Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Region of Unlikeness _ (2)

W. B. YEATS, IN one of his letters to Dorothy Wellesley, wrote that "a poem comes right with a click like a closing box." Graham seems to be pushing back against this idea near the beginning of "From the New World," asking someone (something? God?) for help with facing the horrifying story of Ivan the Terrible at  Treblinka.

   Can you help me with this?

Are you there in your stillness? Is it a real place?

 God knows I too want the poem to continue,

 

want the silky swerve into shapeliness

    and then the click shut

and then the issue of sincerity, [...]

The lines pose an interesting question: should a poem about an atrocity to be well-made? One could answer, well, yes, any poem should be well-made. But then again, should aesthetic considerations enter in a poem about an atrocity? Would making a poem about an atrocity beautiful be a betrayal of some kind?

I don't know how the answer those questions. "From the New World" is an aesthetic success, I would say, but it is not a well-wrought urn, by any means. It doesn't resolve into any kind of equilibrium, and it seems right that it does not.

And then that "click" becomes a sort of leitmotif in  the book. Sometimes it seems to be the shutter of a camera, as in "The Tree of Knowledge": "just appearance turning into further appearance, / click." More shutters seemingly go off in "What Is Called Thinking" --"Flight of a bluejay like a struck / match / Then twenty abreast (click) (click)"--but the sound turns out to belong to a cassette player doing an auto-reverse: "the click is my tape going into / reverse play." In "Who Watches from the Dark Porch," we are changing channels: 

Maybe if I turn the TV on?

   Let's graze the channels? Let's find the

storyline composed wholly of changing

   tracks, click, shall I finish this man's phrase with this

man's face, click, is this  the truest news [...]

The clicks could be chronometric, distinguishing one time-segment from another. But any kind of completion the sounds apparently signal, we realize, can only be an arbitrary mechanical one, something we supply in order to create demarcations in our experience. But our experience in itself offers no such handholds. What  happens if we attempt to do without them? 

"Have you ever wanted to put your hand right in," Graham asks in "The Tree of Knowledge," "to open it up and push it deep in there, / to make the other thing begin?" I have.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty _ (4) and _Region of Unlikeness_ (1)

 EXTRAORDINARY POETRY COLLECTIONS do not necessarily make their authors famous, but The End of Beauty did put Graham into a whole new league. It created sufficient buzz that I heard of her, found a copy, and got hooked. This was about 1990 or 1991, I think; the book had already been out for a few years. I remember leaving it on a table in my office during the weeks I was reading it. A friend picked it up, spent about twenty minutes with it, and said, "This is the real thing."

The cover of the 1991 follow-up, Region of Unlikeness, bears evidence of its predecessor's impact. Blurbs from Frank Bidart, John Ashbery, and James Tate--a three-headed endorsement from the previous generation of poets that would be hard to surpass. The author bio mentions that Graham is now "on the permanent faculty" of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and has received a MacArthur grant. So, at 40, Graham is doing better than okay. 

Whatever fueled the takeoff of The End of Beauty is still burning hard and bright in Region of Unlikeness. The "Foreword," three pages of short quotations from Augustine, Heidegger, the Bible, and Melville, announces plainly enough that the poet's intellectual ambitions have not slackened. 

History is present here as mythology was present was in The End of Beauty, and as the myths of the earlier volume were presented as a kind of self-portraiture, so the big events here are infused with Graham's own circumstances. 

In "Fission," she learns of the assassination of Kennedy when a screening of Kubrick's Lolita is interrupted by the management to make the terrible announcement. That a 13-year-old girl is watching Lolita is enough for an unsettling poem, anyone might suppose, to say nothing of attending the showing with her parents, but to have so charged a moment as Humbert's first glimpse of Lo shattered by the announcement that the handsome young man whose arrival at the White House seemed to promise a transformative renewal has been shot dead.... 

