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.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Overlord_ (2)

OVERLORD BEARS A title of more referential precision than Graham collections tend to have. "Never," "erosion," and "swarm" are words that one might use in quite a few circumstances, and even "materialism," while not an everyday word, could pop up in many contexts. "Overlord" has nothing everyday about it, being the title of a job that in its original sense no longer exists (e.g., "feudal overlord") and these days tends to be applied ironically or metaphorically (e.g., "Elon Musk is the overlord of X"). 

But "Overlord" was also the name of the enormous World War II operation in which the Allies landed in Nazi-held France to open a second front. Quite a few poems in Overlord refer to this event, especially the series of poems titled "Spoken from the Hedgerows."

So what might this mean?

The 2005 author bio notes that Graham “divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts […].”  If “western France” in effect means Normandy, then perhaps spending weeks or months in the place where D-Day occurred inspired an interest in the event. Then, too, the poems bearing dates pinpoint composition during 2003 and 2004, when the Iraq war was particularly intense. Being in a place where the United States was once engaged in an arguably legitimate war while it is engaged in an arguably illegitimate one may be part of the mix.

The “lord” in “overlord” tips a few theological dominoes, too, though, and Graham seems always interested in such questions, as she does in the six poems titled “Prayer” in Overlord and several other passages.

Operation Overlord involved highly centralized and hierarchical planning and decision-making. The aim was to anticipate every single contingency and to coordinate the whole effort, down to the smallest detail, to a single overarching goal. Things did not completely conform to expectation, of course—that is what the “Spoken from the Hedgerows” poems emphasize—but the operation nonetheless calls to mind a certain theological conception natural to monotheistic religions, in which God has foreseen the whole infinitely intricate unfolding of creation and everything, literally everything, is part of the design, providence in the fall of a sparrow, all part of the plan…that sort of thing.

We can connect this conception to a vein in High Modernism—the lingering idea that there was a pattern to things, a controlling center, a master design. Yeats and his gyres, for instance, or Pound and paideuma, or Eliot’s wish to be in a society like Dante’s in which every art and every science was subordinated within a Christian cosmos, or Wyndham Lewis’s fable about the caliph’s design. 

Graham, I think, feels the attraction of this idea, but is also (and quite rightly) wary of it.

More on this later.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Overlord_ (1)

SEVERAL GRAHAM COLLECTIONS that I thought worthy but not compelling when I first read them--The Errancy, Never, and now Overlord--seem much more compelling to me now, on a second reading many years later. Reading them all together probably accounts for some of the difference, as it's easier to see both the continuities and changes in direction. Then, too, I have read a lot of poetry of all sorts since 2005, when Overlord was published, and I imagine that makes a difference. Or so I can hope.

Let's notice the dust jacket again. The intriguingly named Fearn Cutler de Vicq again served as designer, and she used the same template employed for Never: uniform background color (black rather than white this time), book title and Graham's name all caps in a contrasting color, descriptors of the book's content ("poems") and Graham's standing ("from the pulitzer prize winner") in a smaller font size. Centered among the words, a photograph of a painting/collage; then, centered on the back, in the same spot and in the same dimensions, a photograph of Graham, with no other copy save the UPC code.

Both the painting/collage and  the photograph are by Peter Sacks, whom Graham had married in 2000. 

Does the repeated jacket design suggest a sort of continuity between Never and Overlord? I have the feeling it does, but it would be hard to pin down. It reminds me of the similar jackets for Yeats's The Tower and The Winding Stair, both designed by Sturge Moore. Those two books seem to share origins, not so much to seem like a "part one" and a "part two" as to be like siblings, á la Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac. 

The dedication too is a variation on previous dedications: "This book is dedicated to the life of my parents, / Bill and Beverly, / and to the life of my daughter, / Emily." Graham has already dedicated books  to her parents and (more than once) to her daughter, but what difference does it make to dedicate a book to "the life of" a person, rather than simply to the person?

One of the poems titled "Praying" (the one subtitled "Attempt of Feb 6 '04" and "For Emily") may help. "I search for gratitude," Graham declares, a few lines later landing on the possibility, "That my loved ones exist. That they are right this / second still in / life." This move doesn't quite seem enough--"No gratitude yet," Graham observes on  the next page--but maybe the idea behind the dedication is that the book in  honor of their being not simply her loved ones but of their being, "right this / second," still alive.

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.