IN A RECENT review of new books by Annelyse Gelman and Elisa Gonzalez in NYRB (1/18/2024), Anahid Nersessian quoted a remark by Eileen Myles: "It's really hard to figure out what's poetry and what's a tweet at this time." The observation took me aback at first, but on reflection, I saw what she meant. It is not just the poetry shelves at my local Barnes and Noble sag under the weight of multiple volumes of Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav and other practitioners of Instagram-ready poetry, but people like Chelsey Minnis, working from the other side, so to speak, can leave you wondering whether we have any business making distinctions.
And then I thought, "well, there's Jorie Graham." There is no mistaking a Jorie Graham poem for a tweet. Right?
But now and again in To 2040 one reads something like this:
stay in touch it is
saying, stay in touch
babe. I'm here
for u. I'm always
going to be
here for you.
A good many poems in To 2040 are in short-lined quatrains, justified all the way left, and use text message shorthand: u, yr, cd, bc, that sort of thing. They do not all use phrases like "I'm here for u," but they are a few steps down Graham's typical diction.
I discovered, on checking, that there are quite a few poems in this form (short-lined quatrains, text message shorthand) in the final section of Runaway (2021).
What's going on?
Damned if I know. The only thing that occurred to me was that Graham found it freeing or refreshing to work a more popular vein, like Yeats writing "Words for Music Perhaps" after the highly wrought ottava rima poems of The Tower and The Winding Stair. Just letting that (famous) hair down. Or perhaps they are tongue in cheek? But the quatrain poems do not do a lot to lighten the mood, I'd say.
More on the mood tomorrow, maybe.
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