Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (4)

 QUITE A FEW of the poems in Never seem comparable to the poems in the first half of Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts in that Graham is outdoors, seemingly by herself, near woods or water, noticing as much as she can, especially birds and trees. But this time around, the Wordsworthian Graham is the plural Graham, not just the speaking subject noticing and writing things down, but also noticing her own noticing and scrutinizing what she writes down, and wondering what it means that she is noticing her own noticing.

(By the way, is "In/Silence" a rewriting of Shelley's "Skylark"?)

Being plural also affects those poems that approximate prayer. Graham had already written a few of these, and more were coming--there are six poems titled "Praying" in the next book, Overlord. But the praying-subject has as many hovering ghost-selves as the speaking-subject. "Via Negativa" sounds like a prayer, but one that undermines the grounds of prayer in the very act of praying. It begins:

Gracious will. Gracious indistinct.

Everything depends on the point where nothing can be said.

From there we deduce how

from now on nothing will be like.

The person praying is already several persons, and the being to whom the person prays seems to be one of whom nothing can be asserted, nothing known. 

what is this (erasure) (read on) it is a warning:

omit me: go back out: go back in: say:

no way to go in: go in: measure:

this little fabric vanishes, ascends, descends, vanishes [...]

And then the poem ends with four statements in parentheses.

Graham's theology, I am guessing, could be described as apophatic--that is, mainly based on negation, on what cannot be said, asserted, named. That puts her, as an artist whose main medium is words, in a particularly interesting position, as words tend to say, assert, and name.

I am trying to get at why "The Taken-Down God" is, for me, the book's high point. Graham is in a small church in Italy on Easter Saturday. Apparently, this congregation has an Easter tradition of taking its sculpture of Jesus down from cross on the wall on Friday, covering it with cloth on Saturday, then raising it back onto the wall on Sunday.

Graham is watching all this, an observer but not exactly a participant...or is she a participant? Is everyone there a participant? She knows she is not supposed to be taking notes while this local tradition is enacted, so she goes outside.

You are not supposed to write in the presence so I can't really do

this task [for us] in there [feel fear when I feel for my pen] [in pocket] [I have

come outside, sit on  the steps, people watching me as they

go in] [remember]: 

Like a quantum physicist, Graham understands that her observation of what happens becomes part of what happens. She does not share the faith of the other participants, perhaps; but as for that, what do we know what their faith is? She notes certain homely, matter of fact details, like the holes in the wall where the sculpture of Jesus will eventually be reattached; but she also seems genuinely affected. Another not-prayer is not-said ("a voice will say 'Father'--but, no; there is nothing: the / voice will say father meaning by that nothing") but Jesus will rise again--right back up on that wall, and you yourself will be turning the screwdriver that reattaches him.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (3)

 GRAHAM'S TAKES ON her own experience typically rely on first-person pronouns (I/me/etc) but sometimes her second person pronouns (you/your/etc) seem also to be takes on her own experience, as if the Graham who had the experience is not precisely the same Graham who is remembering and writing about the experience...and after all, the person remembering the experience really is not exactly the same person who had the experience, so adjusting the pronoun seems like a helpful device.

If we throw in the "editor" Graham alongside the "speaking subject" Graham, we seem to have yet another point of view, calling for third-person pronouns (she/her/etc).

The above conclusions come from my own grappling with passages like this, from "By the Way":

More birds fly through. Through the "she" of the

                                                        beginning

whose clearing this "you" is in. The I stands

                                                    deepening.

As a fruit ripens. For the summer of the clearing is long

once you enter the first person, bearing out-limbs, carrying

                                                                                   fruit.

The device may seem precious and weird to some, but I thought it worked. Graham even seems to be having a little fun with it:

                                                    She

felt the calling herself she as the exact spot

spot she closed her eyes and the whole un-

                                        spooled--miles,

beach, mist, spray, out-croppings, current-drawn

nettings of foam that fanned-out in lulls

as if to give the sea a top--oh please--a

resistance stillness on which to scroll--a

flat impenetrability windowlike out onto a

dark that allows only for this reflection, [...]. )

("Estuary")

I really love that "oh please." Though it occurs between em-dashes rather than inside brackets or parentheses, it sounds like a snort from "editor."

All of us are plural, I think, and Graham's stepping out of the first-person struck me as more true to experience than sticking with "I." As she writes in "Woods":

O stubborn appetite: I, then I,

loping through the poem. Shall I do that again?

Can we put our finger on it?

