Ben Lerner, _Transcription_

AUTOFICTION? WHO KNOWS? I appreciated Tara K. Menon's review of Ben Lerner's new novel for the Nation for pointing out that the episode where the (unnamed) narrator visits the famous glass flower museum at Harvard goes to show how convincing a simulacrum can be, even while you remain aware of its artificiality. The characters and events of Transcription seem utterly plausible, and the narrator is again a near-ringer for Lerner himself, but could this very short novel be 100% fiction? Of course it could. Do we really need ti know whether it is?

In the first chapter, "Hotel Providence," the narrator returns to the Providence, RI, where he attended college, to interview his famous mentor Thomas for a magazine. In his hotel, before heading over to his mentor's house, he gets water in his phone, which means he will be unable to record the interview. Embarrassed but unwilling to own up to his klutziness, he goes ahead with the interview. His mentor, while obviously brilliant, is showing signs of dementia and goes off on some startling and unfiltered digressions about his wife (who died by suicide) and detailed memories of a trip to Switzerland with the narrator...a trip the narrator has absolutely no memory of. 

In the second chapter, "[Hotel Villa Real]." (why the brackets? I don't know), the narrator gives a talk at a conference about Thomas, who has died since the first chapter (by assisted suicide, in Switzerland, it seems). The talk is about the circumstances of the interview the narrator did publish after all, which turned out to be Thomas's final public utterance. Accordingly, the interview has gotten a lot of reverential attention from Thomas-philes. In the narrator's talk, however, he spills some beans about the circumstances of the interview (that is, that he had to rely on memory? That Thomas betrayed signs of dementia?), and now everyone is angry at him. Thomas's son, Max--a college friend of the narrator--is, we hear, especially furious.

A lot of the talking in the second chapter is from Rosa, one of those wondering what the hell the narrator thought he was up to in his talk on Thomas, and almost all of the talking in the third chapter, "Hotel Arbez," is done by Max. Is this before or after the narrator's talk at the conference? After, one would assume, given that novels typically move forward in time, but Max does not seem angry and makes no reference to the talk...another little puzzle. Max, like the narrator, has a tween daughter with baffling issues that her parents have no idea how to handle, and Max, it turns out, not the narrator, was the young man accompanying Thomas on that trip to Switzerland.

The Thomas-Max-narrator triangle is at the heart of things, somehow. Max and the narrator are vaguely doppelgänger-like; besides their being the same age and having daughters with unfathomable issues, a mentor-mentee relationship between men has plenty of father-son overtones, making Max and the narrator sibling rivals, of a sort. Neither can quite relax and take Thomas's approval for granted; both constantly look for signs of how they stand. 

Max and the narrator do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their parent; they do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their daughters. To me, this is an utterly recognizable situation, autofiction or not.

So much for summary--I've failed, though, to get at how captivating the novel is. I could hardly put it down. 

Lucy Ives, _An Image of My Name Enters America_

 I BELIEVE THIS is poet and novelist Lucy Ives's first collection of essays, but I may be wrong. There are thirteen titles listed in the front matter of An Image of My Name Enters America; I have read eight of them, and none of them was a collection of essays, but who knows?

The book's first essay, "Of Unicorns," gives the reader a good idea of how Ives works. It blends personal history (Ives's youthful passion for My Little Ponies) with scholarly investigation (medieval and early modern lore of the unicorn) and adds some dashes of high theory (Michel Serres, Anna Dufourtmentelle), all tightly woven with a poet's touch for language and sentence construction.

Ives's essays remind me somewhat of Guy Davenport's in that he too could happily blend diverse kinds of specialized knowledge into a surprising but convincing whole. Davenport rarely added any personal history, however, and Ives's candor about her own life does a lot to raise the stakes in each essay. A youthful passion for My Little Pony could be observed in many American households in the early nineties, including ours, but the book's other essays are about graver matters. 

The title essay mainly has to do with Ives's learning only in her thirties that an ancestor had escaped the Armenian genocide, but it also has to do with memory, the American period rooms in the Metropolitan Museum, Virginia Woolf, and Ives's (ill-fated) marriage. 

"Earliness, or Romance," has to do the idea of romantic love, which Ives is ready to dispense with, making her case with through the movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the Stephen Vincent Benét short story the musical was based on, quite a few literary works, and the ideas of Lauren Berlant. 

"The End" is about Ives's experience of depersonalization disorder in her twenties, coinciding with her exposure to advanced literary theory (under the guidance of Barbara Johnson, no less). 

"The Three-Body Problem" discusses the science fiction series by Cixin Liu, of course, but it is really about the birth of Ives's son. Yves. I have only witnessed childbirth, never experienced it, but Ives's account is the most convincing I have ever read. Midwifery, caesarians, and Margery Kempe are among the topics blended into the mix.

"Of Unicorns" is the book's shortest essay, and it is not exactly short at thirty-some pages. The others run between forty and sixty--deep dives, in other words. No periodical these days is likely to run essays like these in their entirety, so all the more thanks to Graywolf Press for publishing the book.

Heather Altfeld, _Post-Mortem_

 I PICKED THIS up because I admired "Obituary for Dead Languages," a...lyric essay? prose poem?...anyway, it ran in Conjunctions, and I admired it. 

As the title Post-Mortem suggests, the theme of the book is writing based on someone or something having died. Seven poems have "obituary" in the title, two have the word "kaddish," two more have the word "autopsy," and we also have "After Poetry Died" and "The Death of Beauty." 

The poems in the earlier part of the book are witty and inventive, so I was thinking of the theme as playfully dark or darkly playful, but in Part IV it gradually becomes clear that Altfeld and her partner lost one of their kids. Reading those poems, I felt like my heart fell into a deep hole. That Altfeld was able to write about the event at all astonished me, to say nothing of how powerfully she wrote about it, how moving the poems are.

