Re-reading Jorie Graham and wondering about Iphigenia

 BORN IN 1950, Graham is a baby boomer. Second-wave feminism mattered a great deal to her contemporaries, especially for the educated, and often intensely for those who were in academic environments. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich were getting lots of attention when Graham started writing poetry, and Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and H.D. started to get a lot more attention in the 1980s and 1990s than they had in earlier decades, when they had been overshadowed by male peers. (I think Bishop is more read than Lowell at this point, and H.D. may be more read than Pound.) 

Keeping all this in mind, we would not be surprised if gender were often or consistently salient in Graham's poems. But (it seems me) it is not. It's not absent, by any means; consider the many male-female duos re-imagined in The End of Beauty, for instance. It's not often in the foreground, though. I would not expect Graham to show up on many syllabuses for courses on women writers courses, even given that those courses tend to focus on fiction, essay, and memoir.

But then there is the figure of Iphigenia. The first allusion that I noticed appeared in Swarm. "Fuse" reworks the opening speech by the Watchman in the Oresteia, and then the following poem, "Underneath (11)," which seems to begin by thinking about King Lear, drops this in:

to set the blood in

            motion

to choke the core of event

                        out

pushing spring and the new

                    shoots up

pushing the ships (at Aulis) up

into narrative then

beyond it

what  can be

The step from Lear to Agamemnon came as a surprise to me, but it makes sense: prickly pig-headedness in authority, and so on. Then the reference to Aulis, where Iphigenia was sacrificed to raise the winds the Greek army needed to sail to Troy, reminds us that Lear, too, was willing to give up a daughter.

Then, a few years later, in Overlord, "Praying (Attempt of June 14 '03")" seems to be describing a visit to Mycenae, Graham imagining "The still bodies of the / listeners, high on this outpost, 3,000 years ago, the house of / Agamemnon, the opening of the future."

There. Right through the open

mouth of the singer. What happened, what 

is to come. 

What is to come, I'm guessing, is the war on Troy, the war that will require the sacrifice of Iphigenia. In a book that keeps recalling World War II and hinting at the war then happening in Iraq, we see Agamemnon as a man to whom war was so important that he had his own daughter killed in order to get his war going ("Do not force us back into the hell / of action, we only know how to kill.")

And then--Sea Change. This is from "Nearing Dawn":

back there, lamentation, libations, earth full of bodies everywhere, our bodies,

                                        some still full of incense, & the sweet burnt

                                        offerings, & the still-rising festival out-cryings--& we will

                                        inherit

                                        from it all

nothing--& our ships will still go,

                                        after the ritual killing to make the wind listen,

out to sea as if they were going to new place,

                                        forgetting they must come home yet again ashamed

no matter where they have been--& always the new brides setting forth

                                        & always these ancient veils of theirs falling from  the sky

                                        all over us [...]

Underneath the ceremony then, underneath the policy, just men making their bloody fantasies come true, with the lives of women as collateral damage.

Graham may not be a right-out-there feminist, but if she is willing to tell Clytemnestra, "you go, girl," she has something to say about gender.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Overlord_ (3)

LET'S BORROW FROM physics and call the idea that everything is part of a complex interrelated whole that operates according to a single, universal set of principles the idea of a "unified field." One of Graham's best poems (the poem that lent its title to her volume of selected poems) is called "The Dream of the Unified Field," which suggests both that the idea fascinates her that the idea may just be a hubristic human fantasy, a Babel-like attempt to rival God.

But if we say God alone is the principle of the "unified field," that God alone comprehends the complex interrelated whole that operates according to a single, universal set of principles, then we are up against the Problem of Evil (i.e, the question of why evil exists is God is both omnipotent and benevolent). 
The Dream of the Unified Field" is in part about exactly this, I suspect.

The idea of a center fits in here. In the third part of "Dream," Graham is walking through a storm and hears "inside the swarm, the single cry // of the crow. One syllable--one--inside the screeching and the / skittering,/ inside the constant repatterning of a thing not nervous yet / not ever / still--but not uncertain--without obedience / yet not without law--one syllable [...]." Is the cry of the crow the secret unifying principle? Can Graham in some way identify with it? In the sixth part, still in the storm, "I close my eyes and, /standing in it, try to make it mine." It's as though she is trying to home in on the frequency that unifies the field.

