Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Materialism_ (1)

MATERIALISM CONTINUES THE trajectory of its two predecessors, I would say--intellectually ambitious, tending to longer-lined poems, deeply engaged in what the senses can gather at the same time that it keeps several philosophical (and maybe theological) conceptions in play.

I may be getting too literal about the title, but matter seems to be an abiding concern in Materialism. Fourteen texts in the book are "adaptations," passages from, among others, Sir Francis Bacon, Wittgenstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Benjamin, Dante, Jonathan Edwards, Plato, and John James Audubon about matter: what it is, how we can investigate its nature, what the human relationship to it is.

Accordingly, subject-object relations figure prominently in the collection. Having spent a lot of time with Charles Taylor's book Cosmic Connections recently, I promptly (maybe too promptly) started seeing Graham as working in the Romantic and post-Romantic tradition Taylor describes, trying to overcome or transcend the alienation generated by the Enlightenment's rigor in severing perceiver from perceived, trying to recover a sense of connectedness with the non-human. 

The six relatively shorter poems at the end of the book--"Invention of the Other," "Opulence," "Young Maples in Wind," "The Visible World," "Existence and Presence," and "The Surface"--all seem to be aspiring to a union between the perceiving "I" and the perceived natural world. "Opulence" gets really close, I'd say, but Graham being Graham, self-consciousness often opens up some cracks in "Young Maples in the Wind": 

                                            Reader,

wind blowing through these lines I wish were branches,

searchlight in daylight, trying as I 

                                            am trying

to find a filament of the real like some twist of handwriting glowing

                                                            in the middle

distance--somewhere up here, in the air, can we 

                                                    together,

(if I say salt, if I say fresh-cut grass, late April, the sound of

                                                             sprinkler on

some distance away but still within

staining range of the sinking whisperings of this gentle

                                                            wind,

and a hammer now, one car sputtering down)--can we.

                                                                together,

make a listening here [...].

I feel like saying, "yes, we can," but asking the question breaks the spell somewhat...but maybe it is healthier to break the spell? One of the "adaptations" is of Brecht on the alienation effect, insisting that representations ought to be  honest about their own status as representations, that anything less  than full honesty on that score is cheating and exploitation.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Region of Unlikeness_ (3)

 GRAHAM DOES NOT strike one as being personally religious the way, say, Marilynne Robinson does, but she certainly seems interested in theology. Those lines quoted in the previous post, near the beginning of "From the New World"-- "Can you help me with this? / Are you there in your stillness? Is it a real place?"--certainly sound like they are addressed to a divinity, but the colloquial tone of the very next line, "God knows I too want the poem to continue," lets all the air out of what was starting to sound like a prayer.

The collection's title comes from a passage out of Augustine's Confessions that is quoted in the book's "Foreword." Augustine writes that he "entered into  my innermost being" and "saw above the eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light. [...] I trembled with love and awe, and found myself to be far from you in a region of unlikeness." 

The region of unlikeness, then, is where Augustine is, a place wholly unlike the place where the light of God is, a place of estrangement...maybe also self-loathing, alienation, isolation.

The poem titled "Region of Unlikeness" seems to be about a memory, although the memory belongs not to an "I" but to a "you." (Which could still be Graham, I think.) A young woman, very young perhaps, wakes up in Rome next to someone whose name she does not immediately recall and then makes her way home at dawn. Self-loathing, alienation, and isolation all seem to be in the mix. The "you" has overnight become a person different than who she once knew herself to be, living in a different world than the one she lived in yesterday.

Not exactly a religious poem, but the sense of displacement and separation certainly parallels what Augustine was writing about. But the light mentioned by Augustine is harder to find. God is absent in Region of Unlikeness, but the absence is noticed, which makes a difference. Registering God as an absence certainly differs from from leaving God entirely out of the reckoning. 

The collection's last poem, "The Phase after History," gets explicit about God's absence, playing off of Exodus 33, where God partly grants Moses's wish see to him--but not face to face, only from behind, while Moses is tucked into a cleft place in a rock.

     And there is the Western God afraid his face would come off

into our eyes

     so that we have to wait in the cleft

rock--remember?--

     His hand still down on it, we're waiting for Him to

go by,

     The back of Him is hope, remember,

the off-white wall,

     the thing-in-us-which-is-a-kind-of-fire fluttering

as we wait in here

     for His hand to lift off,

the thing-in-us-which-is-a-kind-air

     getting coated with waiting, with the cold satinfinish,

the thing-which-trails-behind (I dare do all that may

     become a man,

who dares do more is none)

     getting coated, thickly. Oh screw thy story to the

sticking place--

So, denied God's face, we are waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the promised glimpse of His back, with our three things (soul, spirit, conscience?) getting a little worse for wear, and in the meantime we have turned into Macbeth...which portends no good at all, it seems to me.

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.