Ocean Vuong, _On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous_

 IT TOOK ME longer than I expected to get around to this autobiographical novel by the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (which I thought well of), but I finally did, and yep, it's good.

It reminded me somewhat of Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh, another memorable account of a son's growing up with a working mother (barbershop in Because I Was Flesh, nail salon in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) and an absent father. Little Dog (Vuong's narrator) emphasizes the tightness of the bond by addressing his mother as "you" throughout.

We don't find out exactly what circumstances led to Little Dog and his mother to leave Vietnam--something went wrong somehow--but his grandfather's being a U. S. citizen and a Vietnam War veteran makes it possible to relocate in Connecticut. Little Dog contributes to the family income by (illegally) working on a tobacco farm (they grow tobacco in Connecticut, surprising but true).

And that is where Little Dog meets Trevor and the novel turns into a gay coming-of-age story. Trevor comes from a very laissez-faire working class family and is already familiar with opioids. Their backgrounds, obviously, are quite different, but they become close friends and then lovers. The circumstances are not idyllic--they are exploited child labor, after all--but there is sweetness in this part of the story.

As in any coming of age story, though, childhood and adolescence end. Little Dog has a chance to go to college and takes it. Trevor is not going anywhere. 

But Little Dog knows about getting out in  time--as, we are reminded in  the closing pages, his mother did.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (2)

 ALL BUT ONE of the poems in To 2040 is either a "rivulet" poem (my own coinage for Graham's poems in very short lines of just a few words, grouped as quatrains, justified on the left) or a justified-on-the-right poem, with greater variety in the length of the lines. Both forms were repeatedly used in Runaway, but now they account for almost the whole collection (eleven "rivulets," nine justified-right). 

Several poems in Runaway were in long-lined quatrains, and there is exactly one poem following that form here: the title poem, "To 2040." Does that mean it was written earlier than most of the others? 

I read the book first in January 2024, not that long ago, but reading it after re-reading its predecessors involved noticing different things and asking different questions. For one thing, I kept trying to discern a pattern to the justified-left and justified-right poems. (Give me a difference, and like many of us I will attempt to attach meaning to it.)

Are the left-justified poems more lyrical, the right-justified more discursive? This works up to a point, as the left-justified ones are swifter, more focused, more colloquial, "sing" more. The right-justified ones tend to looser movement, more detail, more connections, arguing with themselves. No sooner did I construct this pattern, though, than it deconstructed itself. Lyrical moments aplenty in the right-justified poems, plenty of position-taking in the left-justified. The lyrical/discursive difference often holds, but not always.

To 2040 seems set in some near post-collapse future. When two of the left-justified poems ("They Ask Me" and "Dusk in Drought") seemed to be about the disappearance of actual birds and their replacement by mechanical simulations, I wonder if left-justified = future, right-justified = now. But in the right-justified "Fog" we read, "I remember / what it was like  to make coffee in the / mornings. I remember mornings." That would have to be set in a future in which we have lost access to coffee beans, no? And the left-justified "Why" seems set now. So I'm not sure. 

Part of the book's balance of an anxious present and a terrible near-future may imply, though, that it's later than we think, that the future is already here in ways we haven't learned to notice. So any "now" poem could be about the future, any "future" poem would remember now. Draw no hard lines. 

There are moments when hope breaks through. "Why," in which granddaughter Sam touches a bud. The cicadas of "Dawn 2040." The earth healing itself in "Then the Rain." 

Okay. I feel as ready as I could possibly be for Killing Spree.

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_ (1)

 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.