize and the LA Times Book Award and longlisted for the National Book Award; Money Money Money | Water Water Water (Alice James Books, 2014); and The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande Books, 1996).
Of her work, the poet Gerald Stern writes, “Jane Mead’s mission is to rescue—to search and rescue; and the mind, above all, does the work…. Her poems are a beautiful search for liberation and rebirth.”
Mead was the recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the Lannan Foundation, and a Whiting Writers Award. She taught at Colby College, Southwest Texas State University, the University of Iowa, and Wake Forest University, among others. She managed her family’s ranch in northern California and co-owned Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa. She died on September 8, 2019.
Bibliography
To the Wren, Collected & New Poems (Alice James Books, 2019)
World of Made and Unmade (Alice James Books, 2016)
Money Money Money | Water Water Water (Alice James Books, 2014)
The Usable Field (Alice James Books, 2008)
House of Poured-Out Waters (University of Illinois Press, 2001)
The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande Books, 1996)
Jane Mead
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Jane Mead (August 13, 1958 – September 8, 2019) was an American poet, author of five poetry collections. Her last volume was To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019 (Alice James Books, 2019). Her honors included fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations, and a Whiting Award. Her poems appeared in literary journals and magazines including Ploughshares,[1] Electronic Poetry Review, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly, The Antioch Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1990.[2]
Born in Baltimore, Mead lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until she was twelve. Her father taught ichthyology at Harvard University. After Cambridge, she moved around a great deal with her mother and stepfather, who was a journalist, living in New Mexico, London, and Cambridge, England. She graduated from Vassar College and from Syracuse University and the University of Iowa. She taught and was Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University.
After her father died in 2003, Mead managed the family ranch in Napa County, Northern California. She taught at New England College[3] and co-owned Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa.
Mead died September 8, 2019, in Napa, from cancer.[4]
Contents
1
Honors and awards
2
Published works
3
References
4
External links
Honors and awards[edit]
2017 World of Made and Unmade shortlisted for 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize
2004 Ploughshares Cohen Award
2002 Guggenheim Fellowship[5]
1992 Whiting Award
Lannan Foundation Completion Grant[6]
Published works[edit]
Full-Length Poetry Collections
To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019. Alice James Books. 2019. ISBN 978-1-948579-01-8.
World of Made and Unmade. Alice James Books. 2016. ISBN 978-1-938584-32-9.
Money Money Money I Water Water Water. Alice James Books. 2014. ISBN 978-1-938584-04-6.
The Usable Field. Alice James Books. 2008. ISBN 978-1-882295-69-2.
House of Poured-Out Waters. University of Illinois Press. 2001. ISBN 978-0-252-06944-4.
The Lord and the General Din of the World. Sarabande Books. 1996. ISBN 978-0-9641151-1-8.
Anthologies Edited
Jane Mead, ed. (1994). Many and More: A Celebration of Love in Later Life. Timken Publishers. ISBN 978-0-943221-21-2.
In Anthology
Melissa Tuckey, ed. (2018). Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820353159.
Jane Mead
1958–2019
http://www.janemead.com/
Jane Mead was the author of five collections of poetry: The Lord and the General Din of the World (1996), The House of Poured-Out Waters (2001), The Usable Field (2008), Money Money Money Water Water Water (2014), World of Mad and Unmade (2016), and To the Wren: Collected and New Poems (2019). Her later work engaged the Western landscape, ecology, and the debts of ancestry: she managed her family’s farm in Northern California, where she grew zinfandel and cabernet wine grapes. In his review of Money Money Money Water Water Water, Jeff Hamilton noted, “Mead’s poetic compass, then, leads her not in circles, but toward a horizon of tragic speech,” adding that she “writes georgics in a confessional mode.”
Mead earned a BA at Vassar College, an MA at Syracuse University, and an MFA at the University of Iowa. She received awards and fellowships from the Lannan, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations. She taught at Colby College, Washington University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Drew University Low-Residency MFA program, and was for many years poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University. She died in 2019.
* To the Wren: Collected & New Poems
Jane Mead. Alice James, $29.95 (600p) ISBN 978-1-948579-01-8
With lyric candor and emotional precision, Mead (World of Made and Unmade) offers her family history, meditations on loss and madness, and the landscape of California wine country in this collected volume. Bringing together seven collections written over three decades, this book makes room for the many facets of Mead's talents to shine. Her father's struggles with addiction--along with the profound impact these struggles have on her family--are documented in Mead's debut collection and reconsidered after his death, leading to meditative exploration of grief and remembrance. Mead bears witness to her mother through a child's eyes, then, decades later, through the slow process of her mother's dying. A new poem asks "Do we ever really get to go beyond the story/we were born to." (For the speaker of these poems, the answer is a resounding no.) Still, the natural world, in its bounty and brutality, is a grounding force for Mead, a reminder of a time scale beyond the human span. In her commitment to representing experience faithfully, Mead engages fundamental questions about the nature of knowing. Through observation, philosophy, math, science, and prayer, the reader is witness to a mind that submits itself to the world with curiosity and humility in order ro see things as they really are. (Aug.)
