Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (1)

JORIE GRAHAM ON Copper Canyon? Did not see that one coming. I associate Copper Canyon with poets like Hayden Carruth, David Lee, Marvin Bell, and [clears throat] James Galvin—that is to say, poets older than and not all that much like Graham—and Ecco (or Harper Collins) seemed to have a handle on what Graham wanted (wider than usual pages, Bulmer font), so what happened? Presumably these questions will be answered when the definitive Graham bio comes out, if I live that long, and people keep writing poets’ biographies.

I did notice on re-reading Runaway that the pages are already getting a little brown at the edges even though my copy is only six years old. Cheap paper, obviously. The pages of To 2040 are still bleach white. Yes, my copy is only three years old, but Copper Canyon obviously used better paper.

No dust jacket, though. Tsk.

Copper Canyon also said yes to the generous page dimensions Graham has preferred starting with Never and to using the services of designer Erica Mena, who also worked on the Graham collections Fast and Runaway. (This is not the Erica Mena who is a model and actress, by the way. It looks like Erica Mena the designer now goes by E. Rowan Mena.) 

In her acknowledgments, Graham thanks “the whole crew at Copper Canyon Press […] as we start down this new path together,” but the path has apparently come to an early end, as the new Graham book to appear in May will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

So what happened? I may never know. I hope FSG goes with really good paper. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_ (2)

 SOME FORMAL DEVELOPMENTS are going on in Runaway. The right-margin-justification form that Graham used for “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” the final poem in Fast, is used again in several poems, some of which seem crucial to the architecture of the book: “[To] the Last [Be] Human,” “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” “Scarcely There.”

It occurred to me that this form would be tricky if one were writing a first draft by hand, as you have to guess how much space the line’s letters would need before you started writing it. In a word-processing program, however, nothing tricky at all, just hit a couple of buttons. Does this mean Graham composes directly into a word-processing program? I suppose a lot of poets do these days.

The poems with classically Grahamian long lines tend to be arranged in quatrains, giving them a seeming regularity that turns out to be only superficial, because within those very stately-looking four-line arrangements we have that old Grahamian cataract going wherever it wants to go.

The new departure is what I am going to call the “rivulet” poem, with (for Graham) startlingly short lines, one, two, three words long, dropping vertically straight down the page. There are just four “rivulets,” but they include the title poem, “Runaway,” and the collection’s last three poems, inclining one to think that Graham has come up with something new that she is keen to explore. And explore it she did in To 2040.

Besides "Runaway," the rivulet poems are "In the Nest ®," "The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem." 

"In the Nest®" is in the dystopian vein that widened in To 2040, the "Nest" being a collective name for some of Google's "smart products." Amid the anxiety over surveillance are some poignant lines addressed to "Mother": "Mother. See us. / Mother it's / a strange new // winter here."

"The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem" combine Graham's penchant for longer sentences with the drops-like-a-plumb-line verticality of the "rivulet" poems, and the combination...definitely...does something. Damned if I can say what. But the rhythm feels very different, somehow, more headlong, more we-are-getting-somewhere-before-we-are-ready-to-be-there. Something urgent, insistent. The poem is about a couple on a ferryboat, looking at its wake, and addresses the problem that we are always already not the persons we think of ourselves as being. Short but packs a punch.

"Poem" could be a key note for eco-Graham: "The earth said / remember me."

"Runaway" deserves  to be the title poem. The long sentences in very short lines creates that urgency again, that feeling that like Alice we are not keeping up with ourselves, combined here with the crisis of our own technology rapidly consuming our substance and likely to consume a lot more of it before we get around to applying the brakes. 

Runaway makes a terrific introduction to To 2040. Or To 2040 makes a terrific sequel to Runaway. Take your pick.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_

 A BRAND NEW dedicatee this time around—Samantha Lorraine Almanza. I wondered whether Graham had broken her pattern of dedicating collections only to family members, but several poems in Part III of Runaway led me to think that Samantha Lorraine Almanza must be a granddaughter. “Sam’s Dream” is about Sam in utero and then being born; “Sam’s Standing” is about her learning to walk; “I Won’t Live Long” is about her acquiring language. 

Even when all the news is bad (I can attest) grandchildren give one hope, and the Sam poems have a certain lift and sprightliness that is not Graham’s most familiar vein.

That more familiar vein--unease, anxiety, dread--shows up too. "When Overfull of Pain" is the title and the opening phrase of one of the poems, for instance. "[To] the Last [Be] Human" has the atmosphere of a dystopian or post-eco-disaster novel:

One of us had come back from some other place--

Alaska, a father dying in rage, screaming on his

floor, saved by

nothing.

We're so full of the dead the burnt fronds

hum, getting going each day again into too much sun to no

avail. I was human. I would have liked to speak of

that. But not now. Now is more

complicated. I have no enemy except day. The edges

turn hot and

stay

hot. Shadow hard to find [...]

Later in the poem the collection's title appears: "What are our rates of speed. Where is runaway. How far / away."  Do these questions without question mark hope for an elsewhere not yet visited by the disaster? It is not at all clear that there is one.