She has published a few more essays in Conjunctions, and I enjoyed those, but I wonder if another poetry collection is on the way. I hope one is.

Szilárd Borbély, _Berlin - Hamlet_, trans. Ottilie Mulzet

 A HUNGARIAN WRITER who died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 50, Borbély wrote plays and a novel as well as poetry. This particular collection is extraordinarily cohesive, centered on Berlin as it might have impressed the sensibilities of (1) a Walter-Benjamin-like flâneur, (2) Franz Kafka during his prolonged and tricky engagement to Felice Bauer, and (3) Hamlet. 

All three are intellectual, supersensitive, a little edgy, under a lot of pressure, and on a slightly different wavelength from most people. Two of them are Jewish, as Borbély might have been, which adds a few quanta of anxiety to being in Berlin.

The overall mood of the book is wintry, overcast, bleak, no one here gets out of alive. It's very good, but it's not, you know, heartwarming. 

I was reading this about a month ago while on a vacation with a group of old friends. Several of them came upon me one morning in a lovely screened-in porch; they were returning from a walk. What are you reading? A Hungarian poet. Oh, read us one of his poems! 

I realized immediately that there was not a single poem in the book quite suitable for reading to a group of not-exactly-literary friends on a lovely spring morning. On, the other hand, declining to read a poem would have seemed churlish, or so I thought. I didn't feel I could say no. I did say, "these aren't happy poems," but that did not get me off the hook. I went with "Wannsee," in which the flâneur visits the place where the Wannsee Conference was held--that is, where the Nazis laid plans for the Final Solution--thinking that having a historical reference point would work better than trying to explain Hamlet or Kafka's engagement. I read the poem. It cast a pall. 

Well...they asked. They probably won't ask next time. 

I need to memorize a Mary Oliver poem or two just to have something ready for such occasions.

Mark Lilla, _Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know_

 I BECAME AN admirer of Mark Lilla mainly through his work as an intellectual historian: The Reckless Mind, The Stillborn God, The Shipwrecked Mind. All three touched on matters of contemporary relevance, certainly, but mainly through a kind of excavation of the ideas of influential thinkers. His previous book, though, was more explicitly an intervention in debates of the moment; The Once and Future Liberal made the argument that liberals and/or Democrats would improve their electoral chances by placing less emphasis on identity-related issues. He had a point, maybe, but one more white guy arguing that we should put identity issues on the back burner mainly just pissed everyone off. 

Ignorance and Bliss splits the difference, we could say. It's about the don't-know-and-don't-want-to-know stance that underlies our current impasse of polarization. No one wants to have a calm, give-and-take discussion about Trump and MAGAism. You're either passionately behind him or passionately opposed, and whichever side you are on, you are not about to change your mind. Thus Ignorance and Bliss is about an important contemporary political phenomenon. It approaches the phenomenon, though, with an historical array of illustrations, many drawn from the Bible and classical literature, but with additional insights from Freud, Kafka, Hobbes, Locke, Pascal, Ibsen, and quite a few more.

Lilla generally adopts the sensible (and liberal, I'd say) position that yes, one ought to seek to know the truth, with all that implies about freedom of speech and the press, open debate, objective investigation. But he certainly understands why it might not always be best to insist (he makes some interesting points about Ibsen's The Wild Duck). 

He frames the book with discussions of Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Might one leave the cave and find the blinding illumination of broad daylight a little...oppressive? Intense? Or just uncomfortable? Might we want to go back into the cave, to the familiarity of those dancing shadows, and just hang out? "Think very hard before answering that question," he concludes. It's worth thinking hard about.

Louise Erdrich, _The Sentence_

 MANY INGREDIENTS HERE. The main one is a ghost story. The narrator, who works in a bookstore, thinks she is being haunted. I'm not sure whether we, the readers, are supposed to accept the haunting as actual or to see the narrator as under a compelling delusion. A bit like James's Turn of the Screw, let's say. I (and some of the narrator's fellow employees) think the haunting is real, but several members of my book club thought the narrator (who has had a difficult past, serving time for a crime she was set up for by "friends") was having an episode.

We also have some nice workplace comedy. Erdrich owns a bookstore in the Twin Cities (a very nice one, Birchbark Books) and the depiction of bookstore culture is lovely. It got me thinking that someone should set a sitcom in a bookstore--I guess they tried that with Ellen, and it didn't quite take off, but the idea still appeals to me.

Then there is the time setting. Twin Cities, All Souls Day 2019 to All Souls Day 2020--which means we get COVID and the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests. 

On top of all that, the narrator, Tookie, is indigenous, and the ghost, Flora, is a particularly annoying instance of a Euro-Anglo-American becoming obsessed with a romanticized idea of indigenous cultures, so the haunting is wrapped up in the issue of cultural appropriation. (The title refers to a sentence in a unique book Flora has appropriated, the reading of which was so shocking to her self-conception as practically indigenous herself that it killed her.)

I like Louise Erdrich, but there may be too many eggs in this pudding. It's a swift read, though, and the book club liked it.

Ocean Vuong, _On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous_

 IT TOOK ME longer than I expected to get around to this autobiographical novel by the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (which I thought well of), but I finally did, and yep, it's good.

It reminded me somewhat of Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh, another memorable account of a son's growing up with a working mother (barbershop in Because I Was Flesh, nail salon in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) and an absent father. Little Dog (Vuong's narrator) emphasizes the tightness of the bond by addressing his mother as "you" throughout.

We don't find out exactly what circumstances led to Little Dog and his mother to leave Vietnam--something went wrong somehow--but his grandfather's being a U. S. citizen and a Vietnam War veteran makes it possible to relocate in Connecticut. Little Dog contributes to the family income by (illegally) working on a tobacco farm (they grow tobacco in Connecticut, surprising but true).

