A NEW COLLECTION by Graham, her fifteenth (!), is forthcoming in May, a circumstance that struck me as a good moment to read the whole corpus again.
Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts is her first collection; it appeared in 1980, the year she turned thirty, as part of Princeton UP's Contemporary Poets series (alongside volumes by, among others, Robert Pinsky, Grace Shulman, and Carl Dennis).
The title is from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It occurs in a passage in which Zarathustra is declaring, "I teach Superman." Even the wisest man, Zarathustra insists, is but a temporary conjoining of bare life, like a plant (bios, maybe), and a spirit (zoë, maybe), thus a hybrid of plant and ghost, but the Superman will be something else again.
I don't think Graham was interested in the übermensch, really, but she was plainly interested in embodiment and consciousness right out of the gate, as she has been ever since.
The thing that immediately struck me on reading this book again (I first read it over thirty years ago) is how assured it is. Most first collections include a certain amount of fumbling, baldly derivative poems, overplayed hands, and such, but Jorie Graham seems to be 100% Graham right away. (Not publishing her first collection until she was thirty may have something to do with this).
A poet with whom I conversed about this book told me she had heard that Graham recommends poets begin a collection with an ars poetica, and Graham seems to do exactly that here with "The Way Things Work." Graham always pays attention to things with a certain ferocity of concentration, and this poem takes that approach: "The way things work / is that we finally believe / they are there, / common and able / to illustrate themselves. / [...] / The way things work / is that eventually / something catches." Throughout the book, Graham pays attention intently, waiting, maybe probing for the moment when something catches.
The waiting is not always patient, which is why I threw "probing" in there. Another poet with whom I was conversing felt that Graham tended to fall into a subject/object dichotomy, monitoring her own sensorium and consciousness so minutely that she sacrificed any chance of getting out of herself, shall we say. Maybe so...a bit like Hamlet in that respect, monitoring her own consciousness then monitoring her monitoring ("That would be scanned"). She isn't one for spontaneity, relinquishing control, delirium.
There is a lot of control in her sentence structure, for instance--reminiscent of Walter Pater, late Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. That is fine by me--I love Pater, James, and Woolf--but few contemporary poets go in for that degree of syntactical elaboration. Merwin and Ashbery were a couple of the key contemporary poets when Graham started writing, but you don't see much of the parataxis of Merwin or the juggling with the colloquial that you see in Ashbery. She seems to be going for something else--maybe something more high modern, if I am right in thinking "I Was Taught Three" has one eye on Yeats's "Among School Children."
Another striking thing: not many other people in the poems, which are mainly about features of the landscape and animals, most often birds. The volume feels eerily depopulated until about two-thirds through, when a "you" surfaces. (See, for instance, "The Slow Sounding and Eventual Reemergence of.") The "you" may just be Graham's way of talking to her own consciousness as she monitors her monitoring, and the "we" may just be human beings, but I wonder if the "you" was first husband William Graham (of the Washington Post Grahams), to whom she was married from 1973 to 1977, and the "we" the two of them. Hard to say. Plath and Sexton may have been important precursors, but Graham is not confessional...at least not in that way.
