A Remembrance of Jayne
Jayne Marek was a brilliant editorial colleague. That’s how I knew her—she was a collaborator in our process of selecting the poems we’d take into an issue of Bracken. I knew her a good while, but always via the magic screen on my laptop. She was up in the Port Townsend area and I was across the Sound in Seattle. Our staff is geographically dispersed all over the continent—still our meetings can be impassioned, intimate. And Jayne was a stirring, deepening presence—in with both feet, heart and head, attentive, sensitive, vocal, brave. When she gave her breath and voice to a poem we were considering, we heard the wondering, humility, hurt, protest, and hope of the poet. I looked forward to hearing her say a poem, and to being moved by her conveyance of the vulnerable, courageous heart in it. By the same token, when a poem in its current state wasn’t quite working, Jayne’s reading it to us brought that out—she’d faithfully given the piece its best chance.
Jayne was committed—to poetry, to the fragile and resilient natural world around us and within us, and to the potential in poetry to awaken us to the wonders and dangers of our true circumstances. She was committed to the witness, celebration, and protection of the splendors of the Salish Sea and its shores, its forests, creatures, rivers, ridges….
I wish you could hear her voice as I did, Sundays at noon, albeit through a little speaker on a quirky device. I wish you could see her face, even if only on a rectangular display, its expression changing by the instant as she gave us a poem that just might belong in Bracken, her eyebrows seeming to dance with the music and feeling in her subtly sung speech.
Jayne kept attending and enlivening these sessions even after she’d begun noticeably struggling for breath. She’d had a mitral valve problem that had been hardly a problem; then Covid came, then her long Covid stayed, and it proved relentlessly hard on her heart. She didn’t bow out till days before she died. She remained committed, expressing hopes of sitting with us for another meeting soon….
In my heart—still working well enough for the moment—I’m keeping Jayne with me, here in the world where she encourages my deepening commitment, to poetry, to the miracle of the living Earth we are blessed to be part of, and to the tidal power of the arts to lift us to full reverent awareness. Thank you Jayne!
–Jed Myers