Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (1)

THE ERRANCY IS the first Graham collection to come in at fewer pages than its predecessor--112 pages to Materialism's 146--but the font is smaller in The Errancy, so it may be a wash. More interesting, perhaps, is that it is also the first collection without a dedicatee. The preceding collections had been dedicated, sometimes in various combinations, to Graham's parents, to then-husband Jim Galvin, to daughter Emily, and to, in parentheses, "Marilynne" (Robinson, maybe, but I don't know). But The Errancy bears no dedication.

What to make of an absence is a bottomless question, but I wonder if Graham was feeling alone when the book appeared (1997). She seems alone in a lot of the poems--not just alone, but estranged, removed, even alienated. In the first poem, "The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia," she seems to be looking at a party, but at a kind of remove, as though the party were in her backyard and she were looking out a second-story window: "how small they seem from here, / the bobbing universal heads, stuffing the void with eloquence, / and also the tiny merciless darts / of truth." You've been to parties like that, I suppose--some wine, some nice cheese, a few merciless darts of truth. A few lines earlier, the phrase about "the pollen-free abandoned marriage-hymn" strikes a similar note of disenchantment.

There are six other "guardian angel" poems. My guess about the guardian angels is that they represent the habits and practices that keep one functioning when circumstances grow stressful. The book as a whole faintly suggests that Graham's marriage was out of fuel and losing altitude during the time she was writing these poems, yet such strategies as the "Guardian Angel of Not Feeling" ("We gust that lingering, moody, raw affection / out, we peck and fret until it's / gone") and the "Guardian Angel of the Private Life" ("sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event / on the list / then checking it off") keep her going even while internal turbulence threatens to throw her into a tailspin.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Materialism_ (2)

SINCE REGION OF Unlikeness alluded to Exodus 33 and God's letting Moses see God from behind, but not face to face, I noticed that the cover of Materialism featured a drawing (based on a Mantegna painting) in which we see Christ's back, but not his face. Of this collection, too, we could say that God is absent, but not exactly, and that God is present, but not exactly. Divinity is present in its absence, maybe.

There are four longer poems (of twelve, eight, ten, and fifteen pages) in the second half of the book--"Annunciation with a Bullet in It," "The Dream of the Unified Field," "Manifest Destiny," and "The Break of Day"--that seemed to me central to the collection. I'm probably wrong about that--the "adaptations" and the five poems titled "Notes of the Reality of the Self" seem likelier to be the main building blocks, and those five shorter poems at the end. "The Dream of the Unified Field" and "Manifest Destiny" did make it into Graham's first book of selected poems, which even carried the title of the former, and they certainly  got my attention.

"Annunciation with a Bullet in It" and "Break of Day" use the adaptation technique, rearranging existing texts: Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz by Isabella Leitner in "Annunciation," and passages from several famous writers (Plato, Flaubert, Heidegger, Sir James Frazer, and Marx) in "Break of Day." That the texts were more arranged than composed by Graham may account for their being skipped in the selected poems of The Dream of the Unified Field, but they both present perceiving, reasoning subjects in earnest engagement with matter and, possibly, with the immaterial. Isabella hears an angel saying "FEAR NOT" (as Gabriel said to Mary) even in Auschwitz, and the juxtaposition of Plato's Allegory of the Cave with Emma Bovary will get you thinking about what counts as real even before Heidegger and Marx show up.

"Manifest Destiny" juxtaposes a visit to a (Civil War, I think) museum, the battle of Shiloh (especially the fight in the Peach Orchard), and...Leda and the Swan. I'm not sure whether Graham has the Yeats poem in mind--her note mentions a series of photographs by Diane Michener, not Yeats--but the middle section of the poem marries beauty to terror much as the Yeats poem does, as well as the sense that the conjunction of the divine and the human can portend catastrophe.

"The Dream of the Unified Field" is one of Graham's strongest poems. It begins simply: her daughter is having a sleepover at a friend's house, but has forgotten her leotard, and Graham is bringing it to her. The walk down a plain (Iowa City?) street with a leotard unlatches memories of Graham's own dance classes in Rome, in a Europe not all that far past the trauma of the war, and her teacher saying, when she thinks none of her students can hear her, "No one must believe in God again." Then Graham, leaving after dropping off the leotard, sees her daughter through a window, dancing...a lovely moment.  Maybe Europe and its blood orgies have been left behind, our children will be safe and happy? But then something triggers a scene of another historical trauma, the landing of the Europeans in the western hemisphere, and all that entailed.

Graham writes enough about the Holocaust that I wondered whether she was Jewish. Her mother was, according to the internet, but her father was Catholic, and growing up in Rome, she was exposed to Catholicism a lot more than she was to Judaism. Still, Jewish connections seem to matter in both "The Dream of the Unified Field" and "From the New World," and I count those as two of her strongest and most characteristic poems.

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.