Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Swarm_ (2), with a bit more on _The Errancy_

 THE WORD "SWARM" shows up about half a dozen times in The Errancy, I noticed when re-reading, knowing that it became the title of her next book.  "The Guardian Angel of the Swarm," particularly caught my attention. Graham (in  the notes) tagged it as another "manteau" poem, this one in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze. It ends, "Come now, let us go," which may align with the OED definition of "swarm" Graham provides in the notes to Swarm: "a  body of bees which at a particular season leave the hive or main stock, gather in a compact mass or cluster in search of a new dwelling-place, under the guidance of a queen." The OED further notes a metaphorical extension: "persons who leave the original body and go forth to found a new colony or community."

"Swarm" thus might connect to Graham's own circumstances, leaving Iowa for Massachusetts, and it also strikes a surprising Plath resonance--surprising to me, anyway, since I never thought of Graham as sounding much like Plath (see the bee poems in Ariel).

The most interesting thing about the word, though, is that for Graham it conveys concerted and purposeful activity, a chosen departure from the familiar into the unknown, rather than the chaos and shapelessness "swarm" suggests if, like me, you are too damn lazy to look up the word and instead rely on its association with mobs and aimless milling about. There is nothing chaotic or vague about a swarm at all. The queen bee says, in effect, "come now, let us go," like a Moses, or a John Winthrop, or a Brigham Young, and the hive says, "we're in, let's go."

The title of The Errancy has a like doubleness to it. The OED defines "errancy" as "the condition of erring or being in error," as in wandering from the true and the right, but Graham's notes call our attention to the knight errant, who did indeed wander, but wandered with a purpose, pledged and prepared to do knightly service in whatever circumstance he encountered on his wanderings.

I wondered whether the errancy of the knight errant even tips over a bit into an errand, "a going with a message or a commission." Not really, as it happens. I learned in snooping about the OED that errand for a task that sends you out in  the world has Anglo-Saxon roots, while errant for wandering has French and Latin roots--that is, the two words, despite their superficial similarity, are not related. I like the idea of Graham toggling between the two possibilities, though.

And speaking of swarms, what kind of swarm is depicted on the cover of Swarm? We have maybe a dozen heads, six depicted in profile, the faces somewhat androgynous except for the bearded person on the left edge. The dust jacket informs us that this is a detail from one of Giotto's frescos in the Serovegni Chapel in Padua. Which one? "The Prayer of the Suitors," it turns out. This fresco depicts an episode in the Life of Mary. According  to medieval legend, she had many suitors, but her parents wanted her to marry a man who would promise to preserve her virginity. Each suitor provided a rod; Joseph's rod blossomed, a divine sign that he was the man. Whether this backstory to the painting tells us much about Graham's collection I wouldn't say, but the intent faces all headed in the same direction definitely sends us a signal about the idea of a swarm.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Swarm_ (1)

SWARM (2000) IS a wider swerve than I realized at the time I first read it, sometime within half a year of when it was published.  After my having just read the previous six collections, Swarm comes as a shock. From The End of Beauty on, Graham had been writing in longer lines and even longer sentences, and writing longer poems with longer arcs of development (see especially Materialism), Not in Swarm.  For the most part, the lines here are short, sometimes just a few words, and we often get phrases or just isolated words instead of those long unscrolling Grahamian sentences. "The Veil" begins with these lines:

Exile          Angle of vision.

So steep          the representation.

Desperate          Polite.

A fourth wall          A sixth act.

Centuries lean up into its weave, shudder, go out.

The poems are not brief, but the longest are only three or four pages, and they tend to have the disjunctive feel of the passage I just quoted, to feel like mosaics from which half the tesserae have fallen out.

There are some new devices as well: poems with what look like stage directions ("The Veil," "Middle Distance,"), more frequent use of parentheses, asterisks separating lines.

Graham had a lot going on in the later 1990s. She took up her position as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (succeeding Seamus Heaney) in 1999, which was  the same year her divorce from Jim Galvin became final. In 1999, too, while serving as judge in a poetry contest, she gave  the prize to her boyfriend (later husband), Peter Sacks, a dodgy circumstance that was to get a lot of attention a few years later.

