Mary Jane White

Mary Jane White is a poet and translator who practiced law at her home, the O. J. Hager House in Waukon, Iowa. She was born and raised in North Carolina, earned degrees from The North Carolina School of the Arts, Reed College, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and studied law at Duke University, graduating from the University of Iowa. Her poetry and translations received NEA Fellowships in 1979 and 1985. She taught lyric poetry and poetry workshops briefly at the University of Iowa and at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and served for a decade as an Iowa Poet in the Schools, before her son, Ruffin, was born in 1991. She has been awarded writing scholarships to Bread Loaf (1979), Squaw Valley Community of Writers (2006), Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference (2015), Writers in Paradise Conference (2016, 2018), Prague Summer Program for Writers (2017), Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia (2018). Her first book, Starry Sky to Starry Sky (Holy Cow! Press, 1988), contains translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s long lyric cycle, “Miles,” which first appeared in The American Poetry Review as an inserted feature. After Russia: Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva (Adelaide Books, New York/Lisbon, 2021) is her most recent translated work. Earlier poems and other translations have appeared widely across journals and magazines, have been included in various anthologies, and featured on Iowa Public Radio.

Praise for Dragonfly. Toad. Moon.

How to be a poet and a mother both? Hard question, asked by many, and not to be answered, or worthily asked, except in the living of it. How to be a poet and the mother of a child with autism? Harder question, and harder in the living as well. In this extraordinary collection of poems, Mary Jane White allows us into the pain-ridden, privileged space of world-constituting devotion. How do the disciplines of lyric form rhyme with the luminous sense-making of “A waist-high web of string,” for example, woven by a child who has walked in the night “from doorknob to doorknob . . . cabinet door to doorknob to cabinet door” after dismantling the crib that was meant to keep him safe? How does the mother who sees the sense of it and, yes, the beauty too, as well as the difficult entrapment, help the child make his way to larger freedom? Clear-eyed, exquisitely crafted, stripped of easy sentiment, the poems in Dragonfly. Toad. Moon. unfold for us the foundational strangeness and wonder of what Heidegger called our “thrown-ness” in the given world.

—Linda Gregerson, author of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2014

Where has life taken you, friend, on your journey? Poetry has held you aloft across ventures, truces, and wars. My favorite lines are from “Patience”: “You were born / A girl-child / To grow into / This Christian name, / Which will be / As a shell / To the tender foot / Of a snail . . .”
Your poems press our shoulders down to bring into view the exquisite everyday we might have missed. So many left me murmuring, “Wish I’d written that.”
You write as a mother, as a daughter. You reach backwards and forward all at once, uniting, just as a slip-stitch does when crocheting, what came before and what comes after. This is indeed a fine weave.

—Sandra Cisneros, American Book Award winner for The House on Mango Street, and author of Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo

What a delightful book of poems that will resonate deeply within the heart of any parent of a child on the autism spectrum. It is a perfect mix of delectable words and images that massage old bruises and sing to any soul that has ever wondered if anyone else “gets it.” Mary Jane White “gets it” beautifully.

—Shannon Penrod, host of Autism Live, the #1-rated Autism podcast

Mary Jane White’s Dragonfly. Toad. Moon. is a book highly attuned to perception. The poet’s intuition and gift for language runs parallel to her neurodiverse son’s artistry, the clay he throws becoming “A vase that flows out and, breathing, closes in / Upon what is now a nearly perfect lip.” As a mother learns her son’s modes of expression, she cares for him with a fierce intelligence and desire to understand his vocalizations that might otherwise go unheard. Dragonfly. Toad. Moon. is a beautifully complex collection. A wonderfully human, humane, and empathetic achievement.

—Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

Mary Jane White describes raising her son with autism the way he and all of us experience our lives—in blinks—sometimes in the moment, sometimes not. She talks straight but underneath the straight is poetry that is all her own. And no matter how difficult things get, you have the sense that in the end, Ms. White’s patience and the depth of her love for her boy will prevail. And in three clicks—dragonfly, toad, moon—they do. This is a tender and fearless book.

—Lola Haskins, author of Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare

Mary Jane White’s Dragonfly. Toad. Moon. speaks to the mute heroism endemic to caregiving and to how patience is less a virtue than a survival skill. Deploying an ear honed on the music of Modernist masters, her lyrics oscillate between the sweetly, and sadly, personal and the divinely cryptic, and the current they produce powers a humane, thoroughly adult vision.

—Richard Katrovas, author of Poets and the Fools Who Love Them: A Memoir in Essays

A child with autism is a mysterious blessing. In Dragonfly. Toad. Moon., Ms. White perfectly captures this. For parents and teachers of these children, this book will be a strong comfort after exhausting and challenging days. I remember my wife and I meeting Ruffin; she, who had never met a person with autism before, remarked, “He seems like a regular child!” Indeed, he did—at five or six, after years of ABA therapy. All the more so that sweet Ruffin changed many lives because Ms. White battled for critically necessary ABA services (woodenly, and like teaching a parrot to talk), and sent out dozens of copies of her efforts to other parents whose sleep-deprived days were filled with experiences similar to those she recounts herein. An inspiring read for all of us and should be required reading for the decisionmakers who impact all the Ruffins in the world. I wept and smiled as I read it.

—Sonja D. Kerr, Connell Michael Kerr, LLP

Writing both as the young daughter of parents and as the ferociously dedicated single mother of a son with autism, Mary Jane White’s vivid snapshots, her poems, burn into the mind. A web of knotted string fills a room. A struggling naked boy hurls a curtain rod, makes four empty swings swing together precisely, is swaddled, raging, in a towel. With his mother, we endure horrifying images of children with autism who could not be taught. But then, finally, as the tensions relax, the blessed beginnings of learning. The language of this poetry is as hard-edged and compressive as the images it shapes. The poems are unlike any I have ever seen, as unforgettable in method and content as the story they depict. Had White named her remarkable book with adjectives instead of nouns, she might have called it Hard. Bright. Fierce.

—Judith Moffett, author of Tarzan in Kentucky

I have spent over forty-five years working with and observing children with autism, their families, seeing how they overcame the difficulties and experienced the emotional significance of this life course. It takes an artist, a poet, to capture the experience, the upside down communications, the anxious expectations. Certainly there can be, after all, the most hoped-for successes, but there is always love.

—Dr. James A. Mulick, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus in Pediatrics, The Ohio State University

Tantrum

A practiced love of sameness:
As in this wild flapping and pacing . . .
Grunting is how he speaks to me.
A thing he wants is somewhere
In the world—find it! by
Looking
Everywhere. At all cost, avoid his tantrum.

A persistent love of sameness:
As in never move the salt and pepper . . .
As he does not speak to people, do not move
A thing in his world.
This will avoid his asking
Where?
This will avoid his tantrum.

A perseverative love, of sameness:
As in do not change anything . . .
As he does not speak to people, even me,
A thing in his world
He may love—but whom he will avoid,
By looking
Elsewhere. And avoid his tantrum.

~ ~ ~

“Tantrum” from Dragonfly. Toad. Moon. by Mary Jane White, Copyright © 2022 by Mary Jane White