And that is where Little Dog meets Trevor and the novel turns into a gay coming-of-age story. Trevor comes from a very laissez-faire working class family and is already familiar with opioids. Their backgrounds, obviously, are quite different, but they become close friends and then lovers. The circumstances are not idyllic--they are exploited child labor, after all--but there is sweetness in this part of the story.

As in any coming of age story, though, childhood and adolescence end. Little Dog has a chance to go to college and takes it. Trevor is not going anywhere. 

But Little Dog knows about getting out in  time--as, we are reminded in  the closing pages, his mother did.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (2)

 ALL BUT ONE of the poems in To 2040 is either a "rivulet" poem (my own coinage for Graham's poems in very short lines of just a few words, grouped as quatrains, justified on the left) or a justified-on-the-right poem, with greater variety in the length of the lines. Both forms were repeatedly used in Runaway, but now they account for almost the whole collection (eleven "rivulets," nine justified-right). 

Several poems in Runaway were in long-lined quatrains, and there is exactly one poem following that form here: the title poem, "To 2040." Does that mean it was written earlier than most of the others? 

I read the book first in January 2024, not that long ago, but reading it after re-reading its predecessors involved noticing different things and asking different questions. For one thing, I kept trying to discern a pattern to the justified-left and justified-right poems. (Give me a difference, and like many of us I will attempt to attach meaning to it.)

Are the left-justified poems more lyrical, the right-justified more discursive? This works up to a point, as the left-justified ones are swifter, more focused, more colloquial, "sing" more. The right-justified ones tend to looser movement, more detail, more connections, arguing with themselves. No sooner did I construct this pattern, though, than it deconstructed itself. Lyrical moments aplenty in the right-justified poems, plenty of position-taking in the left-justified. The lyrical/discursive difference often holds, but not always.

To 2040 seems set in some near post-collapse future. When two of the left-justified poems ("They Ask Me" and "Dusk in Drought") seemed to be about the disappearance of actual birds and their replacement by mechanical simulations, I wonder if left-justified = future, right-justified = now. But in the right-justified "Fog" we read, "I remember / what it was like  to make coffee in the / mornings. I remember mornings." That would have to be set in a future in which we have lost access to coffee beans, no? And the left-justified "Why" seems set now. So I'm not sure. 

Part of the book's balance of an anxious present and a terrible near-future may imply, though, that it's later than we think, that the future is already here in ways we haven't learned to notice. So any "now" poem could be about the future, any "future" poem would remember now. Draw no hard lines. 

There are moments when hope breaks through. "Why," in which granddaughter Sam touches a bud. The cicadas of "Dawn 2040." The earth healing itself in "Then the Rain." 

Okay. I feel as ready as I could possibly be for Killing Spree.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _To 2040_ (1)

JORIE GRAHAM ON Copper Canyon? Did not see that one coming. I associate Copper Canyon with poets like Hayden Carruth, David Lee, Marvin Bell, and [clears throat] James Galvin—that is to say, poets older than and not all that much like Graham—and Ecco (or Harper Collins) seemed to have a handle on what Graham wanted (wider than usual pages, Bulmer font), so what happened? Presumably these questions will be answered when the definitive Graham bio comes out, if I live that long, and people keep writing poets’ biographies.

I did notice on re-reading Runaway that the pages are already getting a little brown at the edges even though my copy is only six years old. Cheap paper, obviously. The pages of To 2040 are still bleach white. Yes, my copy is only three years old, but Copper Canyon obviously used better paper.

No dust jacket, though. Tsk.

Copper Canyon also said yes to the generous page dimensions Graham has preferred starting with Never and to using the services of designer Erica Mena, who also worked on the Graham collections Fast and Runaway. (This is not the Erica Mena who is a model and actress, by the way. It looks like Erica Mena the designer now goes by E. Rowan Mena.) 

In her acknowledgments, Graham thanks “the whole crew at Copper Canyon Press […] as we start down this new path together,” but the path has apparently come to an early end, as the new Graham book to appear in May will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

So what happened? I may never know. I hope FSG goes with really good paper. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_ (2)

 SOME FORMAL DEVELOPMENTS are going on in Runaway. The right-margin-justification form that Graham used for “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” the final poem in Fast, is used again in several poems, some of which seem crucial to the architecture of the book: “[To] the Last [Be] Human,” “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” “Scarcely There.”

It occurred to me that this form would be tricky if one were writing a first draft by hand, as you have to guess how much space the line’s letters would need before you started writing it. In a word-processing program, however, nothing tricky at all, just hit a couple of buttons. Does this mean Graham composes directly into a word-processing program? I suppose a lot of poets do these days.

The poems with classically Grahamian long lines tend to be arranged in quatrains, giving them a seeming regularity that turns out to be only superficial, because within those very stately-looking four-line arrangements we have that old Grahamian cataract going wherever it wants to go.

The new departure is what I am going to call the “rivulet” poem, with (for Graham) startlingly short lines, one, two, three words long, dropping vertically straight down the page. There are just four “rivulets,” but they include the title poem, “Runaway,” and the collection’s last three poems, inclining one to think that Graham has come up with something new that she is keen to explore. And explore it she did in To 2040.

Besides "Runaway," the rivulet poems are "In the Nest ®," "The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem." 

"In the Nest®" is in the dystopian vein that widened in To 2040, the "Nest" being a collective name for some of Google's "smart products." Amid the anxiety over surveillance are some poignant lines addressed to "Mother": "Mother. See us. / Mother it's / a strange new // winter here."

"The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem" combine Graham's penchant for longer sentences with the drops-like-a-plumb-line verticality of the "rivulet" poems, and the combination...definitely...does something. Damned if I can say what. But the rhythm feels very different, somehow, more headlong, more we-are-getting-somewhere-before-we-are-ready-to-be-there. Something urgent, insistent. The poem is about a couple on a ferryboat, looking at its wake, and addresses the problem that we are always already not the persons we think of ourselves as being. Short but packs a punch.