Graham was present at les événements in Paris in 1968 and was even arrested, but "The Hiding Place" is not a call to action nor a nostalgic bliss-was-it-then-to-be-alive memory but a montage of grim details that suggest no one at the time knew exactly what was going on, not even Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red--if he is the "certain leader" Graham faced "above an open streetfire."

"From the New World" is one of Graham's most remarkable poems (it provided a title for her second book of selected poems). It is not "about" the Holocaust, exactly, but orbits a horrifying detail from the 1987 trial of John Demjanjuk, known as "Ivan the Terrible" while he was a guard at Treblinka. I can't say I really understand why Graham pairs this story with memories of her grandmother sliding into dementia. It might have to do with the slipperiness of identity, as one of the issues in the trial was whether Demjanjuk really was "Ivan," and Graham's grandmother does not entirely believe that the girl she is talking to is Jorie. It might have to do with how fragile things are, or how resilient things are, or the sheer power of the world's devouring maw. It's an arresting poem, though--and by "arresting" I mean it brings everything to a halt while you are reading it.

Walter Kempowski, _All for Nothing_, trans. Anthea Bell

 If YOU ARE in the mood for something bleak, sobering, and comfortless, here is a novel for you.

Set in East Prussia (a territory now mostly within Poland and partly within Russia) in the early months of 1945, All for Nothing is about the von Globings, a family belonging to the provincial nobility. The father, Eberhardt, is in Italy with the German army, leaving the rest of the family--his attractive wife, Katharina, his adolescent son, Peter, an aunt, Peter's tutor, and a few other retainers--in their grand old family home out in the country, near the town on Mitkau.

The von Globigs are not fervent Nazis--they look down a little on the local party boss, Herr Drygalski--but they have gone along to get along. They have sold most of the land of their estate well before the novel begins, and the investments they relied on for income have been upended by the war, but they do have Eberhard's officer pay.

They are all settled into their routines when the novel opens, routines that begin to get frequently interrupted by folks coming through from the east, looking to stay a while before pressing on to Germany or other points west. Each chapter looks closely at one of the von Globigs or at some party of visitors: "the Painter," "The Violinist," and so on. The steady stream of temporary guests is due to the  Russian army's progress to the east. The von Globigs are not too concerned about this, though, assuming things are bound to turn around.

By the time they realize things are not turning around and start packing to leave, the situation has deteriorated badly, society is coming unglued, and they find that nothing and no one can be relied on.

By the end...well, I'll avoid spoilers here. But just to repeat: bleak, sobering, and comfortless. And powerful in its understatement, its restraint, its telling the whole story without any melodramatic gesture at all. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty_ (3)

THE TITLE PHRASE occurs in a poem called "The Lovers," apparently about a couple; it begins, "They have been staring at each other for a long time now/ Around them the objects (circa 1980) / Then corridors, windows, a meadow, the _______." In the latter part of the poem, I'm guessing, things get sexual:

Listen, this is the thing that can trap it now--the glance--

the howling and biting gap--

and our two faces raised

that nothing begin (don't look away),

that there be no elsewhere,

that there be no elsewhere to seed out into,

just this here between us, this look (can you see me?) this

     look afloat on want,

this long thin angel whose body is a stalk, rootfree,

     blossomfree,

whose body we are making, whose body is a _______,

(only quicker, much quicker, a conflagration)

The phrase occurs earlier than this passage, a dozen or so lines in: "Here it is, here, the end of beauty, the present."

"The end of beauty," by itself, suggests termination, closure, something over and done with, but in this line Graham seems to be working with a different meaning of "end," the end as goal or purpose, the thing one hopes to bring about. So we may be talking about the goal of beauty, what beauty exists to bring about, and in this poem beauty exists to get two people together, to turn two individuals into lovers, into the making of one body.