The possibility, as a disaster unfolds, of a future or an elsewhere also occurs "The Hiddenness of the World," a re-casting of Edward Thomas's great poem, "As the Team's Head Brass." In Thomas's poem, written as World War I was in its catastrophic course, the speaker engages in an intermittent conversation with a farmer plowing his field behind a team of horses. They talk about the war, naturally. The war is a disaster, but the farmer is still plowing, still intends to plant, still assumes his crop will grow, that people will need food. In the distance, a pair of lovers slips into and then out of a small wood, perhaps conceiving a child who will live in the hard-to-imagine future. 

It's an uncannily balanced poem. Thomas was soon off to war himself, and he was killed. The immense human cost of the war looms just underneath the lines--yet some idea that life will continue is also present.

Graham's poem folds our own eco-catastrophe into this scenario. Can we get out? Is there an elsewhere to get to? Can we even imagine one? "Feel the outsideness here. Here on this page. Here in my head. / You. You in me in this final time."

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Fast_ (2)

 FAST MAINTAINS THE no-notes-in-the-back policy of the preceding two volumes, so when “Cryo” included phrases like “this peine driede uppe all the lively spirities of flesh" and “I saw in him a doubille thurst one bodely and another  gostly,” which sounded like quotations, I checked the internet and learned that they were from Julian of Norwich’s Showings (a.k.a. Revelations of Divine Love). 

As a longtime reader and admirer of Julian’s book, this pleased me for several reasons. Besides just the plain fact that I appreciate any evidence that contemporary poets are reading Julian, the quotation also established another underground passage between Graham and T. S. Eliot (Julian is a key presence in “Little Gidding”), who often seems a crucial precursor.

The quotations are from Julian's 8th showing, chapters 16-21 in the longer version, a vision of dryness pivoting on the crucified Jesus' words, "I thirst." Julian has prayed to know and understand what Jesus experienced on the cross, so the 8th showing is part of fulfilling that prayer. As she contemplates Jesus' thirst, she comes to a larger understanding of the love he had for humankind.

The speaker of "Cryo" is not exactly Graham, I suppose, since Graham has not had herself frozen. If the speaker is considering cryogenics, she must be on the threshold of dying, as Julian was, but the object of the speaker's attention at this fearful juncture is not on a crucifix but on astonishing machinery and a team of professionals. And, of course, on a prospect of eternal (frozen) existence quite different from anything that might have occurred to Julian.

The body is stiffened by something happening far away--> though the curious bag

inside beats like a heart still --> like a line repeated --> an opinion from the

future --> low, repeating some science --> looking back at that prayer that was not

received [...]

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Fast_ (1)

THE INSIDE FRONT flap copy of the dust jacket opens with this sentence: "In her first new collection in five years--her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive to date--Jorie Graham explores the limits of the human and the uneasy seductions of the post-human." Inside front flap copy is always going  to be an aerosol of scented bullshit, but Fast (2017) really is formally inventive, with several departures from Graham's usual practice, and it really is more explicitly personal than her work had tended to be, since several poems are about the declines and deaths of her father and mother.

I would say Swarm is the Graham collection that looks and sounds the least like any other Graham collection, in that it often abandons syntax and turns into a cataract of words and phrases. The same thing happens in Fast, with the addition of arrows as punctuation. This is from "Honeycomb":

Your fiberoptic cables line its floor. Entire. Ghost juice. The sea now

does not emit sound. It carries eternity as information. All its long floor. Clothed as

I am --> in circumstance --> see cell-depth --> sound its atoms --> look into here

further--> past the grains of light --> the remains of ships --> starlight [...].

In passages like these, and there are quite a few, I can't tell whether the line-breaks are actually line-breaks or just where the line ran up against the limits of the page and had to start back flush left. Some of the lines may actually be intended to be dozens of words long and would stretch across three pages were it feasible to print them that way.

The "arrows" contribute something to the effect, as if raising Graham's penchant for horizontality to a new level, as if insisting that this line just keeps going and going, plunging into the unmappable future.

"Incarnation" has a novel form that looks like a familiar one. The stanzas of fourteen lines, about the length of blank verse lines, look like sonnets...but don't sound like sonnets, running along as they do in short, simple clauses and phrases mainly linked by dashes. In a poem about the forms we end up inhabiting, the choice feels very apt.

The poems about her parents tend to be in what I think of as "Graham-form," long lines with shorter "outrider" lines hanging from the right-hand side of the longer lines, with the exception of closing poem "Mother's Hands Drawing Me," which is mainly shorter lines, centered on the page, but with a justified margin on the right rather than the (customary) left. It's a simple thing, but it's surprising how it puts the reader in a different space, as Graham herself is in a foreign country as she deals with her mother's increasing cognitive difficulties:

mother who cannot get the dress on

because of broken hip and broken

arm and tubes and coils and pan

and everywhere pain, wandering

delirium, in the fetid shadow-

world--geotrauma--trans-

natural--what is this message

you have been scribbling all your

life to me, what is this you drag

again today into non-being. Draw it.