"Poem" could be a key note for eco-Graham: "The earth said / remember me."

"Runaway" deserves  to be the title poem. The long sentences in very short lines creates that urgency again, that feeling that like Alice we are not keeping up with ourselves, combined here with the crisis of our own technology rapidly consuming our substance and likely to consume a lot more of it before we get around to applying the brakes. 

Runaway makes a terrific introduction to To 2040. Or To 2040 makes a terrific sequel to Runaway. Take your pick.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_ (1)

 A BRAND NEW dedicatee this time around—Samantha Lorraine Almanza. I wondered whether Graham had broken her pattern of dedicating collections only to family members, but several poems in Part III of Runaway led me to think that Samantha Lorraine Almanza must be a granddaughter. “Sam’s Dream” is about Sam in utero and then being born; “Sam’s Standing” is about her learning to walk; “I Won’t Live Long” is about her acquiring language. 

Even when all the news is bad (I can attest) grandchildren give one hope, and the Sam poems have a certain lift and sprightliness that is not Graham’s most familiar vein.

That more familiar vein--unease, anxiety, dread--shows up too. "When Overfull of Pain" is the title and the opening phrase of one of the poems, for instance. "[To] the Last [Be] Human" has the atmosphere of a dystopian or post-eco-disaster novel:

One of us had come back from some other place--

Alaska, a father dying in rage, screaming on his

floor, saved by

nothing.

We're so full of the dead the burnt fronds

hum, getting going each day again into too much sun to no

avail. I was human. I would have liked to speak of

that. But not now. Now is more

complicated. I have no enemy except day. The edges

turn hot and

stay

hot. Shadow hard to find [...]

Later in the poem the collection's title appears: "What are our rates of speed. Where is runaway. How far / away."  Do these questions without question mark hope for an elsewhere not yet visited by the disaster? It is not at all clear that there is one.

The possibility, as a disaster unfolds, of a future or an elsewhere also occurs "The Hiddenness of the World," a re-casting of Edward Thomas's great poem, "As the Team's Head Brass." In Thomas's poem, written as World War I was in its catastrophic course, the speaker engages in an intermittent conversation with a farmer plowing his field behind a team of horses. They talk about the war, naturally. The war is a disaster, but the farmer is still plowing, still intends to plant, still assumes his crop will grow, that people will need food. In the distance, a pair of lovers slips into and then out of a small wood, perhaps conceiving a child who will live in the hard-to-imagine future. 

It's an uncannily balanced poem. Thomas was soon off to war himself, and he was killed. The immense human cost of the war looms just underneath the lines--yet some idea that life will continue is also present.

Graham's poem folds our own eco-catastrophe into this scenario. Can we get out? Is there an elsewhere to get to? Can we even imagine one? "Feel the outsideness here. Here on this page. Here in my head. / You. You in me in this final time."

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Fast_ (2)

 FAST MAINTAINS THE no-notes-in-the-back policy of the preceding two volumes, so when “Cryo” included phrases like “this peine driede uppe all the lively spirities of flesh" and “I saw in him a doubille thurst one bodely and another  gostly,” which sounded like quotations, I checked the internet and learned that they were from Julian of Norwich’s Showings (a.k.a. Revelations of Divine Love). 

As a longtime reader and admirer of Julian’s book, this pleased me for several reasons. Besides just the plain fact that I appreciate any evidence that contemporary poets are reading Julian, the quotation also established another underground passage between Graham and T. S. Eliot (Julian is a key presence in “Little Gidding”), who often seems a crucial precursor.

The quotations are from Julian's 8th showing, chapters 16-21 in the longer version, a vision of dryness pivoting on the crucified Jesus' words, "I thirst." Julian has prayed to know and understand what Jesus experienced on the cross, so the 8th showing is part of fulfilling that prayer. As she contemplates Jesus' thirst, she comes to a larger understanding of the love he had for humankind.

The speaker of "Cryo" is not exactly Graham, I suppose, since Graham has not had herself frozen. If the speaker is considering cryogenics, she must be on the threshold of dying, as Julian was, but the object of the speaker's attention at this fearful juncture is not on a crucifix but on astonishing machinery and a team of professionals. And, of course, on a prospect of eternal (frozen) existence quite different from anything that might have occurred to Julian.

The body is stiffened by something happening far away--> though the curious bag

inside beats like a heart still --> like a line repeated --> an opinion from the

future --> low, repeating some science --> looking back at that prayer that was not

received [...]

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Fast_ (1)

THE INSIDE FRONT flap copy of the dust jacket opens with this sentence: "In her first new collection in five years--her most exhilarating, personal, and formally inventive to date--Jorie Graham explores the limits of the human and the uneasy seductions of the post-human." Inside front flap copy is always going  to be an aerosol of scented bullshit, but Fast (2017) really is formally inventive, with several departures from Graham's usual practice, and it really is more explicitly personal than her work had tended to be, since several poems are about the declines and deaths of her father and mother.

I would say Swarm is the Graham collection that looks and sounds the least like any other Graham collection, in that it often abandons syntax and turns into a cataract of words and phrases. The same thing happens in Fast, with the addition of arrows as punctuation. This is from "Honeycomb":

Your fiberoptic cables line its floor. Entire. Ghost juice. The sea now

does not emit sound. It carries eternity as information. All its long floor. Clothed as

I am --> in circumstance --> see cell-depth --> sound its atoms --> look into here

further--> past the grains of light --> the remains of ships --> starlight [...].

In passages like these, and there are quite a few, I can't tell whether the line-breaks are actually line-breaks or just where the line ran up against the limits of the page and had to start back flush left. Some of the lines may actually be intended to be dozens of words long and would stretch across three pages were it feasible to print them that way.