The book's next poem, "Vertigo," calls up the same idea: "How is it one soul wants to be owned / by a single other / in its entirety?--". This time, though, it's a question. Can this really be the purpose of beauty, of life itself, of being? One wants to be owned. But why does one want that? Can we, should we, stop ourselves from wanting that?

This reminded me of how, in Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, there seemed to be few other people around, as if Graham preferred being on her own. "To the Reader" in The End of Beauty shows us a young Jorie Graham intent on a Science Fair project, with a description of her activity that simultaneously suggests her work as a poet. "I swear to you this begins with that girl on a day after sudden rain," she writes, and the girl heads out to "the allotted earth--for Science Fair--into the everything of / one square yard of earth," where a relentless excavation commences. That girl doesn't need a partner--a partner would only slow things down. But the woman that girl became wants a partner--perhaps everything depends on  that. Or does it?

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty_ (2)

THE RECURRING SITUATION in the poems of The End of Beauty involves a famous couple, usually a man and a woman, and a moment of rupture, or the crossing of a line, or some other decisive instant that creates a before and after. A couple (at least) of the poems are about Adam and Eve, and we also have Orpheus and Eurydice, Tristan and Isolde, Apollo and Daphne, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Mary and the angel Gabriel, Demeter and Persephone, and Penelope and Odysseus. The poem “Pollock and Canvas” also seems to belong in the category somehow, involving as it does a heightened, intense, almost feverish scrutiny of an emerging event, with the canvas as the painter's counterpart/mate. (Which could be biographically true, for all I know. Perhaps Lee Krasner wished she got half the attention the canvases did.)

The final poem, "Imperialism," might also count as a version of the situation, as Graham may be telling a Higher Being ("Nothing but a shadow, lord, and hazy at that") to whom she is married ("what is it for // this marriage, this life of Look, here's a body") about being taken, aged nine, to the Ganges by her mother, and entering the river with hundred of thousands of pilgrims. It's a moment that definitely creates a before-and-after, it sounds like ("they had to call whatever doctor was on hand / to give me a shot of what? --probably Demerol-- / to stop the screaming"). 

This would all be interesting enough, but Graham ups the ante by calling some of these poems about dyads-in-crisis self-portraits. The book's first poem, about Adam and Eve, is titled "Self-Portrait as the Gesture between Them," and we also have "Self-Portrait as Both Parties" (Orpheus and Eurydice), "Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne," "Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay" (Odysseus and Penelope), and "Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone." 

The titles suggest these poems depict something about the poet herself. But what? Does she identify with the woman in the dyad, and do the poems somehow reflect her first or second marriage? Or is she both parts of the dyad? Or is she the crisis the dyad is experiencing? Maybe these poems picking up something of an earlier generation of American poets, a Plath-Sexton-Berryman-Lowell confessionalism, but in a high modernist, oblique way. 

Graham once in a while veers towards straightforward confessionalism, as in the poem about being taken to the Ganges or "Ravel and Unravel," which revisits Penelope but includes lines that seem to address her (then) husband: "You walked ahead, lost one, carrying / Emily, all cargo now that I / am emptied finally / of all but my own / undoing [...]". But she seems to be telling us a lot more in the dyad-in-crisis poems, even though is not at all easy to say what she is telling us.

And what about that other dyad: poet and reader? Graham comes just little short of Jane Eyre in her willingness to speak right to us (e.g., "To the Reader"), telling us things she seems not to have told anyone else. 

Re-Reading Jorie Graham: _Erosion_ (2) and _The End of Beauty_ (1)

 SIXTEEN OF EROSION's thirty-three poems use a stanza of six short lines, the first, third, and fifth usually of three accented syllables, the second, fourth, and sixth usually of two (and slightly indented). The combination of the short lines with Graham's typically complex sentence structure creates a headlong tumbling or falling movement, straight down as it were, as though into a well, or as though we were trying to catch up with the White Rabbit.