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"To the Wren: Collected & New Poems." Publishers Weekly, 20 May 2019, p. 57. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587765459/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fbe291cf. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A587765459
Mead, Jane. World of Made and Unmade. Alice James. Sept. 2016.100p. ISBN 9781938584329. pap. $15.95. POETRY
"How will you spend/ your courage, how// will you spend your life?" Mead (Money Money Money \ Water Water Water) addresses that question repeatedly as she considers the long season of her mother's dying. In untitled poems connected like the strands of a "deep blue yarn," Mead propels readers forward, using plain language that's elegant in its simplicity yet compelling and heartbreaking. Even as she confronts grief and loss, the poet highlights the overriding theme of courage. "Saying you want to die/is one thing ... / but dying is quite another," she proclaims, further suggesting that love carries us through the process of death as we do what we must to ease the transition for loved ones, and live our lives in honor of them. With its ever-changing cycles of birth and rebirth, nature shows us that life continues, and it indeed provides comfort; perhaps for Mead, tending the vineyards (begun by her grandfather) and her mother's pecan trees is a way of honoring her mother. In the end, finally, it is winter: "The trees ... are losing/ their leaves. The pecans// pop out of their casings--/ready for their winter harvest." VERDICT This accessible work will appeal to a wide range of readers.--Karla Huston, Appleton, WI
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Huston, Karla. "Mead, Jane. World of Made and Unmade." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 99. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A459805051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4919cee1. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459805051
World of Made and Unmade
Jane Mead. Alice James (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (100) ISBN 978-1-93856432-9
Changing gears in her elegiac fifth collection, Mead (Money Money Money | Water Water Water) explores parental mortality against the backdrop of a New Mexico landscape that is tied to the author's heritage and under threat socially and ecologically. Mead grapples with a complicated mother-daughter relationship in unswerving terms, refusing to shirk responsibilities to the surrounding world, in particular the local grape harvest and the issues of migrant workers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her shifts and movements often occur in conjunction with agricultural cycles: "Rain, and the grape-sugars/ are dropping.// The phone has gone out." Said shifts and cycles, in turn, are frequently fashioned from actual representations of harvests, floods, and other natural forces frequently evoked by other poets on a symbolic level. As a result, Mead's earthiness sometimes morphs into otherworldliness. Despite the protracted, harrowing process, Mead rejects self-pity: "The day after my mother died/ we finished the grape harvest." Incorporated archival documents such as ledgers, photos, and drawings lend a stark palpability to the work. This resolute examination of death holds surprising room for an "emergency sense of humor." In addressing the relationship of mortality to ideas of resolution, celebration, and homecoming, Mead asks, "How will you spend your courage?" Photos & illus. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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"World of Made and Unmade." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 184. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A459287499/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=da095128. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287499
Money Money Money Water Water Water by Jane Mead. Alice James Books, 136 pp., $16.95 (paper). In her latest collection, Mead seeks transcendence in a world in crisis. Sometimes she quests as a wry supplicant, hoping "God will lean out of some cloud / bellowing my name" ("Cove"). But just as often, she lights upon a graceful authority and lyricism. For example, in "The Geese," she hears birds call and experiences the kind of integration of self and natural world that Wordsworth pined for: "the landscape / becomes the landscape / of being, which becomes / the bright silos and snowy / fields." The crises here are those associated with contemporary capitalism: alienation, environmental degradation, and the commoditization of everything. The opening poem, "Money," recalls a proposal to release more water into the "once-green Tuolumne,--// so the minnows could have some wiggle room." Note the characteristically understated music, Mead's delicate consonance and rhyme. The plan stalls: "it wasn't possible--by then, the water / didn't belong to the salmon anymore." The poem's title looms, monolithic, as the cause. But there is personal recovery. The book's final section pictures Mead leaving the social world for a vineyard, and discovering joy amid dogs, turtles, scorpions, Cabernet and Zinfandel. In "Big or Small with Language," she catalogues this natural surround and closes with a bursting: "the heart / unravels--... doesn't the heart unravel."
