Jorie Graham, _Sea Change_

JORIE GRAHAM REMINDS me of W. B. Yeats -- not that she sounds like Yeats, because she doesn't at all, and even though they have some thematics in common (being in a body and living in time, the intersection of the individual and history), I don't mean that either.  She reminds me of Yeats in that he was perhaps the greatest poet in English of his time, as she may be of hers, and yet his poetry had little obvious relationship to the other great poetry of his time, as little as Graham's does to the other great poetry of hers.  They both seem apart, isolated, great as they are, and bound to stay that way.

Whenever I teach Yeats alongside Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, Williams, H.D., etc., I always notice how unrelated what he is doing seems to be to what the others are doing.  His work, though involved in his historical moment and his place in numerous and complex ways, does not seem to be incorporating anything of poetry written in English after, say, 1900.  (Even Pound's editorial assistance doesn't keep Yeats from sounding like Yeats, I would say.)  The Oxford Book of Modern Verse that Yeats edited suggests that he just couldn't hear what the great poets of the 20s and 30s were up to.

This may help account for why Yeats is such a dead end as an influence.  The poets whose early work was obviously under his spell -- Auden, Berryman, Lowell, Plath -- had to shake him off in order to do important work.  Delmore Schwartz never did shake him off...en route to becoming a cautionary tale.  Heaney showed a bit of Yeatsian influence early and was canny enough to lose it and follow Kavanagh and Lowell instead, both of whom he could surpass.

Some poets make good influences: Bishop, Pound (n.b. as poet), Williams, even Eliot, I think, but Yeats -- no.  One cannot be much influenced by him without sounding as though one is imitating him, so he is a sort of dead end.

I think Graham is a sort of dead end as well.  Fairly often I come across work that seems influenced by hers, but the influence makes the work in question seem like an imitation, i.e., all too influenced by Graham, unable to do with the approach anything that Graham hasn't already done better.  Ashbery is a fructifying influence, I think, but being influenced by Graham just leads to a sort of off-brand Grahamishness.

Sea Change is more real Graham -- not quite the same as earlier Graham, to be sure, though recognizably her.  Along about Swarm and Never I was beginning to feel that Graham herself was succumbing to Grahamishness, but Overlord was stimulating and so is this new one.

Climate change seems to be on her mind; many of the poems begin with a reference to a time of day, or weather, or a season, and there is pervading sense of a civilization (or an administration) that has jumped the rails.  History hovers behind the lines.  But most often the poems start with a few stacatto bursts, then start unrolling in great sheets of phrases, more dashes and ampersands than periods, of that distinctive Graham phenomenology, witty then stumped, poignant then terrifying, veering from the just-barely-sayable into the unsayable.

She's great.  The greatest poet alive writing in English?  I think so, sometimes.  But anyone who wants to write poetry should be looking for influences elsewhere.