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.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (2)

 PLACE ALIGNS, FOR me, with a few other books from around 2005-10 that register the oppressiveness of the second G. W. Bush administration, the days of Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina, when it felt like Dubya was easily the Worst President Ever--little knew we what was coming all too shortly! I'm thinking of Carla Harryman's Adorno's Noise, Richard Greenfield's Tracer, that book of Alice Notley's with the owl on the cover, I think, whose name I forget...Alma, maybe. Blood, torture, and disaster keep hovering throughout PLACE. “Loved / ones shall pay / ransom / for the body of / their child.” “[T]here this / animal / dying slowly / in eternity its / trap.” “My century, the one where / 187 million perished in wars, massacre, persecution, famine […].” Dark.

The clouds part, though, with the closing poems. "Lapse" is a memory of Graham putting her daughter Emily in a swing in 1983, when she was not yet one year old, and giving her a little push. Having myself once upon a time helped my children (and grandchildren) enjoy a swing, I particularly enjoyed this poem, all the more in that it pulls out the stops, with the full Graham pleroma effect of, say, “Summer Solstice” in Sea Change. (That the swinging takes place on the day of the summer solstice resonates nicely.)

PLACE is I think the fifth Graham collection for which Emily was dedicatee or co-dedicatee. I wonder how she felt about that? She turned 30 the year PLACE was published, and I expect she had made her peace with it by then.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (1)

 I DON'T KNOW why the title of PLACE is always rendered entirely in upper-case letters, but it is, so I will follow that practice even in my ignorance of what it signifies. I don't think it's an acronym, but maybe. Anyway, PLACE it is. 

The word occurs a few times in the collection, not at all surprisingly given how common it is (cf. "never"), but at least one passage seems to be signaling to us:

journals written in woods where the fight has just taken place or is about to

                                                take place

                                                for place

("Employment")

Is this a clue? Does "for place" modify "fight"? Is a fight for place about to take place? I wasn't sure. That does describe a lot of fights, though. 

The line "the world a place we got use out of" in the poem "Although" also got my attention, but I haven't been able to pull that into any generalizations about the collection as a whole.

What really got my attention, though, is the number of times Graham seems to be writing about the moment of waking up. "Of Inner Experience" is quite explicit:

Eyes shut I sense I am awakening & then I am

                                                awake but

                                                deciding

to keep eyes shut, look at the inside, stay inside, in the long and dark of it [...]

"The Bird That Begins It" seems to address being awakened at dawn by birdsong, and the weird moment when your identity reassembles itself as you come to waking consciousness:

                                                          [...] in the 

                                                return I

                                                think I

                                                am in this body

I really only think it--this body lying here is

                                                only my thought,

                                                the flat solution

                                                to the sensation/question

                                                of

who is it that is listening, who is it that is wanting still

                                                to speak to you

                                                out of the vast network

                                                of blooded things

And then, explicitly again, "Waking," which opens with, "The bells again. You open your eyes / again. A gap. To be a person-- / human and  then a woman."

Waking can certainly be a....well, I was about to say disembodied experience, which is nonsense, but that's not it, it's more like you are pulled into your body again after some interval of absence, in which you have been wherever you were in your dream. On waking, you might have just a few seconds of uncertainty, of wondering "where am I?", even if you are, as usual, in exactly the spot where you fell asleep, in the same spot where you have awakened day after day for years and years.  And you might even wonder, "who am I?'", what bundle of responsibilities has just landed on my shoulders as I return this identity, was I supposed to be somewhere an hour ago?

Sleep and waking raise all kinds of question about where you are while asleep and your place in the world, so to speak, once you awake, so I wonder if that helps account for the title of PLACE. It doesn't help account for those upper-case letters, though.                      

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Sea Change_ (2)

 SEA CHANGE DOES not, for reasons I gave in the previous post, feel like a sea change to me. It must have felt like one to Graham, I am guessing, or she would not have chosen the title she did. And when Graham switched publishers to Copper Canyon, she/they put together her previous four books as a single volume, [To] the Last [Be] Human, starting with Sea Change, which suggests she sees Sea Change inaugurating a distinct phase of her work. 

I have to admit Sea Change feels unified in ways no other Graham collection does. That every poem employs (what I am going to call) Graham-form (a long line followed by one or several shorter deeply indented "outrider" lines) does a lot to create this unity, but it is not only that. Thematic currents run through the book, too, sometimes so strongly felt that the whole book feels like a single poem. Most of her other books have thematic currents as well--I'd say Materialism, The Errancy, and Swarm definitely do--but something feels different this time.

I wish I could name the thematic current. I can't. But it may have to do with some sense of completeness, fullness, pleroma...not permanent or enduring of course, all too brief in fact, like whatever it was Pascal was writing about in his "Memorial." 

Let's try some passages. This is from "Later in Life":

[...] it is your right to be so entertained, & if you are starting to

                                              feel it is hunger this

                                              gorgeousness,, feel the heat fluctuate & say

                                              my

                                              name is day, of day, in day, I want nothing to

come back, not ever, & these words are mine, there is no angel to

                                              wrestle, there is no inter-

                                               mediary, there is something I must

tell you, you do not need existence, these words, praise be, they can for now be

                                               said. That is summer. Hear them.