Graham was obviously a bit in love with this form at the time she was writing the poems in Erosion, so it surprises that in her next book, The End of Beauty, foof, it's gone. In Helen Vendler's chapter in Graham in The Breaking of Style, she explains how Graham, in her third book, goes for a whole different kind of form, with lines stretching across the page like midwestern horizons. (The End of Beauty was Graham's first book with Ecco, who accommodated her with wider and wider pages, eventually getting to the almost square pages of Swarm, Never, and Overlord.)

Vendler makes an interesting argument about the shift from the vertical to the horizontal, from going down to going across, and how Graham seems to now be in a different mode, lighting out over the territory rather than excavating.

Vendler also notes a couple of other distinctively Graham-ian moves that make their debut here:

(1) the fill-in-the-blank spaces where the syntax suggests a word is called for, but the word has been omitted or never supplied, e.g., "looking into that which sets the _______ in motion," from "Orpheus and Eurydice."  For someone my age, this device infallibly recalls tests in junior high or high school along such lines as "The chief exports of Chile are _____, ______, and _______." Insofar as  the device recalls the stress of being tested to choose the one-and-only right word, it is a bit unnerving; since this is a Graham poem, however, and one senses she herself might have filled the blank in any number of surprising and counter-intuitive ways, one gets a heady sense of possibility as well, an invitation to participate in the creation of the poem. Can one feel intimidated and liberated at the same time? That's a close as I can come to describing the effect. It may be the cosmos beings set in motion, or it may be the mojo.

(2) the numbering of lines--or, it may be, the numbering of sections that consist of only one line--in several of the poems, e.g., "Self-Portrait as the Gesture between Them" or Part II of "Pollock and Canvas." Vendler calls this device the "freeze-frame," as in a film projected frame-by-frame so that each image gets its own moment rather than blurring into the illusion of movement--as in Douglas Gordon's art installation "24 Hour Psycho," say. This strikes me as an ingenious way of conveying Graham's desire to notice everything she can about a moment before it hastens on its way, making it...slow...down...like...this so she (and we) can get a good look at it. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Erosion_ (1)

 AS NOTED EARLIER, Hybrid of Plants and of Ghosts already sounds like Jorie Graham, but Erosion (1983) sounds even more like Jorie Graham.

There is more of that hyper-attention, that intense focus on the moment, as if trying to notice every single thing about the moment before it goes, before it gives way to the next moment. I wonder if the tendency of the details of one's surroundings to fade and disappear is what the title is naming. The collection does include a poem titled "Erosion," which begins by claiming to love sequence, one thing giving way to another, slow disappearances: 

Today, on this beach

I am history to these fine

pebbles. I run them

through my fingers. Each time

some molecules rub off

evolving into 

the invisible.

But since this poem involves a "we," I started to wonder if the erosion was going on in the relationship as well, that it was wearing away, that its end it was in sight. The poem ends ominously:

Outside the window it's starting to snow.

It's going to get colder.

The less full the glass, the truer

the sound. 

This is my song

for the North

coming towards us.

Is the relationship also about to evolve into the invisible? 

Elsewhere, the poems seem to want things to stop, or hold still long enough to be completely experienced, even inventoried. This may be why the poems often look at paintings, where motion is arrested--one poem is about two portraits by Klimt, but more typically the paintings under our eye are by masters of the Italian Renaissance. 

But then the paintings start moving, as in what may be her first great poem, "San Sepolcro," in which we behold "this girl / by Piero / della Francesca, unbuttoning / her blue dress, / her mantle of weather, / to go into // labor." 

     Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
     forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
      is a button 

coming undone, something terribly

     nimble-fingered

finding all the stops. 

Childbirth is, famously, an event that is not stopping or holding still for anyone, and to have that turn into music--the breath and the stops suggest a recorder or flute to me--the art perhaps most enmeshed in time--well, that works for me. Poetry has affinities with painting on the one hand, making things stand still, but affinities with music on the other hand, dits effects occurring through the modality of time.