Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts_

A NEW COLLECTION by Graham, her fifteenth (!), is forthcoming in May, a circumstance that struck me as a good moment to read the whole corpus again. 

Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts is her first collection; it appeared in 1980, the year she turned thirty, as part of Princeton UP's Contemporary Poets series (alongside volumes by, among others, Robert Pinsky, Grace Shulman, and Carl Dennis).

The title is from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It occurs in a passage in which Zarathustra is declaring, "I teach Superman." Even the wisest man, Zarathustra insists, is but a temporary conjoining of bare life, like a plant (bios, maybe), and a spirit (zoë, maybe), thus a hybrid of plant and ghost, but the Superman will be something else again.

I don't think Graham was interested in the übermensch, really, but she was plainly interested in embodiment and consciousness right out of the gate, as she has been ever since. 

The thing that immediately struck me on reading this book again (I first read it over thirty years ago) is how assured it is. Most first collections include a certain amount of fumbling, baldly derivative poems, overplayed hands, and such, but Jorie Graham seems to be 100% Graham right away. (Not publishing her first collection until she was thirty may have something to do with this).

A poet with whom I conversed about this book told me she had heard that Graham recommends poets begin a collection with an ars poetica, and Graham seems to do exactly that here with "The Way Things Work." Graham always pays attention to things with a certain ferocity of concentration, and this poem takes that approach: "The way things work / is that we finally believe / they are there, / common and able / to illustrate  themselves. / [...] / The way things work / is that eventually / something catches." Throughout the book, Graham pays attention intently, waiting, maybe probing for the moment when something catches.

The waiting is not always patient, which is why I threw "probing" in there. Another poet with whom I was conversing felt that Graham tended to fall into a subject/object dichotomy, monitoring her own sensorium and consciousness so minutely that she sacrificed any chance of getting out of herself, shall we say. Maybe so...a bit like Hamlet in that respect, monitoring her own consciousness then monitoring her monitoring ("That would  be scanned"). She isn't one for spontaneity, relinquishing control, delirium. 

There is a lot of control in her sentence structure, for instance--reminiscent of Walter Pater, late Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. That is fine by me--I love Pater, James, and Woolf--but few contemporary poets go in for that degree of syntactical elaboration. Merwin and Ashbery were a couple of the key contemporary poets when Graham started writing, but you don't see much of the parataxis of Merwin or the juggling with the colloquial that you see in Ashbery. She seems to be going for something else--maybe something more high modern, if I am right in thinking "I Was Taught Three" has one eye on Yeats's "Among School Children."

Another striking thing: not many other people in the poems, which are mainly about features of the landscape and animals, most often birds. The volume feels eerily depopulated until about two-thirds through, when a "you" surfaces. (See, for instance, "The Slow Sounding and Eventual Reemergence of.") The "you" may just be Graham's way of talking to her own consciousness as she monitors her monitoring, and the "we" may just be human beings, but I wonder if the "you" was first husband William Graham (of the Washington Post Grahams), to whom she was married from 1973 to 1977, and the "we" the two of them. Hard to say. Plath and Sexton may have been important precursors, but Graham is not confessional...at least not in that way.

Jacques Derrida, _Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question_, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby

FINISHING A BOOK by Derrida always feels like an accomplishment to me, even when, as in the present case, (a) the book is a short one, just over a hundred pages, (b) it is one of the relatively easier ones, in this case one of his lectures, and (c) I wouldn't say I understood all of it. 

Picking up this book is one more attempt of mine to sort out what Heidegger saw in Hölderlin. Hölderlin only comes up in Derrida's ninth chapter, but the whole lecture addresses the issues that puzzle me, as it concerns Heidegger's development between Being and Time (1927) and texts from the 1930s like his rector's address of 1933 and Introduction to Metaphysics (written in 1935, although not published until many years later).