The "arrows" contribute something to the effect, as if raising Graham's penchant for horizontality to a new level, as if insisting that this line just keeps going and going, plunging into the unmappable future.

"Incarnation" has a novel form that looks like a familiar one. The stanzas of fourteen lines, about the length of blank verse lines, look like sonnets...but don't sound like sonnets, running along as they do in short, simple clauses and phrases mainly linked by dashes. In a poem about the forms we end up inhabiting, the choice feels very apt.

The poems about her parents tend to be in what I think of as "Graham-form," long lines with shorter "outrider" lines hanging from the right-hand side of the longer lines, with the exception of closing poem "Mother's Hands Drawing Me," which is mainly shorter lines, centered on the page, but with a justified margin on the right rather than the (customary) left. It's a simple thing, but it's surprising how it puts the reader in a different space, as Graham herself is in a foreign country as she deals with her mother's increasing cognitive difficulties:

mother who cannot get the dress on

because of broken hip and broken

arm and tubes and coils and pan

and everywhere pain, wandering

delirium, in the fetid shadow-

world--geotrauma--trans-

natural--what is this message

you have been scribbling all your

life to me, what is this you drag

again today into non-being. Draw it.

The me who is not here Who is the

ghost in this room. [....]

Graham is rarely this plain. 

But even plainer than that is "From Inside the MRI," which, taken in conjunction with a mention of doing internet searches about chemotherapy, seems to suggest that Graham had health crises of her own during the time she was writing the book. And then there is "Prying": "your every breath is screened, your every cell, it is not hit and / miss, we get it all, your safety lies with us, hold still, / granted it's cold at first, this new relief, / your icy nation thanks you / for the chance to rest these absolutes on you / murmurs the gleaming staff in the deliberate air [...]."

Brr.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (4)

 BEFORE MOVING ON to Fast, I want to make some observations about the poem that opens PLACE, "Sundown." It is not very long, a bit over two pages, and is in Graham-form but with the all-the-way-to-the-left lines somewhat shorter than usual. It bears a date and a place in parentheses under its title: St. Laurent Sur Mer, June 5, 2009.

The poem's main event is simple enough: Graham (okay, right, the speaking subject, whom I am going to dub "Graham"), is walking on a beach and a man rides by on a horse. The main event occurs in a classic Graham extended sentence--the whole poem, in fact, is just that single sentence. I will quote just an excerpt here: "just this / galloping forward with / force through the low waves, seagulls / scattering all around, their / screeching and mewing rising like more bits of red foam, the / horse's hooves now suddenly / louder as it goes / by and its prints / on wet sand deep and immediately filled by thousands of / sandfleas thrilled to the / declivities in succession in the newly released  / beach [...]."

"Sundown" has in common with a great many other Graham poems, early, middle, and late, its intense attention to an unfolding now, trying to notice and record as much as possible of an astonishing phenomenon while it is happening. Here, as often, she stacks up absolute phrases (noun + participle, e.g., "seagulls scattering") to create the sense that you, the reader, are experiencing the event as it is occurring. 

But the thing about phenomena is that they occur in time--another Graham preoccupation, early, middle, and late--they emerge, flash upon us, and are gone. Marvelous as the moment of the man on horseback riding up from behind Graham and passing her is ("upraised knees and / lightstruck hooves and thrust-out even breathing of the great / beast"), it will be over in seconds, absolutely gone.

Except for the hoofprints, which Graham also describes. But a few waves will erase those. 

How can so extraordinary a thing be so temporary? But that's the boat we are all in, aren't we? Even Graham, who ends the poem by noting her own footprints on the beach.

And then there's the date--the day before the 65th anniversary of D-Day, a crucial episode that occurred right on the beach where Graham is walking, as she glances at in referring to it as "Omaha." Unimaginable, history-changing tumult was occurring on that beach sixty-five years ago, but you might never guess today. What a churning up of sand occurred that day--and all marks effaced now.

The poem put me in mind of the opening of Book 12 of the Iliad, where Homer notes that in years to come, the scene of the war, with all its ramparts and weapons and machinery, would be wiped clean by wind and weather and no one would be able to tell a great war had occurred on that shore.

The poem will stay behind a lot longer than the hoofprints, though. Not forever, but with luck, a good long while. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (3)

 “MESSAGE FROM THE Armagh Cathedral, 2011," the collection’s concluding poem, probably would have had a note attached in the collections before Sea Change. It’s easy to get the particulars, though, thanks to the internet; in fact, Graham may have stopped placing notes at the end of her books because the internet made them not all that necessary.

There are two cathedrals in Armagh, it turns out, both named after St. Patrick, one belonging to the Church of Ireland and one belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Both are seats of the Primate of All Ireland, i.e., the senior bishop among the Irish bishops, in their respective denominations.

Graham must be describing a visit to the Church of Ireland cathedral, because that is the one that contains the Tandragee idol, “a carved granite figure dated to the Iron Age” (Wikipedia), thought to represent Nuadha of the Silver Arm, one of the Tuatha Dé Danaan (see Mark Williams’s Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth). Graham does not use the name “Tandragee Idol,” but she does devote much of the poem to this sculptures.

“I put my own pale arms around you,” writes Graham, addressing the idol, and later “I put / my hand in your wide carved mouth,” at which point I imagine a sexton stepping up and saying, “Ma’am, please do not touch the idol,” but Graham is left to do as she pleases, even though a wedding (!) is in progress. So, if you ever book a wedding in the Church of Ireland Cathedral in Armagh, you had best make perfectly clear that you do not want any American poets running around embracing the Tandragee idol while you are making your vows. 