Blake Bailey, _Philip Roth: The Biography_ (2)

 I STARTED READING this not long after it came out--actually, about the time all those revelations about its author, Blake Bailey, came out, and the cancellation that ensued. I wrote an interim post about it on June 11, 2021. Not long after, my interest flagged and I shelved the book unfinished. 

But then the Steven Zipperstein book appeared. I very much wanted to read it, but thought, eh, I should finish the Bailey bio first. And I have finished it. 

Among Oscar Wilde's more famous sayings is the one about putting merely his talent into his works, while putting his genius into his life. Roth definitely did it the other way around: He managed his life with a fair amount of talent, but he saved his genius for his works. I suspect that work, his corpus, will scrape through to posterity, losing a bit of bit of flesh to the Scylla of political correctness but avoiding the Charybdis of literary oblivion. If people are still reading novels written in English in the 22nd century, I bet Roth's will be among those being read.

The main problem with Bailey's biography is that he is not that interested in Roth's novels. He is interested in what Roth professed of his intentions for each novel. He notes how well each novel was reviewed, what awards it received, and how well it sold. He is definitely interested in which of a novel's characters resemble people Roth knew, and he has some interesting revelations on this front (e.g., Faunia in The Human Stain and Drenka in Sabbath's Theater). He is not all that interested, though, in what was distinctive about Roth as a novelist, or the shape of his career, or why his overall accomplishment is worth contemplating.

In other words, while this biography will long remain a useful resource for scholars of Roth, it does not measure up to Ellmann on Joyce, Bate on Keats, or Boyd on Nabokov. 

I'm hoping the Zipperstein book does Roth's work--which is, I would maintain, the work of a genius--greater justice.

(By the way, if you did not see Joshua Cohen's review of Bailey's biography in the March, 2021 issue of Harper's, you should look it up.)

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (2)

 GRAHAM HAD ALREADY been occasionally using parentheses and brackets in her poems, but in Never this practice becomes pervasive. The last 19 lines of "The Complex Mechanism of the Break" are one long parenthesis, with several bracketed phrases inside it. The last 13 lines of "Kyoto" are nothing but bracketed phrases, seeming to be insertions into a text that survived after the text into which they were inserted disappeared.

I was reminded of Derrida on supplements. The phrases in parentheses and brackets are in a double relationship to the poem, we might say, inside of it and outside of it. Take them out, and the sentences that contained them read as if complete and self-sufficient. But they must not have been self-sufficient if they needed the contents of the brackets and parentheses. Those contents are, from one angle, not part of the poem, but from another angle, the poem is not itself without them.

The poems in Never generally return to the usual Graham mode of long lines, long sentences, long arcs of development, but one--"Solitude"--is more in the mode  of Swarm: short lines, paratactic, disjunctive. But "Solitude" drops a crucial clue about those parentheses and brackets in identifying two characters, "speaking subject" (or "s.s.") and "editor" (or "ed"). The "speaking subject" is the "I' of the poem, or perhaps of the first draft of the poem. The "editor" is a later consciousness proposing revisions, different strategies, cancellations.

So perhaps the content in the parentheses and brackets is from the "editor"--still Graham, that is, but not exactly the Graham of the draft, instead the part of the Graham brain that wants to add a detail, or enter a qualification, or suggest an alternative, or even call the whole enterprise into question, Graham serving as her own Old Ez to her own Possum.

Because of this, Never both reminds one of the pre-Swarm Graham and seems like a new Graham. Graham had often veered into the meta-poetic before, with poems calling attention to their own status as poems. The new wrinkle in Never is that that the poems are Graham-poems that call attention to...or ponder, or work against, or even get a little grouchy about their own status as Graham-poems. 

Rounding fifty, definitely an "established poet," Graham's poems start to wonder, what is this thing called Graham?

This questioning shows up in the book's pronouns, which need their own post.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Never_ (1)

ALERT TO THE wisdom of the old proverb, I do not judge books by their covers, but I certainly notice covers, and some of the physical details of Never seem to be sending signals.

For instance, this is the first Graham collection with the wide, approaching square pages (seven inches by nine-and-a-quarter inches) that she used for every subsequent collection (to date at least). My first guess was that the wider pages accommodate those famous long lines, giving the book as a physical object a certain Grahamian dimension. But beyond that, the format unleashes a variety of design possibilities for Fearn Cutler de Vicq de Cumptich. (I wondered whether this was a fanciful pseudonym and that Graham had designed the jacket herself, but no, Fearn Cutler de Vicq de Cumptich is a real designer.)