The author bio on the back flap of the dust jacket notes that Graham "currently divides her time between Iowa and Massachusetts," which makes me wonder whether her daughter did not want to be the new kid in a Massachusetts school and so stayed in Iowa City. Being often separated from her daughter would be a stressful situation, I imagine--for that matter, a daughter in her early teens and a mother in her late 40s is going to be stressful no matter what, even if no divorces or relocations are involved.

It would be over-tidy to say the radical changes in Graham's personal life generated the radical changes in the form of her poetry, but there does seem to be a movement in Swarm to strip things down, to lay bare the bones. There are sixteen different poems titled "Underneath," distinguished from each other by number or subtitles, as in "Underneath (8)" or "Underneath (Libation)." Are these the poems that were underneath the baroque elaborations of The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism?

Swarm revisits The End of Beauty in an even more remarkable way by including poems on Eurydice, Daphne, and Eve, but this time without Orpheus, Apollo, and Adam. And instead of Penelope, we get Calypso...and Clytemnestra. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (4)

 "EMERGENCY," I HAVE decided, ranks among my favorite Graham poems. It's a somewhat longer one, four sections over six pages.

Section 1 connects to some of the collection's "aubade" poems, in that Graham (or "I") is out walking at night, perhaps making a "'fore-day creep" as Willie Dixon put it in "Back Door Man," or perhaps just suffering from insomnia...anyway, it's a pitch-dark, moonless night, Graham is out walking by a river. She is "a woman, in a good-sized American town, alone, / late night, along a river's finery, / downriver from a power-plant, / upriver from a reservoir [...]". Due to the lightless circumstances she can only hear, not see, the river. The river is there, plainly enough, and through sound and memory she can imaginatively construct what she cannot see, but the subtraction of the seen arrests her, focuses her attention in a way that would not have happened to her in ordinary daylight. 

In Section 2, the river speaks to her--so the main pronoun here is not "I" but "you." The river seems to know a lot about her and to have decided opinions on what she should do next: "There is novelty, feel its blades, says the river, rippling, / push into perdition, your fault is eternal, exciting, exciting with seeming-- / the river falls over itself explaining -- / why do you expect to drown yourself in me [...]". What really got my attention, though, was the line--

(the garmenture of river, the light tucked into its raveling hem)

--which makes the river something like Pascal's manteau, a garment with a secret in its hem. And then, since the river (twice!) says "the stars are in me," the river is also Magritte's version of Pascal's manteau, starlight glimmering in infinite space through the cloak's holes.

Section 3 begins with a kick in the gut: "When she hit the child she felt something multiply." We have shifted pronoun gain, to a "she," a mother who has been stretched to her breaking point and is now conscious above all of silence...Pascal's eternal silence, maybe, given how utterly alone the mother seems to be. 

Section 3 put me in mind of the third section of Yeats's "Easter 1916," which takes us miles from Dublin into the countryside, a lively natural scene that seems unconnected to the politics and  personalities of the Easter Rising--only to turn out, once we get to the fourth section, to be eerily congruent with politics and personalities, setting up the impersonal, pleading, honoring voice of the fourth section.

In "Emergency," Section 4 is a prayer.

Let us pray. Why? Let us pray to be a torpid river, Lord.

Why? Whom shall we compose to be the speaker

for this void?

"I," "you," and "she" are all rejected, and we turn from river containing stars to Blaise Pascal himself, or more properly his sister, she who did the actual sewing of the Memorial into the hem of the manteau. After describing the sister's labors, the poem subsides into a series  of questions (as does "Easter 1916"), but I felt as a reader that we had passed through something and were--as Yeats put it--transformed utterly.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (3)

 THE IMAGE ON the cover of The Errancy is a Magritte painting, Le manteau de Pascal. Pascal is Blaise Pascal, mathematician, author, and bane of the Jesuits, he of Pascal's Triangle and Pascal's Wager and the Pensées. Pascal is also famous for having an intense mystical experience on the night of November 23, 1654, about which he wrote some brief but ecstatic phrases at the time. An excerpt, translated into English: 

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob

not of the philosophers and of the learned.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

The "Memorial," as it is known, was found sewn into the lining of his over-garment (manteau) after he died. He had apparently kept the evidence of his experience on his person as a reminder, a talisman against the inevitable spiritual lassitude in which doubt would creep back in.