 I feel no certainty about the pronouns here. "You" may be Graham, "I" may be Being...but a being that does not require existence...which means Being need not be...which makes no sense. You see my difficulty. But the relentless desire present so often in Graham, the aching excavating need to get to the bottom of things, seems satisfied here, some completion or sufficiency has been achieved. 

Whatever it is, it has something to do with summer, so it seems right that another poem, "Summer Solstice," speaks to the same pleroma:

you could call it matrimony it is not an illusion it can be calculated  to the last position,

                                                consider no further think no longer all

                                                art of 

persuasion ends here, the head has been put back on the body, it stands before us

                                                entire--it has been proven--all the pieces have

been found--the broken thing for an instant entire--oh strange

                                                addition and sum, here is no other further step

 to be taken, we have arrived, all the rest now a falling

                                                back, but not yet not now now is all now and

here--the end of the day will not end--will stay with us

                                                this fraction longer--

                                                the hands of it all extending--

"Summer Solstice" makes me think Graham should have had a chapter in Charles Taylor's last book. Dualities like mind and body, subject and object, divine and human seem transcended, not once and for all but only for an interval ("all the rest now a falling / back"), but even so a marriage has occurred ("you could call it matrimony"), oppositions have reconciled. 

It might even be a marriage, or at least an I-Thou relationship, between humans and the rest of the Earth, a way of imagining ourselves that could arrest our despoliation of our home. This is from "Just Before":

[...] some felt it was freedom, or a split-second of unearthliness--but no, it was far from un-

                                                earthly, it was full of 

                                                earth, at first casually full, for some millennia, then

desperately full--of earth--of copper mines and thick under-leaf-vein sucking in of 

                                                light, and isinglass, and dusty heat--wood-rings

                                                bloating their tree-cells with more

life--and grass and weed and tree intermingling in the

                                                undersoil--& the 

                                                earth's whole body round

                                                filled with

                                                uninterrupted continents of

                                                burrowing--& earthwide miles of

                                                tunnelling by the

mole, bark beetle, snail, spider, worm--& ants making their cross-

                                                nationstate cloths of

                                                soil, & planetwide the

                                                chewing of insect upon leaf--fish-mouth on krill,

                                                the spinning of

coral, sponge, cocoon--this is what entered the pool of stopped thought [...].

This sense of cosmic connection is not Graham's usual beat, and in PLACE things got dark again, but  it rings true here. And maybe the best examples of what I am trying to talk about here are the collection's last two poems, "Undated Lullaby" and "No Long Way Round."

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Sea Change_ (1)

THE FAMOUS PHRASE from Ariel's song "Full fathom five" in The Tempest tells us that a "sea change" is a transformation "into something rich and strange," as in the line Eliot lifted for The Waste Land, "Those are pearls that were his eyes." (We are talking about Shakespeare's Ariel here, by the way, not Disney's, though both get memorable songs.)

As a title for a poetry collection, "sea change" throws down a gauntlet; it seems to declare, "expect radical departures, new forms, startling transformations."

I wouldn't say Sea Change provides any of those things. 

It does differ from preceding collections in a few ways. It's the first to be dedicated to Peter Sacks, whom Graham married in 2000. It's the first not to include a "Notes" section at the end, identifying sources of quotations, so it is up to you to spot that the poem "Full Fathom," like Sea Change, derives its title from Ariel's song. It's the shortest Graham collection yet at 56 pages, although that may be due in part to none-too-large font size.  It includes no longer poems, everything coming in at two or three pages. She relies heavily on the ampersand. But nothing in all that compares to an eye becoming a pearl.

Maybe the change here is not a departure from, but a doubling-down on the Grahamian. Nothing is more Grahamian than the lineation device that every poem here deploys: a long line flush left, followed by one-to-six shorter lines indented two inches ("outrider" lines, I think Helen Vendler called them). A sample from "Just Before":

coral, sponge, cocoon--this is what entered the pool of stopped thought--a chain suspended in

                                                         the air of which

                                                         one link

                                                        for just an instant

                                                        turned to thought, then time, then heavy time, then

                                                        suddenly

air--a link of air!--& there was no standing army anywhere,

                                                        & the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all

                                                        the cities of

                                                        what was then just

                                                        planet earth

were lifted out of their sleeping [....].

Graham had been using this strategy since The End of Beauty, so it is not at all new for her, but using it for a whole book, as she does in Sea Change... that is new. Likewise, the very long sentences were a long-established characteristic of his poetry, but they dominate here.

Sea Change does often raise ecological concerns, a deepening concern for Graham (as for all of us) in the years ahead, but these are not new for her, either, as such concerns also appear in Swarm and Never.

So I am wondering, why this title for this book? And I am also wondering whether Graham was familiar with the work of J. H. Prynne, who was using the "outrider lines" device in the late 1960s. I bet she was.