The jacket cover is simple but striking. Mostly white space, with "NEVER" at the top, quite large, "JORIE GRAHAM," not quite as large, towards the bottom, and "poems" and "from the pulitzer prize winner" tucked in between. At the center, three and a half inches by three and a half inches, is a detail from Vermeer's The Astronomer, the astronomer's right hand reaching out to touch the celestial globe on his table, the globe lit by the sunlight coming through that famous Vermeer window. The fingers of his left hand rest on the table, near a book or manuscript. 

Clean and appealing.

The surprise is on the jacket's back. Alongside the inevitable UPC code, we have another three-and-a-half inch square, positioned just where the detail of the Vermeer painting was on the front, with a black-and-white photo of Graham. In this one, unlike her earlier jacket photos, she is smiling. And she holds her left hand up, fingers extended, in a gesture that looks a lot like that of the astronomer's right hand, save that she is not touching anything. Her hand is just suspended in the air.

The design seems to be suggesting that the viewer see Graham as somehow in relation to Vermeer's astronomer. Hmm.

Another superficial but interesting detail: this is the first Graham collection since Materialism to have a dedicatee: "This book is for Emily." There are quite a few Emilys out there, but my guess would be Graham's daughter, Emily Galvin (also the dedicatee of The End of Beauty). 

Brandon Som, _Babel's Moon_

I SPOTTED THIS at a local used book store (hello, A Novel Idea!) and thought it might be a followup to Som's remarkable second book Tripas (see post for 8/19/2023), but no...and turns out it isn't his first book, either, but a 27-page chapbook that preceded his debut, The Tribute Horse. A very handsome chapbook, in fact--nice work, Tupelo Press.

Early work, then, but Som already had some serious chops.

Swaddled in limb sap,

I imagine myself, impulse,

a cadence, a prevailing hunger

or thirst to avail myself of the light

and blister.

That's the opening of the third of the five sections of "My Grandfather in the Lemon Orchard," a highlight for me.

To my surprise, the book does not much address the complexities of Som's identity, a recurring concern of Tripas. Instead, it feels definitely mandarin, in the Cyril Connolly sense, putting its greatest energies into form and language. I have never read The Tribute Horse, but now I feel like investigating.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Swarm_ (3)

 UNEXPECTED PRESENCES IN Swarm include Emily Dickinson, whose astonishing "I cannot live with You" is "a poem which animates the book throughout," according to Graham's notes. She thanks Susan Howe as well, which suggests Graham had been reading My Emily Dickinson.

Another: David Jones, whose In Parenthesis and Anathemata are also cited in the notes. I read In Parenthesis in grad school but have not thought of it often since then. It's a poem about trench warfare, but refracted through a panoply of high modernist lenses. Graham's affinities with Anglo-American high modernism have been often noted, but I'm not sure what to think about this particular influence. I need to pluck that one from the shelf again. 

Also name-checked: John Ashbery, Donald Revell, Michael Palmer, (my man!) Hölderlin.

Not to mention Agamemnon and King Lear--see especially "Underneath (11)." Both kings. Both bad dads. Both prone to faulty decisions. Both made to suffer. Not sure what to think about this connection, though.

Not name-checked but, to my mind, quite present: John Milton, especially Book I of Paradise Lost, in "Underneath (Upland)," which certainly seems to be about the bewilderment and pain of the fallen angels. Since Graham typically seems quick to identify sources, it surprised me that this one went unmentioned. But it seems hard to miss: 

light-carriers carrying light for the Lord

(who are these fallen the light lifted

for us to step over

reveals?)

Or consider this:

while the creatures are felled,

gracing the high slopes with cries and outstretched arms

felled, among the stout-fibered living wood,

felled, the rest pierced through with green,

to make the basilica of divine hazard [...]

Okay, I know, no trees in Hell, but even so the scene seems reminiscent of Satan considering the landscape littered with his defeated angel army:

                                    till on the Beach

Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call'd

His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans't

Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks

In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades

High overarch't imbowr; or scatterd sedge

Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion arm'd

Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew

Busirus and his Memphian Chivalry,

While with perfidious hatred they pursu'd

The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld

From the safe shore thir floating Carkases

And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown

Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood,

Under amazement of thir hideous change.

All in all, Swarm seems to have spot of its own in the Graham oeuvre, quite unlike what came before, quite unlike what came later. 

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.

