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.

Catherine Barnett, _Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space_

 INGENIOUS TITLE, SOUNDING a little like a physics textbook but also summing up in a phrase most human problems. Barnett lights on the phrase while facing a particular problem, presented in the book's concluding poem, "Studies in Loneliness, X": she wants to honor a promise to a friend to be at her bedside when the friend dies, but she also has a raft of obligations to be in other places as the friend's death nears. 

Some of these obligations have to do with being a daughter, as her mother is in serious decline, and some have to do with being mother, as she has an adult son, and some have to do with her career, which like most careers involves commitments to get one's body to specific places at specific times. 

There are a good many other people in Barnett's life, then, all creating problems involving bodies in space that Barnett has to solve. Yet ten poems in the collection are titled "Studies in Loneliness." Even as thickly networked as Barnett is, as an un-partnered empty nester living a life committed to reading and writing, she is often solitary. And that is its own kind of problem of a body in space.

The first collection by Barnett that I read was The Game of Boxes (2012, a James Laughlin winner), and I later read Human Hours (2018). Her voice, I would say has been consistent, marked by dry humor, candor, lightly-borne learning, and a fascination with language that eschews spectacular effects. I've been re-reading Jorie Graham lately, and I appreciated the contrast Barnett provided.

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.