Derrida notes that in Being and Time Heidegger declares that he wants to avoid the word "spirit"--geist--and largely succeeds. The word geist comes back hard in the 1930s texts, though, looming larger and larger, with Heidegger eventually concluding that no word in any other language can translate what geist means. The untranslatability of geist implies that Germany has some indispensable role in the unfolding of history and truth, seemingly--which is quite close to where Heidegger is in his texts on certain of Hölderlin's poems.

Derrida thus seems interested in the question of how Heidegger fell into orbit around the Nazis. That interest only becomes explicit in the last five pages of the book, but seems implicit throughout, and may be telling us what "the question" in the title is--i.e., how did a smart guy like Heidegger fall for the Nazis? That's not the only way to interpret the title, though, since Derrida also notes that Heidegger believed only humans had geist, and only humans could ask questions, so geist is connected, among other things, to the ability to formulate and pose questions.

The lecture was delivered in 1987, which got me wondering. In the early 1980s, Derrida and deconstruction seemed politically and/or ethically suspect, even nihilistic, to many American naysayers  since (according to these naysayers), by emphasizing how slippery language was, how tenuously pinned to the actual it was, it pulled the rug out from under efforts towards progressive social change. 

The naysayers chalked up a big win when, in August of 1987, a researcher discovered that Derrida's friend and fellow deconstructionist Paul De Man had done literary journalism for a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium during World War II. (Not to mention other problems, like committing bigamy.) De Man's newly discovered past seemed to confirm that there was something profoundly wrong with deconstruction.

Hence my wondering: was this 1987 book published before or after the revelations about De Man? The lecture does cite De Man's Allegories of Reading, but says nothing about his collaborationist past. Derrida was soon, however, to treat this painful question with (I think) extraordinary clarity and intellectual honesty in "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” published in Spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry.

What was the actual sequence of events here? I need  to know.

Amy Clampitt, _What the Light Was Like_

I HAVE LONG thought I should get around to reading a book by Amy Clampitt. For one thing, her getting her first full-length collection published at age 63 makes her an inspiring example, and for another, we share an alma mater. I bought What the Light Was Like many years ago, but it was reading Anthony Domestico's review of Willard Spiegelman's new biography of Clampitt that tipped me.

Clampitt's diction is rich, one could say, with a higher cholesterol level than I am used to reading of late. For instance: 

              That veiny Chinese

lantern, its stolid jelly

of a fruit, not only has

no aroma but is twice as tedious

as the wild strawberry's sunburst

stem-end appendage: each one must

be between-nail-snipped at both extremities.

That's a lot of syllables for a gooseberry, but you can't deny they are well chosen and artfully arranged. I am guessing Clampitt's poetic lineage goes back through Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, on back to John "load every rift with ore" Keats. (Keats gets a memorable eight-poem sequence here, focusing on his miraculous year, 1819).

Even when Clampitt gets mildly satirical, as in "A New Life," a portrait of a young wide and mom climbing the corporate ladder, the lure of Romantic spiritualized landscape beckons:

                 These days
She's in Quality Circles, a kind of hovering
equipoise between Management and non-Management,

precarious as the lake-twinned tremor of aspens,

as the lingering ash-blond arcade of foliage

completing itself as it leans in to join its own inversion.

I'm not sure what the richly elaborated image of trees reflected in water is up to in this portrait of a 1980s go-getter, but what the heck, it's lovely, so why not?

Clampitt reminds me also of a lower-cholesterol poet, Elizabeth Bishop, in her attention to landscape and her tendency to use first-person pronouns sparingly. Apart from the sequence on Keats, the collection's sections center on place: Maine in the first part, the Midwest of Clampitt's childhood and youth in  the second, New York City in the fourth. As with Bishop (e.g., "At the Fishhouses"), Clampitt's landscapes feel charged with memory and a kind of interiority even though no "I" is explicitly identified. Clampitt's language brightly calls attention to itself, the top student waving a hand and begging to be called on, but she herself is only subtly present.