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. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty_ (3)

THE TITLE PHRASE occurs in a poem called "The Lovers," apparently about a couple; it begins, "They have been staring at each other for a long time now/ Around them the objects (circa 1980) / Then corridors, windows, a meadow, the _______." In the latter part of the poem, I'm guessing, things get sexual:

Listen, this is the thing that can trap it now--the glance--

the howling and biting gap--

and our two faces raised

that nothing begin (don't look away),

that there be no elsewhere,

that there be no elsewhere to seed out into,

just this here between us, this look (can you see me?) this

     look afloat on want,

this long thin angel whose body is a stalk, rootfree,

     blossomfree,

whose body we are making, whose body is a _______,

(only quicker, much quicker, a conflagration)

The phrase occurs earlier than this passage, a dozen or so lines in: "Here it is, here, the end of beauty, the present."

"The end of beauty," by itself, suggests termination, closure, something over and done with, but in this line Graham seems to be working with a different meaning of "end," the end as goal or purpose, the thing one hopes to bring about. So we may be talking about the goal of beauty, what beauty exists to bring about, and in this poem beauty exists to get two people together, to turn two individuals into lovers, into the making of one body.

The book's next poem, "Vertigo," calls up the same idea: "How is it one soul wants to be owned / by a single other / in its entirety?--". This time, though, it's a question. Can this really be the purpose of beauty, of life itself, of being? One wants to be owned. But why does one want that? Can we, should we, stop ourselves from wanting that?

This reminded me of how, in Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, there seemed to be few other people around, as if Graham preferred being on her own. "To the Reader" in The End of Beauty shows us a young Jorie Graham intent on a Science Fair project, with a description of her activity that simultaneously suggests her work as a poet. "I swear to you this begins with that girl on a day after sudden rain," she writes, and the girl heads out to "the allotted earth--for Science Fair--into the everything of / one square yard of earth," where a relentless excavation commences. That girl doesn't need a partner--a partner would only slow things down. But the woman that girl became wants a partner--perhaps everything depends on  that. Or does it?

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty_ (2)

THE RECURRING SITUATION in the poems of The End of Beauty involves a famous couple, usually a man and a woman, and a moment of rupture, or the crossing of a line, or some other decisive instant that creates a before and after. A couple (at least) of the poems are about Adam and Eve, and we also have Orpheus and Eurydice, Tristan and Isolde, Apollo and Daphne, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Mary and the angel Gabriel, Demeter and Persephone, and Penelope and Odysseus. The poem “Pollock and Canvas” also seems to belong in the category somehow, involving as it does a heightened, intense, almost feverish scrutiny of an emerging event, with the canvas as the painter's counterpart/mate. (Which could be biographically true, for all I know. Perhaps Lee Krasner wished she got half the attention the canvases did.)

The final poem, "Imperialism," might also count as a version of the situation, as Graham may be telling a Higher Being ("Nothing but a shadow, lord, and hazy at that") to whom she is married ("what is it for // this marriage, this life of Look, here's a body") about being taken, aged nine, to the Ganges by her mother, and entering the river with hundred of thousands of pilgrims. It's a moment that definitely creates a before-and-after, it sounds like ("they had to call whatever doctor was on hand / to give me a shot of what? --probably Demerol-- / to stop the screaming"). 

This would all be interesting enough, but Graham ups the ante by calling some of these poems about dyads-in-crisis self-portraits. The book's first poem, about Adam and Eve, is titled "Self-Portrait as the Gesture between Them," and we also have "Self-Portrait as Both Parties" (Orpheus and Eurydice), "Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne," "Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay" (Odysseus and Penelope), and "Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone." 

The titles suggest these poems depict something about the poet herself. But what? Does she identify with the woman in the dyad, and do the poems somehow reflect her first or second marriage? Or is she both parts of the dyad? Or is she the crisis the dyad is experiencing? Maybe these poems picking up something of an earlier generation of American poets, a Plath-Sexton-Berryman-Lowell confessionalism, but in a high modernist, oblique way. 

Graham once in a while veers towards straightforward confessionalism, as in the poem about being taken to the Ganges or "Ravel and Unravel," which revisits Penelope but includes lines that seem to address her (then) husband: "You walked ahead, lost one, carrying / Emily, all cargo now that I / am emptied finally / of all but my own / undoing [...]". But she seems to be telling us a lot more in the dyad-in-crisis poems, even though is not at all easy to say what she is telling us.

And what about that other dyad: poet and reader? Graham comes just little short of Jane Eyre in her willingness to speak right to us (e.g., "To the Reader"), telling us things she seems not to have told anyone else.