Just kidding! Actually, it’s a wedding rehearsal, not an actual wedding, and the wedding makes a welcome counterweight to the thoughts of torture and amputation that Nuadh’s wounded arm brings in its train. If people are still getting married, there must still be some hope in circulation. “May your wishes / come true I say, / guidebook in hand. Tomorrow, she [the bride] says. I can’t wait until tomorrow.”

Sigh.

Also noteworthy is that “Message from the Armagh Cathedral” uses Graham-form, but the initial long line often becomes several lines, or perhaps one very long wrapped-around line. This development will loom large in the next collection, Fast.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (2)

 PLACE ALIGNS, FOR me, with a few other books from around 2005-10 that register the oppressiveness of the second G. W. Bush administration, the days of Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina, when it felt like Dubya was easily the Worst President Ever--little knew we what was coming all too shortly! I'm thinking of Carla Harryman's Adorno's Noise, Richard Greenfield's Tracer, that book of Alice Notley's with the owl on the cover, I think, whose name I forget...Alma, maybe. Blood, torture, and disaster keep hovering throughout PLACE. “Loved / ones shall pay / ransom / for the body of / their child.” “[T]here this / animal / dying slowly / in eternity its / trap.” “My century, the one where / 187 million perished in wars, massacre, persecution, famine […].” Dark.

The clouds part, though, with the closing poems. "Lapse" is a memory of Graham putting her daughter Emily in a swing in 1983, when she was not yet one year old, and giving her a little push. Having myself once upon a time helped my children (and grandchildren) enjoy a swing, I particularly enjoyed this poem, all the more in that it pulls out the stops, with the full Graham pleroma effect of, say, “Summer Solstice” in Sea Change. (That the swinging takes place on the day of the summer solstice resonates nicely.)

PLACE is I think the fifth Graham collection for which Emily was dedicatee or co-dedicatee. I wonder how she felt about that? She turned 30 the year PLACE was published, and I expect she had made her peace with it by then.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _PLACE_ (1)

 I DON'T KNOW why the title of PLACE is always rendered entirely in upper-case letters, but it is, so I will follow that practice even in my ignorance of what it signifies. I don't think it's an acronym, but maybe. Anyway, PLACE it is. 

The word occurs a few times in the collection, not at all surprisingly given how common it is (cf. "never"), but at least one passage seems to be signaling to us:

journals written in woods where the fight has just taken place or is about to

                                                take place

                                                for place

("Employment")

Is this a clue? Does "for place" modify "fight"? Is a fight for place about to take place? I wasn't sure. That does describe a lot of fights, though. 

The line "the world a place we got use out of" in the poem "Although" also got my attention, but I haven't been able to pull that into any generalizations about the collection as a whole.

What really got my attention, though, is the number of times Graham seems to be writing about the moment of waking up. "Of Inner Experience" is quite explicit:

Eyes shut I sense I am awakening & then I am

                                                awake but

                                                deciding

to keep eyes shut, look at the inside, stay inside, in the long and dark of it [...]

"The Bird That Begins It" seems to address being awakened at dawn by birdsong, and the weird moment when your identity reassembles itself as you come to waking consciousness:

                                                          [...] in the 

                                                return I

                                                think I

                                                am in this body

I really only think it--this body lying here is

                                                only my thought,

                                                the flat solution

                                                to the sensation/question

                                                of

who is it that is listening, who is it that is wanting still

                                                to speak to you

                                                out of the vast network

                                                of blooded things

And then, explicitly again, "Waking," which opens with, "The bells again. You open your eyes / again. A gap. To be a person-- / human and  then a woman."

Waking can certainly be a....well, I was about to say disembodied experience, which is nonsense, but that's not it, it's more like you are pulled into your body again after some interval of absence, in which you have been wherever you were in your dream. On waking, you might have just a few seconds of uncertainty, of wondering "where am I?", even if you are, as usual, in exactly the spot where you fell asleep, in the same spot where you have awakened day after day for years and years.  And you might even wonder, "who am I?'", what bundle of responsibilities has just landed on my shoulders as I return this identity, was I supposed to be somewhere an hour ago?

Sleep and waking raise all kinds of question about where you are while asleep and your place in the world, so to speak, once you awake, so I wonder if that helps account for the title of PLACE. It doesn't help account for those upper-case letters, though.                      

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Sea Change_ (2)

 SEA CHANGE DOES not, for reasons I gave in the previous post, feel like a sea change to me. It must have felt like one to Graham, I am guessing, or she would not have chosen the title she did. And when Graham switched publishers to Copper Canyon, she/they put together her previous four books as a single volume, [To] the Last [Be] Human, starting with Sea Change, which suggests she sees Sea Change inaugurating a distinct phase of her work. 

I have to admit Sea Change feels unified in ways no other Graham collection does. That every poem employs (what I am going to call) Graham-form (a long line followed by one or several shorter deeply indented "outrider" lines) does a lot to create this unity, but it is not only that. Thematic currents run through the book, too, sometimes so strongly felt that the whole book feels like a single poem. Most of her other books have thematic currents as well--I'd say Materialism, The Errancy, and Swarm definitely do--but something feels different this time.

I wish I could name the thematic current. I can't. But it may have to do with some sense of completeness, fullness, pleroma...not permanent or enduring of course, all too brief in fact, like whatever it was Pascal was writing about in his "Memorial." 

Let's try some passages. This is from "Later in Life":

[...] it is your right to be so entertained, & if you are starting to

                                              feel it is hunger this

                                              gorgeousness,, feel the heat fluctuate & say

                                              my

                                              name is day, of day, in day, I want nothing to

come back, not ever, & these words are mine, there is no angel to

                                              wrestle, there is no inter-

                                               mediary, there is something I must

tell you, you do not need existence, these words, praise be, they can for now be

                                               said. That is summer. Hear them.