Hermione Hoby, “Long Story”

I AM NOT familiar with Hoby, but this essay in the February 2 New Yorker caught my attention because I have long admired David Foster Wallace’s writing and also have an ongoing interest in the question of whether women readers find him worthwhile. 

I do know some who do, but a lot of women readers don’t. There are a few reasons for this. His depiction of women characters does not get high marks, or even passing marks, from everyone. But his biography may be the bigger problem. He admitted to watching a lot of porn (see “Big Red Son” in Consider the Lobster). After Infinite Jest, he took full advantage of the sexual opportunities that come with literary celebrity, according to biographer D. T. Max. According to Mary Karr, who would know, he made a scary boyfriend. I think too that a lot of writing-oriented young women got very, very tired of hearing from writing-oriented boyfriends that they really, really had to read Infinite Jest. There was no joke about guys enamored of Wallace in the 2023 Barbie movie, but there could well have been.

A high point of Wallace-resistance was Amy Hungerford’s essay/chapter “On Not Reading DFW,” from 2017 or so. Hungerford intensely disliked Infinite Jest without even having read it. Patricia Lockwood’s 2023 take in the LRB was more tempered but well short of an endorsement.

Hoby’s essay starts by discussing how Wallace-resistance has almost become the default position for writing-oriented women. Wallace’s reputation, she writes, is as “a byword for literary arrogance, a totem of masculine pretentiousness, a red flag if spotted on the shelves of a prospective partner, and reading matter routinely subjected to the word ‘performative’ in its most damning sense.” 

She dissents, carefully. Her piece is mainly about Infinite Jest, published thirty years ago this month, and she particularly notes the humanity and humility of the novel’s attention to 12-step culture, especially through the character of Don Gately. She even suggests the novel may be due for a “cultural feminization,” thanks to a new edition with a foreword by Michelle Zauner. (The tenth anniversary edition had a foreword from Dave Eggers, so the landscape has obviously changed a lot in the meantime.)

I hope she’s right. I guess we’ll see. 

Judith Butler, _Who's Afraid of Gender?_

READING JUDITH BUTLER in the early 1990s felt a bit like reading Derrida in the 1970s, in that neither writer seemed inclined to make concessions to the reader. The implied message: if you can't keep up, go home. By the nineties, though, Derrida's sense of an abiding audience led him to relax a little bit, to render his arguments a little easier of access. Butler, too, aware of having a sizeable potential audience, has for quite a few years now been willing to intervene in public questions with arguments that do not rely on the daunting apparatuses they used in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. ("Is Judaism Zionism?" from 2011, can serve as an example.) 

Who's Afraid of Gender? counts as a public intervention, I would say, as it deals with topics being debated in courts and legislatures all across the country and all across the world; in fact, and unfortunately, it is even more urgently timely now than it was on its publication in 2024. The answer to the title's question is "a whole lot of people," including the Catholic Church, the Trump Administration, and certain British feminists, except they name their enemy not "gender" but "gender ideology." The battleground is sometimes sharply defined--public bathrooms, locker rooms, medical care for minors--but sometimes might include anyone and any topic found in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, and sometimes might even include the desire to roll everything back to the days of the trad wife.

Butler's arguments are composed, rational, lawyerlike, their rhetoric temperate and judicious--which must have taken them some doing, for, as they point out, there is little that is rational or temperate or even evidence-based in the manifestoes of those trying to destroy "gender ideology" root and branch. As Butler emphasizes throughout, these culture warriors are battling a "toxic phantasm," an imaginary monster conjured out of their own fears and anxieties, a bogey that has nothing in common with actual LGBTQIA+ people.

But this leaves us with a tough question. Can the phantasmatic be countered with rationality, evidence, logic, as Butler is trying to do? Its sources may be more unconscious than that (as Amia Srinavasan has recently suggested in a London Review of Books essay, "The Impossible Patient"), something way down in the humid boiler room of the id. 

