Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (2)

 GRAHAM HAD ALREADY been occasionally using parentheses and brackets in her poems, but in Never this practice becomes pervasive. The last 19 lines of "The Complex Mechanism of the Break" are one long parenthesis, with several bracketed phrases inside it. The last 13 lines of "Kyoto" are nothing but bracketed phrases, seeming to be insertions into a text that survived after the text into which they were inserted disappeared.

I was reminded of Derrida on supplements. The phrases in parentheses and brackets are in a double relationship to the poem, we might say, inside of it and outside of it. Take them out, and the sentences that contained them read as if complete and self-sufficient. But they must not have been self-sufficient if they needed the contents of the brackets and parentheses. Those contents are, from one angle, not part of the poem, but from another angle, the poem is not itself without them.

The poems in Never generally return to the usual Graham mode of long lines, long sentences, long arcs of development, but one--"Solitude"--is more in the mode  of Swarm: short lines, paratactic, disjunctive. But "Solitude" drops a crucial clue about those parentheses and brackets in identifying two characters, "speaking subject" (or "s.s.") and "editor" (or "ed"). The "speaking subject" is the "I' of the poem, or perhaps of the first draft of the poem. The "editor" is a later consciousness proposing revisions, different strategies, cancellations.

So perhaps the content in the parentheses and brackets is from the "editor"--still Graham, that is, but not exactly the Graham of the draft, instead the part of the Graham brain that wants to add a detail, or enter a qualification, or suggest an alternative, or even call the whole enterprise into question, Graham serving as her own Old Ez to her own Possum.

Because of this, Never both reminds one of the pre-Swarm Graham and seems like a new Graham. Graham had often veered into the meta-poetic before, with poems calling attention to their own status as poems. The new wrinkle in Never is that that the poems are Graham-poems that call attention to...or ponder, or work against, or even get a little grouchy about their own status as Graham-poems. 

Rounding fifty, definitely an "established poet," Graham's poems start to wonder, what is this thing called Graham?

This questioning shows up in the book's pronouns, which need their own post.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (1)

ALERT TO THE wisdom of the old proverb, I do not judge books by their covers, but I certainly notice covers, and some of the physical details of Never seem to be sending signals.

For instance, this is the first Graham collection with the wide, approaching square pages (seven inches by nine-and-a-quarter inches) that she used for every subsequent collection (to date at least). My first guess was that the wider pages accommodate those famous long lines, giving the book as a physical object a certain Grahamian dimension. But beyond that, the format unleashes a variety of design possibilities for Fearn Cutler de Vicq de Cumptich. (I wondered whether this was a fanciful pseudonym and that Graham had designed the jacket herself, but no, Fearn Cutler de Vicq de Cumptich is a real designer.)

The jacket cover is simple but striking. Mostly white space, with "NEVER" at the top, quite large, "JORIE GRAHAM," not quite as large, towards the bottom, and "poems" and "from the pulitzer prize winner" tucked in between. At the center, three and a half inches by three and a half inches, is a detail from Vermeer's The Astronomer, the astronomer's right hand reaching out to touch the celestial globe on his table, the globe lit by the sunlight coming through that famous Vermeer window. The fingers of his left hand rest on the table, near a book or manuscript. 

Clean and appealing.

The surprise is on the jacket's back. Alongside the inevitable UPC code, we have another three-and-a-half inch square, positioned just where the detail of the Vermeer painting was on the front, with a black-and-white photo of Graham. In this one, unlike her earlier jacket photos, she is smiling. And she holds her left hand up, fingers extended, in a gesture that looks a lot like that of the astronomer's right hand, save that she is not touching anything. Her hand is just suspended in the air.

The design seems to be suggesting that the viewer see Graham as somehow in relation to Vermeer's astronomer. Hmm.

Another superficial but interesting detail: this is the first Graham collection since Materialism to have a dedicatee: "This book is for Emily." There are quite a few Emilys out there, but my guess would be Graham's daughter, Emily Galvin (also the dedicatee of The End of Beauty). 

Brandon Som, _Babel's Moon_

I SPOTTED THIS at a local used book store (hello, A Novel Idea!) and thought it might be a followup to Som's remarkable second book Tripas (see post for 8/19/2023), but no...and turns out it isn't his first book, either, but a 27-page chapbook that preceded his debut, The Tribute Horse. A very handsome chapbook, in fact--nice work, Tupelo Press.

Early work, then, but Som already had some serious chops.

Swaddled in limb sap,

I imagine myself, impulse,

a cadence, a prevailing hunger

or thirst to avail myself of the light

and blister.

That's the opening of the third of the five sections of "My Grandfather in the Lemon Orchard," a highlight for me.

To my surprise, the book does not much address the complexities of Som's identity, a recurring concern of Tripas. Instead, it feels definitely mandarin, in the Cyril Connolly sense, putting its greatest energies into form and language. I have never read The Tribute Horse, but now I feel like investigating.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Swarm_ (3)

 UNEXPECTED PRESENCES IN Swarm include Emily Dickinson, whose astonishing "I cannot live with You" is "a poem which animates the book throughout," according to Graham's notes. She thanks Susan Howe as well, which suggests Graham had been reading My Emily Dickinson.