Centers also figure in Overlord, but the idea seems to be to stop thinking about centers. This is the first of the two poems titled "Disenchantment" (which seems to be about Gerhard Richter):

there was to be a meeting, as one of lovers, but then something was 

                                                                            arrested--

just there where the center was beginning to form--

no, there should not be a center--listen how it echoes--

you can blot it nicely with some abstraction--

"Europe (Omaha Beach 2003)" seems to be trying to talk itself into abandoning the idea that things have centers, that physics plays by our rules:

                No basic building blocks "of

matter." No constituent particles from which everything

is made. No made. No human eye. The rules?

Everything speeding towards "the observer." Who is 

that? The other who is me perceives

the tiny stream of particles, hazy, 

the superimposition of states. Entanglement. Immediacy.

I am guessing "superimposition" is related "superposition," which, like "entanglement." is one of those deeply counterintuitive findings that quantum physics likes to toss in our laps.

"Physician" is about a patient with an illness that, among other things, may be about the conundrums of physics: 

                    Everywhere crammed full of the crushed

and confused and still-milling numberless angels.

Everywhere in the solids of our world them rushing towards each other.

As there is nowhere else for them to rush towards.

Even in my room, in my walls, right there, deep inside them,

something filled with greatest passion, thickening folds of it, is

                                                    personally embracing

                                                    a void.

We're crushed in a crowd yet still moving at the speed of light. No wonder we're ill.

And then there is Iphigenia.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Overlord_ (2)

OVERLORD BEARS A title of more referential precision than Graham collections tend to have. "Never," "erosion," and "swarm" are words that one might use in quite a few circumstances, and even "materialism," while not an everyday word, could pop up in many contexts. "Overlord" has nothing everyday about it, being the title of a job that in its original sense no longer exists (e.g., "feudal overlord") and these days tends to be applied ironically or metaphorically (e.g., "Elon Musk is the overlord of X"). 

But "Overlord" was also the name of the enormous World War II operation in which the Allies landed in Nazi-held France to open a second front. Quite a few poems in Overlord refer to this event, especially the series of poems titled "Spoken from the Hedgerows."

So what might this mean?

The 2005 author bio notes that Graham “divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts […].”  If “western France” in effect means Normandy, then perhaps spending weeks or months in the place where D-Day occurred inspired an interest in the event. Then, too, the poems bearing dates pinpoint composition during 2003 and 2004, when the Iraq war was particularly intense. Being in a place where the United States was once engaged in an arguably legitimate war while it is engaged in an arguably illegitimate one may be part of the mix.

The “lord” in “overlord” tips a few theological dominoes, too, though, and Graham seems always interested in such questions, as she does in the six poems titled “Prayer” in Overlord and several other passages.

Operation Overlord involved highly centralized and hierarchical planning and decision-making. The aim was to anticipate every single contingency and to coordinate the whole effort, down to the smallest detail, to a single overarching goal. Things did not completely conform to expectation, of course—that is what the “Spoken from the Hedgerows” poems emphasize—but the operation nonetheless calls to mind a certain theological conception natural to monotheistic religions, in which God has foreseen the whole infinitely intricate unfolding of creation and everything, literally everything, is part of the design, providence in the fall of a sparrow, all part of the plan…that sort of thing.

We can connect this conception to a vein in High Modernism—the lingering idea that there was a pattern to things, a controlling center, a master design. Yeats and his gyres, for instance, or Pound and paideuma, or Eliot’s wish to be in a society like Dante’s in which every art and every science was subordinated within a Christian cosmos, or Wyndham Lewis’s fable about the caliph’s design. 

Graham, I think, feels the attraction of this idea, but is also (and quite rightly) wary of it.