Butler gave us a psychoanalytic map to homophobic anxiety long ago in The Psychic Life of Power. Perhaps they are guessing that those who have declared war on "gender ideology" would not sit still for a psychoanalytic account of their own motives, and so are hoping to get a hearing with clear-light-of-day public accountability kinds of arguments. Will those be enough? One hopes so.

Percival Everett and James Kincaid, _A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond_

THIS IS A brilliant and funny epistolary novel composed by Everett and one of his colleagues at USC. The book is not what its title proclaims, exactly, but instead the correspondence kicked off when a junior staffer of the staunch segregationist South Carolina senator named in the title sends a book proposal to Simon and Schuster. It is never clear whether the junior staffer (to whom Everett and Kincaid give the pitch-perfect name Barton Wilkes) has actually consulted with Sen. Thurmond about this project, but he is relatively clear about the proposed book's trajectory, which will be to show that Blacks in the former Confederate states never had it so good as they did before the Supreme Court messed everything up with Brown v. the Board of Education, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The proposal makes the rounds at Simon and Schuster, the various letters and memos revealing a seething snakepit of office politics. Meanwhile, Wilkes keeps sending in tantalizing bits of what the Senator (supposedly) has in mind for the book and insinuating himself multifariously into said snakepit.

The proposal advances to the point where ghost writers are needed. Everett gets pulled in because a Black author will lend the project a certain credibility; Kincaid gets pulled in because...I don't know, the more the merrier, I guess. 

The personal crises of various editors and editorial assistants at Simon and Schuster mount up, Barton Wilkes egging them on the whole time. The tangled murk of the project gets murkier and more tangled and ever more overtly racist. Everett and Kincaid eventually take a special trip to South Carolina (where Everett in fact grew up and went to high school) to meet the senator himself.

Everett has a knack for being highly entertaining while honing very sharp satirical points, and that knack is fully on display in this one.

Joyelle McSweeney, _Death Styles_

 THIS BOOK CAME out of a deeply painful circumstance: a daughter born with a fatal medical condition that led to her death after just thirteen days. 

McSweeney chose an interesting set of constraints for these poems: to write every day, “to accept any inspiration presented to me,” and “to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me.” Accordingly, each poem’s title is a date, with a subtitle indicating what inspiration chance presented, and some of them are several pages long.

As you might expect, McSweeney’s daughter’s death figures in the poems often: “Darling / I’m sorry you didn’t survive / reverse aubade / every time the sun rises / I want to crumple up / this whole heliocentric universe.” Her accepting the themes and images presented by chance adds an entirely unpredictable swirl to her grief, though, so the poems continually surprise. The krater (the bowl in which ancient Greeks mixed wine), the hooded merganser (a kind of of duck), Mary Magdalene, Leonard Cohen, Mary Shelley are among the dictated-by-chance elements that eerily blend, as if destined to, with McSweeney’s memories and grief.

This may be why the book feels more like actual grief than do books that focus more closely on the grief itself. Our losses occur in a world that does not pause for us—if we are lucky, some will afford us a little space and a little quiet, but meanwhile everything keeps inexorably rolling on. Even our own consciousness keeps inexorably rolling on. And McSweeney’s poems do have that headlong rush, that sense of onward movement pulling us along even when we feel emotionally paralyzed. And the onward movement may be the very thing we need. The “Death Styles” sequence concludes: “I refuse / to shut my eyes / because I was robbed / of something / by a god / and I’m going to/ to keep looking / till I find it.”

And a shout out to Nightboat Books and designer Kit Schluter for the beauty of this book as an object. Taller and narrower than most books, a bit like Atheneum volumes from the early 1970s, with a cover that looks like a woodcut or lino cut with subdued blue, green, red, and pink on a black background, the paper embossed or lightly textured somehow. The presentation of the poems blended seamlessly with the reading of them.