Another: David Jones, whose In Parenthesis and Anathemata are also cited in the notes. I read In Parenthesis in grad school but have not thought of it often since then. It's a poem about trench warfare, but refracted through a panoply of high modernist lenses. Graham's affinities with Anglo-American high modernism have been often noted, but I'm not sure what to think about this particular influence. I need to pluck that one from the shelf again. 

Also name-checked: John Ashbery, Donald Revell, Michael Palmer, (my man!) Hölderlin.

Not to mention Agamemnon and King Lear--see especially "Underneath (11)." Both kings. Both bad dads. Both prone to faulty decisions. Both made to suffer. Not sure what to think about this connection, though.

Not name-checked but, to my mind, quite present: John Milton, especially Book I of Paradise Lost, in "Underneath (Upland)," which certainly seems to be about the bewilderment and pain of the fallen angels. Since Graham typically seems quick to identify sources, it surprised me that this one went unmentioned. But it seems hard to miss: 

light-carriers carrying light for the Lord

(who are these fallen the light lifted

for us to step over

reveals?)

Or consider this:

while the creatures are felled,

gracing the high slopes with cries and outstretched arms

felled, among the stout-fibered living wood,

felled, the rest pierced through with green,

to make the basilica of divine hazard [...]

Okay, I know, no trees in Hell, but even so the scene seems reminiscent of Satan considering the landscape littered with his defeated angel army:

                                    till on the Beach

Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call'd

His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans't

Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks

In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades

High overarch't imbowr; or scatterd sedge

Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion arm'd

Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew

Busirus and his Memphian Chivalry,

While with perfidious hatred they pursu'd

The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld

From the safe shore thir floating Carkases

And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown

Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,

Under amazement of thir hideous change.

All in all, Swarm seems to have spot of its own in the Graham oeuvre, quite unlike what came before, quite unlike what came later. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Swarm_ (2), with a bit more on _The Errancy_

 THE WORD "SWARM" shows up about half a dozen times in The Errancy, I noticed when re-reading, knowing that it became the title of her next book.  "The Guardian Angel of the Swarm," particularly caught my attention. Graham (in  the notes) tagged it as another "manteau" poem, this one in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze. It ends, "Come now, let us go," which may align with the OED definition of "swarm" Graham provides in the notes to Swarm: "a  body of bees which at a particular season leave the hive or main stock, gather in a compact mass or cluster in search of a new dwelling-place, under the guidance of a queen." The OED further notes a metaphorical extension: "persons who leave the original body and go forth to found a new colony or community."

"Swarm" thus might connect to Graham's own circumstances, leaving Iowa for Massachusetts, and it also strikes a surprising Plath resonance--surprising to me, anyway, since I never thought of Graham as sounding much like Plath (see the bee poems in Ariel).

The most interesting thing about the word, though, is that for Graham it conveys concerted and purposeful activity, a chosen departure from the familiar into the unknown, rather than the chaos and shapelessness "swarm" suggests if, like me, you are too damn lazy to look up the word and instead rely on its association with mobs and aimless milling about. There is nothing chaotic or vague about a swarm at all. The queen bee says, in effect, "come now, let us go," like a Moses, or a John Winthrop, or a Brigham Young, and the hive says, "we're in, let's go."

The title of The Errancy has a like doubleness to it. The OED defines "errancy" as "the condition of erring or being in error," as in wandering from the true and the right, but Graham's notes call our attention to the knight errant, who did indeed wander, but wandered with a purpose, pledged and prepared to do knightly service in whatever circumstance he encountered on his wanderings.

I wondered whether the errancy of the knight errant even tips over a bit into an errand, "a going with a message or a commission." Not really, as it happens. I learned in snooping about the OED that errand for a task that sends you out in  the world has Anglo-Saxon roots, while errant for wandering has French and Latin roots--that is, the two words, despite their superficial similarity, are not related. I like the idea of Graham toggling between the two possibilities, though.

And speaking of swarms, what kind of swarm is depicted on the cover of Swarm? We have maybe a dozen heads, six depicted in profile, the faces somewhat androgynous except for the bearded person on the left edge. The dust jacket informs us that this is a detail from one of Giotto's frescos in the Serovegni Chapel in Padua. Which one? "The Prayer of the Suitors," it turns out. This fresco depicts an episode in the Life of Mary. According  to medieval legend, she had many suitors, but her parents wanted her to marry a man who would promise to preserve her virginity. Each suitor provided a rod; Joseph's rod blossomed, a divine sign that he was the man. Whether this backstory to the painting tells us much about Graham's collection I wouldn't say, but the intent faces all headed in the same direction definitely sends us a signal about the idea of a swarm.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Swarm_ (1)

SWARM (2000) IS a wider swerve than I realized at the time I first read it, sometime within half a year of when it was published.  After my having just read the previous six collections, Swarm comes as a shock. From The End of Beauty on, Graham had been writing in longer lines and even longer sentences, and writing longer poems with longer arcs of development (see especially Materialism), Not in Swarm.  For the most part, the lines here are short, sometimes just a few words, and we often get phrases or just isolated words instead of those long unscrolling Grahamian sentences. "The Veil" begins with these lines:

Exile          Angle of vision.