More on this later.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Overlord_ (1)

SEVERAL GRAHAM COLLECTIONS that I thought worthy but not compelling when I first read them--The Errancy, Never, and now Overlord--seem much more compelling to me now, on a second reading many years later. Reading them all together probably accounts for some of the difference, as it's easier to see both the continuities and changes in direction. Then, too, I have read a lot of poetry of all sorts since 2005, when Overlord was published, and I imagine that makes a difference. Or so I can hope.

Let's notice the dust jacket again. The intriguingly named Fearn Cutler de Vicq again served as designer, and she used the same template employed for Never: uniform background color (black rather than white this time), book title and Graham's name all caps in a contrasting color, descriptors of the book's content ("poems") and Graham's standing ("from the pulitzer prize winner") in a smaller font size. Centered among the words, a photograph of a painting/collage; then, centered on the back, in the same spot and in the same dimensions, a photograph of Graham, with no other copy save the UPC code.

Both the painting/collage and  the photograph are by Peter Sacks, whom Graham had married in 2000. 

Does the repeated jacket design suggest a sort of continuity between Never and Overlord? I have the feeling it does, but it would be hard to pin down. It reminds me of the similar jackets for Yeats's The Tower and The Winding Stair, both designed by Sturge Moore. Those two books seem to share origins, not so much to seem like a "part one" and a "part two" as to be like siblings, á la Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac. 

The dedication too is a variation on previous dedications: "This book is dedicated to the life of my parents, / Bill and Beverly, / and to the life of my daughter, / Emily." Graham has already dedicated books  to her parents and (more than once) to her daughter, but what difference does it make to dedicate a book to "the life of" a person, rather than simply to the person?

One of the poems titled "Praying" (the one subtitled "Attempt of Feb 6 '04" and "For Emily") may help. "I search for gratitude," Graham declares, a few lines later landing on the possibility, "That my loved ones exist. That they are right this / second still in / life." This move doesn't quite seem enough--"No gratitude yet," Graham observes on  the next page--but maybe the idea behind the dedication is that the book in  honor of their being not simply her loved ones but of their being, "right this / second," still alive.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (4)

 QUITE A FEW of the poems in Never seem comparable to the poems in the first half of Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts in that Graham is outdoors, seemingly by herself, near woods or water, noticing as much as she can, especially birds and trees. But this time around, the Wordsworthian Graham is the plural Graham, not just the speaking subject noticing and writing things down, but also noticing her own noticing and scrutinizing what she writes down, and wondering what it means that she is noticing her own noticing.

(By the way, is "In/Silence" a rewriting of Shelley's "Skylark"?)

Being plural also affects those poems that approximate prayer. Graham had already written a few of these, and more were coming--there are six poems titled "Praying" in the next book, Overlord. But the praying-subject has as many hovering ghost-selves as the speaking-subject. "Via Negativa" sounds like a prayer, but one that undermines the grounds of prayer in the very act of praying. It begins:

Gracious will. Gracious indistinct.

Everything depends on the point where nothing can be said.

From there we deduce how

from now on nothing will be like.

The person praying is already several persons, and the being to whom the person prays seems to be one of whom nothing can be asserted, nothing known. 

what is this (erasure) (read on) it is a warning:

omit me: go back out: go back in: say:

no way to go in: go in: measure:

this little fabric vanishes, ascends, descends, vanishes [...]

And then the poem ends with four statements in parentheses.

Graham's theology, I am guessing, could be described as apophatic--that is, mainly based on negation, on what cannot be said, asserted, named. That puts her, as an artist whose main medium is words, in a particularly interesting position, as words tend to say, assert, and name.

I am trying to get at why "The Taken-Down God" is, for me, the book's high point. Graham is in a small church in Italy on Easter Saturday. Apparently, this congregation has an Easter tradition of taking its sculpture of Jesus down from cross on the wall on Friday, covering it with cloth on Saturday, then raising it back onto the wall on Sunday.

Graham is watching all this, an observer but not exactly a participant...or is she a participant? Is everyone there a participant? She knows she is not supposed to be taking notes while this local tradition is enacted, so she goes outside.