 I feel no certainty about the pronouns here. "You" may be Graham, "I" may be Being...but a being that does not require existence...which means Being need not be...which makes no sense. You see my difficulty. But the relentless desire present so often in Graham, the aching excavating need to get to the bottom of things, seems satisfied here, some completion or sufficiency has been achieved. 

Whatever it is, it has something to do with summer, so it seems right that another poem, "Summer Solstice," speaks to the same pleroma:

you could call it matrimony it is not an illusion it can be calculated  to the last position,

                                                consider no further think no longer all

                                                art of 

persuasion ends here, the head has been put back on the body, it stands before us

                                                entire--it has been proven--all the pieces have

been found--the broken thing for an instant entire--oh strange

                                                addition and sum, here is no other further step

 to be taken, we have arrived, all the rest now a falling

                                                back, but not yet not now now is all now and

here--the end of the day will not end--will stay with us

                                                this fraction longer--

                                                the hands of it all extending--

"Summer Solstice" makes me think Graham should have had a chapter in Charles Taylor's last book. Dualities like mind and body, subject and object, divine and human seem transcended, not once and for all but only for an interval ("all the rest now a falling / back"), but even so a marriage has occurred ("you could call it matrimony"), oppositions have reconciled. 

It might even be a marriage, or at least an I-Thou relationship, between humans and the rest of the Earth, a way of imagining ourselves that could arrest our despoliation of our home. This is from "Just Before":

[...] some felt it was freedom, or a split-second of unearthliness--but no, it was far from un-

                                                earthly, it was full of 

                                                earth, at first casually full, for some millennia, then

desperately full--of earth--of copper mines and thick under-leaf-vein sucking in of 

                                                light, and isinglass, and dusty heat--wood-rings

                                                bloating their tree-cells with more

life--and grass and weed and tree intermingling in the

                                                undersoil--& the 

                                                earth's whole body round

                                                filled with

                                                uninterrupted continents of

                                                burrowing--& earthwide miles of

                                                tunnelling by the

mole, bark beetle, snail, spider, worm--& ants making their cross-

                                                nationstate cloths of

                                                soil, & planetwide the

                                                chewing of insect upon leaf--fish-mouth on krill,

                                                the spinning of

coral, sponge, cocoon--this is what entered the pool of stopped thought [...].

This sense of cosmic connection is not Graham's usual beat, and in PLACE things got dark again, but  it rings true here. And maybe the best examples of what I am trying to talk about here are the collection's last two poems, "Undated Lullaby" and "No Long Way Round."

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Sea Change_ (1)

THE FAMOUS PHRASE from Ariel's song "Full fathom five" in The Tempest tells us that a "sea change" is a transformation "into something rich and strange," as in the line Eliot lifted for The Waste Land, "Those are pearls that were his eyes." (We are talking about Shakespeare's Ariel here, by the way, not Disney's, though both get memorable songs.)

As a title for a poetry collection, "sea change" throws down a gauntlet; it seems to declare, "expect radical departures, new forms, startling transformations."

I wouldn't say Sea Change provides any of those things. 

It does differ from preceding collections in a few ways. It's the first to be dedicated to Peter Sacks, whom Graham married in 2000. It's the first not to include a "Notes" section at the end, identifying sources of quotations, so it is up to you to spot that the poem "Full Fathom," like Sea Change, derives its title from Ariel's song. It's the shortest Graham collection yet at 56 pages, although that may be due in part to none-too-large font size.  It includes no longer poems, everything coming in at two or three pages. She relies heavily on the ampersand. But nothing in all that compares to an eye becoming a pearl.

Maybe the change here is not a departure from, but a doubling-down on the Grahamian. Nothing is more Grahamian than the lineation device that every poem here deploys: a long line flush left, followed by one-to-six shorter lines indented two inches ("outrider" lines, I think Helen Vendler called them). A sample from "Just Before":

coral, sponge, cocoon--this is what entered the pool of stopped thought--a chain suspended in

                                                         the air of which

                                                         one link

                                                        for just an instant

                                                        turned to thought, then time, then heavy time, then

                                                        suddenly

air--a link of air!--& there was no standing army anywhere,

                                                        & the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all

                                                        the cities of

                                                        what was then just

                                                        planet earth

were lifted out of their sleeping [....].

Graham had been using this strategy since The End of Beauty, so it is not at all new for her, but using it for a whole book, as she does in Sea Change... that is new. Likewise, the very long sentences were a long-established characteristic of his poetry, but they dominate here.

Sea Change does often raise ecological concerns, a deepening concern for Graham (as for all of us) in the years ahead, but these are not new for her, either, as such concerns also appear in Swarm and Never.

So I am wondering, why this title for this book? And I am also wondering whether Graham was familiar with the work of J. H. Prynne, who was using the "outrider lines" device in the late 1960s. I bet she was.

Catherine Barnett, _Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space_

 INGENIOUS TITLE, SOUNDING a little like a physics textbook but also summing up in a phrase most human problems. Barnett lights on the phrase while facing a particular problem, presented in the book's concluding poem, "Studies in Loneliness, X": she wants to honor a promise to a friend to be at her bedside when the friend dies, but she also has a raft of obligations to be in other places as the friend's death nears. 

Some of these obligations have to do with being a daughter, as her mother is in serious decline, and some have to do with being mother, as she has an adult son, and some have to do with her career, which like most careers involves commitments to get one's body to specific places at specific times. 

There are a good many other people in Barnett's life, then, all creating problems involving bodies in space that Barnett has to solve. Yet ten poems in the collection are titled "Studies in Loneliness." Even as thickly networked as Barnett is, as an un-partnered empty nester living a life committed to reading and writing, she is often solitary. And that is its own kind of problem of a body in space.

The first collection by Barnett that I read was The Game of Boxes (2012, a James Laughlin winner), and I later read Human Hours (2018). Her voice, I would say has been consistent, marked by dry humor, candor, lightly-borne learning, and a fascination with language that eschews spectacular effects. I've been re-reading Jorie Graham lately, and I appreciated the contrast Barnett provided.