The manteau in Magritte's painting is in a parlous state, though, full of gaping holes. Moreover, it is suspended against a night sky, and a night sky calls to mind another famous Pascal sentence: Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie--The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me--a classic statement of the theological vertigo occasioned by the invention of the telescope and the discovery that nothing seemed to lie behind the stars except more stars. The painting is open to interpretation, of course, but to my mind it leaves the clear impression that Pascal's experience of certitude was fine for him but does not much help the rest of us as we face those infinite silent spaces.

The Errancy includes at least three poems on the manteau, the first two plainly indicated by their titles, "Le Manteau de Pascal" and "Manteau"; the third, "Emergency," devotes its concluding section to the story of the manteau.

"Le Manteau de Pascal" alludes to Pascal's experience. "I saw clearly the impossibility of staying," the speaker states near the end and then again in  the final line, which seems to be Pascal deciding to record the experience before it faded, as he knew it would. But elsewhere in the poem we read--

The coat, which is itself a ramification, a city,

floats vulnerably above another city, ours,

the city on the hill (only with the hill gone),

floats in illustration

of what was once believed, and thus was visible--

(all things believed are visible)--

floats a Jacob's ladder with hovering empty arms [...]

--which plainly describes Magritte's disenchanted painting. And  right in  the middle we have a passage from Gerard Manley Hopkins's journal, in which a careful description of tree branches leads to the statement, "I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England." (A new high water mark for theo-dendrological thought, I imagine.)

In "Manteau," we seem to be watching a cinematic version of the Pascalian-Magrittean manteau with the speaker. This poem could serve as a model of Graham's serpentine syntax, adding curve to curve as an image opens up, evolves, turns itself inside out, growing and branching like one of Hopkins's oaks. Magritte's painting and the Pascalian vision seem to be braided or wound in a double helix, both valid, neither quite sturdy enough to stand without the other.

And then there is "Emergency," which calls for its own post.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (2)

 "THE GUARDIAN ANGEL of Self-Knowledge" can serve as an example of the sense of estrangement that runs through the book. The speaker seems to be passing through a campus, noticing the students, "these desperate, aimless ones in twos along the built-up paths, / in ones in corridors, these ones so skillfully grouped up / in liquid clutches of impermanence [...]." A few lines later, the speaker notices "the phone-booth where one's crying / softly now / into the glistening receiver [...]." 

"Untitled Two" likewise seems to take place on a campus, the speaker noticing a group of four girls talking among themselves, perhaps dissecting an absent fifth: "and then a hard remark, slammed in, a lowering again / of tone, quick chitter from the group, low twist of tone / from in the midst [...]'" This passage convinced me Graham could have written an excellent novel, but it also deepend the collection's absence of comfort.

Then there are the seven aubades. The traditional aubade is set at dawn (aube, in French) and involves a lover addressing the beloved as they prepare to part. Graham seems alone in her aubades and not in any kind of afterglow. "Oblivion Aubade" begins with these lines: "What dimensions must the defeat acquire, the homecoming, / scrawling all over my skin, my sickly peering in, / for me to finally hear the laughter?" In "Red Umbrella Aubade," the speaker is out on the streets as dawn arrives:

On my way home I hear, somewhere near dawn,

forged and stamped onto the high air,

                            one bloodshot

cardinal-call--bejangled clarity gripping form--

casting its pulverized acrylic in-

                           terrogation

out -- plain out --

first once like a dropped red stitch

and then again like the start of

                a silky argument

unfolding....

The poem ends with "an aftertaste, as of ashes, in my mouth, / from listening." One recalls Romeo and Juliet disputing whether the bird they just heard was a lark or a nightingale. They were spared the cardinal's "pulverized acrylic interrogation."

And then there are the "manteau" poems. They need their own post.

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.