You are not supposed to write in the presence so I can't really do

this task [for us] in there [feel fear when I feel for my pen] [in pocket] [I have

come outside, sit on  the steps, people watching me as they

go in] [remember]: 

Like a quantum physicist, Graham understands that her observation of what happens becomes part of what happens. She does not share the faith of the other participants, perhaps; but as for that, what do we know what their faith is? She notes certain homely, matter of fact details, like the holes in the wall where the sculpture of Jesus will eventually be reattached; but she also seems genuinely affected. Another not-prayer is not-said ("a voice will say 'Father'--but, no; there is nothing: the / voice will say father meaning by that nothing") but Jesus will rise again--right back up on that wall, and you yourself will be turning the screwdriver that reattaches him.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (3)

 GRAHAM'S TAKES ON her own experience typically rely on first-person pronouns (I/me/etc) but sometimes her second person pronouns (you/your/etc) seem also to be takes on her own experience, as if the Graham who had the experience is not precisely the same Graham who is remembering and writing about the experience...and after all, the person remembering the experience really is not exactly the same person who had the experience, so adjusting the pronoun seems like a helpful device.

If we throw in the "editor" Graham alongside the "speaking subject" Graham, we seem to have yet another point of view, calling for third-person pronouns (she/her/etc).

The above conclusions come from my own grappling with passages like this, from "By the Way":

More birds fly through. Through the "she" of the

                                                        beginning

whose clearing this "you" is in. The I stands

                                                    deepening.

As a fruit ripens. For the summer of the clearing is long

once you enter the first person, bearing out-limbs, carrying

                                                                                   fruit.

The device may seem precious and weird to some, but I thought it worked. Graham even seems to be having a little fun with it:

                                                    She

felt the calling herself she as the exact spot

spot she closed her eyes and the whole un-

                                        spooled--miles,

beach, mist, spray, out-croppings, current-drawn

nettings of foam that fanned-out in lulls

as if to give the sea a top--oh please--a

resistance stillness on which to scroll--a

flat impenetrability windowlike out onto a

dark that allows only for this reflection, [...]. )

("Estuary")

I really love that "oh please." Though it occurs between em-dashes rather than inside brackets or parentheses, it sounds like a snort from "editor."

All of us are plural, I think, and Graham's stepping out of the first-person struck me as more true to experience than sticking with "I." As she writes in "Woods":

O stubborn appetite: I, then I,

loping through the poem. Shall I do that again?

Can we put our finger on it?

Blake Bailey, _Philip Roth: The Biography_ (2)

 I STARTED READING this not long after it came out--actually, about the time all those revelations about its author, Blake Bailey, came out, and the cancellation that ensued. I wrote an interim post about it on June 11, 2021. Not long after, my interest flagged and I shelved the book unfinished. 

But then the Steven Zipperstein book appeared. I very much wanted to read it, but thought, eh, I should finish the Bailey bio first. And I have finished it. 

Among Oscar Wilde's more famous sayings is the one about putting merely his talent into his works, while putting his genius into his life. Roth definitely did it the other way around: He managed his life with a fair amount of talent, but he saved his genius for his works. I suspect that work, his corpus, will scrape through to posterity, losing a bit of bit of flesh to the Scylla of political correctness but avoiding the Charybdis of literary oblivion. If people are still reading novels written in English in the 22nd century, I bet Roth's will be among those being read.

The main problem with Bailey's biography is that he is not that interested in Roth's novels. He is interested in what Roth professed of his intentions for each novel. He notes how well each novel was reviewed, what awards it received, and how well it sold. He is definitely interested in which of a novel's characters resemble people Roth knew, and he has some interesting revelations on this front (e.g., Faunia in The Human Stain and Drenka in Sabbath's Theater). He is not all that interested, though, in what was distinctive about Roth as a novelist, or the shape of his career, or why his overall accomplishment is worth contemplating.

In other words, while this biography will long remain a useful resource for scholars of Roth, it does not measure up to Ellmann on Joyce, Bate on Keats, or Boyd on Nabokov. 

I'm hoping the Zipperstein book does Roth's work--which is, I would maintain, the work of a genius--greater justice.

(By the way, if you did not see Joshua Cohen's review of Bailey's biography in the March, 2021 issue of Harper's, you should look it up.)