So steep          the representation.

Desperate          Polite.

A fourth wall          A sixth act.

Centuries lean up into its weave, shudder, go out.

The poems are not brief, but the longest are only three or four pages, and they tend to have the disjunctive feel of the passage I just quoted, to feel like mosaics from which half the tesserae have fallen out.

There are some new devices as well: poems with what look like stage directions ("The Veil," "Middle Distance,"), more frequent use of parentheses, asterisks separating lines.

Graham had a lot going on in the later 1990s. She took up her position as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (succeeding Seamus Heaney) in 1999, which was  the same year her divorce from Jim Galvin became final. In 1999, too, while serving as judge in a poetry contest, she gave  the prize to her boyfriend (later husband), Peter Sacks, a dodgy circumstance that was to get a lot of attention a few years later.

The author bio on the back flap of the dust jacket notes that Graham "currently divides her time between Iowa and Massachusetts," which makes me wonder whether her daughter did not want to be the new kid in a Massachusetts school and so stayed in Iowa City. Being often separated from her daughter would be a stressful situation, I imagine--for that matter, a daughter in her early teens and a mother in her late 40s is going to be stressful no matter what, even if no divorces or relocations are involved.

It would be over-tidy to say the radical changes in Graham's personal life generated the radical changes in the form of her poetry, but there does seem to be a movement in Swarm to strip things down, to lay bare the bones. There are sixteen different poems titled "Underneath," distinguished from each other by number or subtitles, as in "Underneath (8)" or "Underneath (Libation)." Are these the poems that were underneath the baroque elaborations of The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism?

Swarm revisits The End of Beauty in an even more remarkable way by including poems on Eurydice, Daphne, and Eve, but this time without Orpheus, Apollo, and Adam. And instead of Penelope, we get Calypso...and Clytemnestra. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (4)

 "EMERGENCY," I HAVE decided, ranks among my favorite Graham poems. It's a somewhat longer one, four sections over six pages.

Section 1 connects to some of the collection's "aubade" poems, in that Graham (or "I") is out walking at night, perhaps making a "'fore-day creep" as Willie Dixon put it in "Back Door Man," or perhaps just suffering from insomnia...anyway, it's a pitch-dark, moonless night, Graham is out walking by a river. She is "a woman, in a good-sized American town, alone, / late night, along a river's finery, / downriver from a power-plant, / upriver from a reservoir [...]". Due to the lightless circumstances she can only hear, not see, the river. The river is there, plainly enough, and through sound and memory she can imaginatively construct what she cannot see, but the subtraction of the seen arrests her, focuses her attention in a way that would not have happened to her in ordinary daylight. 

In Section 2, the river speaks to her--so the main pronoun here is not "I" but "you." The river seems to know a lot about her and to have decided opinions on what she should do next: "There is novelty, feel its blades, says the river, rippling, / push into perdition, your fault is eternal, exciting, exciting with seeming-- / the river falls over itself explaining -- / why do you expect to drown yourself in me [...]". What really got my attention, though, was the line--

(the garmenture of river, the light tucked into its raveling hem)

--which makes the river something like Pascal's manteau, a garment with a secret in its hem. And then, since the river (twice!) says "the stars are in me," the river is also Magritte's version of Pascal's manteau, starlight glimmering in infinite space through the cloak's holes.

Section 3 begins with a kick in the gut: "When she hit the child she felt something multiply." We have shifted pronoun gain, to a "she," a mother who has been stretched to her breaking point and is now conscious above all of silence...Pascal's eternal silence, maybe, given how utterly alone the mother seems to be. 

Section 3 put me in mind of the third section of Yeats's "Easter 1916," which takes us miles from Dublin into the countryside, a lively natural scene that seems unconnected to the politics and  personalities of the Easter Rising--only to turn out, once we get to the fourth section, to be eerily congruent with politics and personalities, setting up the impersonal, pleading, honoring voice of the fourth section.

In "Emergency," Section 4 is a prayer.

Let us pray. Why? Let us pray to be a torpid river, Lord.

Why? Whom shall we compose to be the speaker

for this void?

"I," "you," and "she" are all rejected, and we turn from river containing stars to Blaise Pascal himself, or more properly his sister, she who did the actual sewing of the Memorial into the hem of the manteau. After describing the sister's labors, the poem subsides into a series  of questions (as does "Easter 1916"), but I felt as a reader that we had passed through something and were--as Yeats put it--transformed utterly.