These poems can be elusive. The grammar and referents are often ambiguous, and the language airy, spare--reduced to, and sometimes just beyond, what's essential. This is especially true of the series of fragments that run along the bottom of the book's left-facing pages. But that said, there are enough immediate lyrics here to earn a reader's confidence. And after a sustained engagement with this knotty, ambitious book, I found myself grateful also for what I couldn't unravel--as it allows space for the irreducible in Mead's quest, and beckons me back.
Grossberg, Benjamin S.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Antioch Review, Inc.
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"Money Money Money Water Water Water." The Antioch Review, Winter 2015, p. 190+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A398502570/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6b2f5180. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A398502570
Money Money. Money Water Water Water
Jane Mead. Alice James (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-938584-04-6-Mead (The Usable Field) urgently explores environmental destruction in her fourth collection. The book's first section, "That the Church of England Should Be Free," alludes to the Magna Carta, signaling the collection's political interests. Through Mead's unique organization of these poems, a conversation is formed between the left and right page, the former always reserved for an italicized short lyric (a tercet and single line)--"The creation of want! The creation of debt/ The creation of the toxic ponds! I If they wave wave back"--while the latter expands on these themes: "Have mercy on us--/ someone. Anyone. Anyone who is watching./ Save up. Save us. (Big job.)" The plight of the natural world is understood through the human body: "The air is solids and non-solids./ The person is solids and non-solids:/ Solids and non-solids all the way down." The author's delicate, elliptical maneuvering of subjects amplifies the collection's ecopoetic concerns: "Make way for seeing/ Make way for blindness/ Make way for the vision// Of sea caught in cove," and later, "the seasons heave along is how/ the seasons are heaving." Mead's work invites us to listen and consider, "our hope/ for something beyond what we can/ plainly see--the poisoned planet poisoning." (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
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"Money Money. Money Water Water Water." Publishers Weekly, 31 Mar. 2014, p. 37+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A364197352/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1fe07b23. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A364197352
The Usable Field by Jane Mead. Alice James Books, 74 pp., $14.95 (paper). The speaker in the last poem of The Usable Field says, "I let the vines cover these windows on purpose. / The bird outside is another story." The book explores this boundary between self and other, life and death, grief and wholeness. Many of these elegiac poems start with a sense of something forcibly taken ("The Complexity of Music" begins, "At the bottom of music / a phrase is missing: / The white mist is coming // or We shall be as if deserted --") and turn to nature for, if not an answer, at least a philosophy for making sense of it. Sometimes, it is as stark as "there / is only one road / home, and it is not // for you." Often, the unornamented diction produces startling moments in which Mead finds "a desolate theme park " in bright flowers or warns us that geese in flight can be "unlocked" but only "at your peril." Occasionally, though, the diction flattens out into an image that seems too thin to bear the weight of meaning. "'Seventy Feet from the Magnolia Blossom'" reads in its entirety: "there is an ant. //He is carrying / a heavy load. -- // We should help him." I find a better balance between the austere language and the complexity of meaning in the final poem, "Where in the Story the Horse Mazy Dies." Here, the intellect is as adamant as ever, but urgency is given a longer leash, particularly because the questioning takes place inside the poem, rather than offstage. "Also, I penned a delicate engine," one section begins. And ends: "In rule of great and thick, in rule of passage--// wand, prayer, deck of cards, revolver-- / why would anyone ever draw an engine now?"
Markham, Malinda
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Antioch Review, Inc.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Markham, Malinda. "The Usable Field." The Antioch Review, Fall 2009, p. 802. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A210364212/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b5d98a4d. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A210364212
Mead, Jane. The Usable Field. Alice James. May 2008. c.80p. ISBN 978-1-882295-69-2. pap. $14.95. POETRY
In her third book (after House of Poured Out Waters and The Lord and the General Din of the World), award-winning poet Mead has created a series of subtle chants--expressing solace, enlightenment, and joy--as she explores the cycles of life and death in the natural world. Both musical and meditative, the collection is divided into three parts. Themes of grief and the yearning for wholeness are constant, as are images of light, trees, and water: "We cry. We carry/our grief whole, we/carry our lives. Swayed/ by the under-self / it's how we love." Mead has been justly compared to Emily Dickinson for her brilliance, inventive syntax, and emotional richness, and her latest is a serious work that will live long with readers. A worthy addition to all libraries with a comprehensive poetry and/or a women's studies collection.--Kathleen A. Welton, Chicago
Welton, Kathleen A.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Welton, Kathleen A. "Mead, Jane. The Usable Field." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2008, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A177829579/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=22f4254f. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A177829579