Re-reading Jorie Graham and wondering about Iphigenia

 BORN IN 1950, Graham is a baby boomer. Second-wave feminism mattered a great deal to her contemporaries, especially for the educated, and often intensely for those who were in academic environments. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich were getting lots of attention when Graham started writing poetry, and Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and H.D. started to get a lot more attention in the 1980s and 1990s than they had in earlier decades, when they had been overshadowed by male peers. (I think Bishop is more read than Lowell at this point, and H.D. may be more read than Pound.) 

Keeping all this in mind, we would not be surprised if gender were often or consistently salient in Graham's poems. But (it seems me) it is not. It's not absent, by any means; consider the many male-female duos re-imagined in The End of Beauty, for instance. It's not often in the foreground, though. I would not expect Graham to show up on many syllabuses for courses on women writers courses, even given that those courses tend to focus on fiction, essay, and memoir.

But then there is the figure of Iphigenia. The first allusion that I noticed appeared in Swarm. "Fuse" reworks the opening speech by the Watchman in the Oresteia, and then the following poem, "Underneath (11)," which seems to begin by thinking about King Lear, drops this in:

to set the blood in

            motion

to choke the core of event

                        out

pushing spring and the new

                    shoots up

pushing the ships (at Aulis) up

into narrative then

beyond it

what  can be

The step from Lear to Agamemnon came as a surprise to me, but it makes sense: prickly pig-headedness in authority, and so on. Then the reference to Aulis, where Iphigenia was sacrificed to raise the winds the Greek army needed to sail to Troy, reminds us that Lear, too, was willing to give up a daughter.

Then, a few years later, in Overlord, "Praying (Attempt of June 14 '03")" seems to be describing a visit to Mycenae, Graham imagining "The still bodies of the / listeners, high on this outpost, 3,000 years ago, the house of / Agamemnon, the opening of the future."

There. Right through the open

mouth of the singer. What happened, what 

is to come. 

What is to come, I'm guessing, is the war on Troy, the war that will require the sacrifice of Iphigenia. In a book that keeps recalling World War II and hinting at the war then happening in Iraq, we see Agamemnon as a man to whom war was so important that he had his own daughter killed in order to get his war going ("Do not force us back into the hell / of action, we only know how to kill.")

And then--Sea Change. This is from "Nearing Dawn":

back there, lamentation, libations, earth full of bodies everywhere, our bodies,

                                        some still full of incense, & the sweet burnt

                                        offerings, & the still-rising festival out-cryings--& we will

                                        inherit

                                        from it all

nothing--& our ships will still go,

                                        after the ritual killing to make the wind listen,

out to sea as if they were going to new place,

                                        forgetting they must come home yet again ashamed

no matter where they have been--& always the new brides setting forth

                                        & always these ancient veils of theirs falling from  the sky

                                        all over us [...]

Underneath the ceremony then, underneath the policy, just men making their bloody fantasies come true, with the lives of women as collateral damage.

Graham may not be a right-out-there feminist, but if she is willing to tell Clytemnestra, "you go, girl," she has something to say about gender.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Overlord_ (3)

LET'S BORROW FROM physics and call the idea that everything is part of a complex interrelated whole that operates according to a single, universal set of principles the idea of a "unified field." One of Graham's best poems (the poem that lent its title to her volume of selected poems) is called "The Dream of the Unified Field," which suggests both that the idea fascinates her that the idea may just be a hubristic human fantasy, a Babel-like attempt to rival God.

But if we say God alone is the principle of the "unified field," that God alone comprehends the complex interrelated whole that operates according to a single, universal set of principles, then we are up against the Problem of Evil (i.e, the question of why evil exists is God is both omnipotent and benevolent). 
The Dream of the Unified Field" is in part about exactly this, I suspect.

The idea of a center fits in here. In the third part of "Dream," Graham is walking through a storm and hears "inside the swarm, the single cry // of the crow. One syllable--one--inside the screeching and the / skittering,/ inside the constant repatterning of a thing not nervous yet / not ever / still--but not uncertain--without obedience / yet not without law--one syllable [...]." Is the cry of the crow the secret unifying principle? Can Graham in some way identify with it? In the sixth part, still in the storm, "I close my eyes and, /standing in it, try to make it mine." It's as though she is trying to home in on the frequency that unifies the field.

Centers also figure in Overlord, but the idea seems to be to stop thinking about centers. This is the first of the two poems titled "Disenchantment" (which seems to be about Gerhard Richter):

there was to be a meeting, as one of lovers, but then something was 

                                                                            arrested--

just there where the center was beginning to form--

no, there should not be a center--listen how it echoes--

you can blot it nicely with some abstraction--

"Europe (Omaha Beach 2003)" seems to be trying to talk itself into abandoning the idea that things have centers, that physics plays by our rules:

                No basic building blocks "of

matter." No constituent particles from which everything

is made. No made. No human eye. The rules?

Everything speeding towards "the observer." Who is 

that? The other who is me perceives

the tiny stream of particles, hazy, 

the superimposition of states. Entanglement. Immediacy.

I am guessing "superimposition" is related "superposition," which, like "entanglement." is one of those deeply counterintuitive findings that quantum physics likes to toss in our laps.

"Physician" is about a patient with an illness that, among other things, may be about the conundrums of physics: 

                    Everywhere crammed full of the crushed

and confused and still-milling numberless angels.

Everywhere in the solids of our world them rushing towards each other.

As there is nowhere else for them to rush towards.

Even in my room, in my walls, right there, deep inside them,

something filled with greatest passion, thickening folds of it, is

                                                    personally embracing

                                                    a void.

We're crushed in a crowd yet still moving at the speed of light. No wonder we're ill.

And then there is Iphigenia.