The me who is not here Who is the

ghost in this room. [....]

Graham is rarely this plain. 

But even plainer than that is "From Inside the MRI," which, taken in conjunction with a mention of doing internet searches about chemotherapy, seems to suggest that Graham had health crises of her own during the time she was writing the book. And then there is "Prying": "your every breath is screened, your every cell, it is not hit and / miss, we get it all, your safety lies with us, hold still, / granted it's cold at first, this new relief, / your icy nation thanks you / for the chance to rest these absolutes on you / murmurs the gleaming staff in the deliberate air [...]."

Brr.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (4)

 BEFORE MOVING ON to Fast, I want to make some observations about the poem that opens PLACE, "Sundown." It is not very long, a bit over two pages, and is in Graham-form but with the all-the-way-to-the-left lines somewhat shorter than usual. It bears a date and a place in parentheses under its title: St. Laurent Sur Mer, June 5, 2009.

The poem's main event is simple enough: Graham (okay, right, the speaking subject, whom I am going to dub "Graham"), is walking on a beach and a man rides by on a horse. The main event occurs in a classic Graham extended sentence--the whole poem, in fact, is just that single sentence. I will quote just an excerpt here: "just this / galloping forward with / force through the low waves, seagulls / scattering all around, their / screeching and mewing rising like more bits of red foam, the / horse's hooves now suddenly / louder as it goes / by and its prints / on wet sand deep and immediately filled by thousands of / sandfleas thrilled to the / declivities in succession in the newly released  / beach [...]."

"Sundown" has in common with a great many other Graham poems, early, middle, and late, its intense attention to an unfolding now, trying to notice and record as much as possible of an astonishing phenomenon while it is happening. Here, as often, she stacks up absolute phrases (noun + participle, e.g., "seagulls scattering") to create the sense that you, the reader, are experiencing the event as it is occurring. 

But the thing about phenomena is that they occur in time--another Graham preoccupation, early, middle, and late--they emerge, flash upon us, and are gone. Marvelous as the moment of the man on horseback riding up from behind Graham and passing her is ("upraised knees and / lightstruck hooves and thrust-out even breathing of the great / beast"), it will be over in seconds, absolutely gone.

Except for the hoofprints, which Graham also describes. But a few waves will erase those. 

How can so extraordinary a thing be so temporary? But that's the boat we are all in, aren't we? Even Graham, who ends the poem by noting her own footprints on the beach.

And then there's the date--the day before the 65th anniversary of D-Day, a crucial episode that occurred right on the beach where Graham is walking, as she glances at in referring to it as "Omaha." Unimaginable, history-changing tumult was occurring on that beach sixty-five years ago, but you might never guess today. What a churning up of sand occurred that day--and all marks effaced now.

The poem put me in mind of the opening of Book 12 of the Iliad, where Homer notes that in years to come, the scene of the war, with all its ramparts and weapons and machinery, would be wiped clean by wind and weather and no one would be able to tell a great war had occurred on that shore.

The poem will stay behind a lot longer than the hoofprints, though. Not forever, but with luck, a good long while. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (3)

 “MESSAGE FROM THE Armagh Cathedral, 2011," the collection’s concluding poem, probably would have had a note attached in the collections before Sea Change. It’s easy to get the particulars, though, thanks to the internet; in fact, Graham may have stopped placing notes at the end of her books because the internet made them not all that necessary.

There are two cathedrals in Armagh, it turns out, both named after St. Patrick, one belonging to the Church of Ireland and one belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Both are seats of the Primate of All Ireland, i.e., the senior bishop among the Irish bishops, in their respective denominations.

Graham must be describing a visit to the Church of Ireland cathedral, because that is the one that contains the Tandragee idol, “a carved granite figure dated to the Iron Age” (Wikipedia), thought to represent Nuadha of the Silver Arm, one of the Tuatha Dé Danaan (see Mark Williams’s Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth). Graham does not use the name “Tandragee Idol,” but she does devote much of the poem to this sculptures.

“I put my own pale arms around you,” writes Graham, addressing the idol, and later “I put / my hand in your wide carved mouth,” at which point I imagine a sexton stepping up and saying, “Ma’am, please do not touch the idol,” but Graham is left to do as she pleases, even though a wedding (!) is in progress. So, if you ever book a wedding in the Church of Ireland Cathedral in Armagh, you had best make perfectly clear that you do not want any American poets running around embracing the Tandragee idol while you are making your vows. 

Just kidding! Actually, it’s a wedding rehearsal, not an actual wedding, and the wedding makes a welcome counterweight to the thoughts of torture and amputation that Nuadh’s wounded arm brings in its train. If people are still getting married, there must still be some hope in circulation. “May your wishes / come true I say, / guidebook in hand. Tomorrow, she [the bride] says. I can’t wait until tomorrow.”

Sigh.

Also noteworthy is that “Message from the Armagh Cathedral” uses Graham-form, but the initial long line often becomes several lines, or perhaps one very long wrapped-around line. This development will loom large in the next collection, Fast.