Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (4)

 "EMERGENCY," I HAVE decided, ranks among my favorite Graham poems. It's a somewhat longer one, four sections over six pages.

Section 1 connects to some of the collection's "aubade" poems, in that Graham (or "I") is out walking at night, perhaps making a "'fore-day creep" as Willie Dixon put it in "Back Door Man," or perhaps just suffering from insomnia...anyway, it's a pitch-dark, moonless night, Graham is out walking by a river. She is "a woman, in a good-sized American town, alone, / late night, along a river's finery, / downriver from a power-plant, / upriver from a reservoir [...]". Due to the lightless circumstances she can only hear, not see, the river. The river is there, plainly enough, and through sound and memory she can imaginatively construct what she cannot see, but the subtraction of the seen arrests her, focuses her attention in a way that would not have happened to her in ordinary daylight. 

In Section 2, the river speaks to her--so the main pronoun here is not "I" but "you." The river seems to know a lot about her and to have decided opinions on what she should do next: "There is novelty, feel its blades, says the river, rippling, / push into perdition, your fault is eternal, exciting, exciting with seeming-- / the river falls over itself explaining -- / why do you expect to drown yourself in me [...]". What really got my attention, though, was the line--

(the garmenture of river, the light tucked into its raveling hem)

--which makes the river something like Pascal's manteau, a garment with a secret in its hem. And then, since the river (twice!) says "the stars are in me," the river is also Magritte's version of Pascal's manteau, starlight glimmering in infinite space through the cloak's holes.

Section 3 begins with a kick in the gut: "When she hit the child she felt something multiply." We have shifted pronoun gain, to a "she," a mother who has been stretched to her breaking point and is now conscious above all of silence...Pascal's eternal silence, maybe, given how utterly alone the mother seems to be. 

Section 3 put me in mind of the third section of Yeats's "Easter 1916," which takes us miles from Dublin into the countryside, a lively natural scene that seems unconnected to the politics and  personalities of the Easter Rising--only to turn out, once we get to the fourth section, to be eerily congruent with politics and personalities, setting up the impersonal, pleading, honoring voice of the fourth section.

In "Emergency," Section 4 is a prayer.

Let us pray. Why? Let us pray to be a torpid river, Lord.

Why? Whom shall we compose to be the speaker

for this void?

"I," "you," and "she" are all rejected, and we turn from river containing stars to Blaise Pascal himself, or more properly his sister, she who did the actual sewing of the Memorial into the hem of the manteau. After describing the sister's labors, the poem subsides into a series  of questions (as does "Easter 1916"), but I felt as a reader that we had passed through something and were--as Yeats put it--transformed utterly.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (3)

 THE IMAGE ON the cover of The Errancy is a Magritte painting, Le manteau de Pascal. Pascal is Blaise Pascal, mathematician, author, and bane of the Jesuits, he of Pascal's Triangle and Pascal's Wager and the Pensées. Pascal is also famous for having an intense mystical experience on the night of November 23, 1654, about which he wrote some brief but ecstatic phrases at the time. An excerpt, translated into English: 

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob

not of the philosophers and of the learned.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

The "Memorial," as it is known, was found sewn into the lining of his over-garment (manteau) after he died. He had apparently kept the evidence of his experience on his person as a reminder, a talisman against the inevitable spiritual lassitude in which doubt would creep back in.

The manteau in Magritte's painting is in a parlous state, though, full of gaping holes. Moreover, it is suspended against a night sky, and a night sky calls to mind another famous Pascal sentence: Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie--The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me--a classic statement of the theological vertigo occasioned by the invention of the telescope and the discovery that nothing seemed to lie behind the stars except more stars. The painting is open to interpretation, of course, but to my mind it leaves the clear impression that Pascal's experience of certitude was fine for him but does not much help the rest of us as we face those infinite silent spaces.

The Errancy includes at least three poems on the manteau, the first two plainly indicated by their titles, "Le Manteau de Pascal" and "Manteau"; the third, "Emergency," devotes its concluding section to the story of the manteau.

"Le Manteau de Pascal" alludes to Pascal's experience. "I saw clearly the impossibility of staying," the speaker states near the end and then again in  the final line, which seems to be Pascal deciding to record the experience before it faded, as he knew it would. But elsewhere in the poem we read--

The coat, which is itself a ramification, a city,

floats vulnerably above another city, ours,

the city on the hill (only with the hill gone),

floats in illustration

of what was once believed, and thus was visible--

(all things believed are visible)--

floats a Jacob's ladder with hovering empty arms [...]

--which plainly describes Magritte's disenchanted painting. And  right in  the middle we have a passage from Gerard Manley Hopkins's journal, in which a careful description of tree branches leads to the statement, "I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England." (A new high water mark for theo-dendrological thought, I imagine.)

In "Manteau," we seem to be watching a cinematic version of the Pascalian-Magrittean manteau with the speaker. This poem could serve as a model of Graham's serpentine syntax, adding curve to curve as an image opens up, evolves, turns itself inside out, growing and branching like one of Hopkins's oaks. Magritte's painting and the Pascalian vision seem to be braided or wound in a double helix, both valid, neither quite sturdy enough to stand without the other.

And then there is "Emergency," which calls for its own post.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (2)

 "THE GUARDIAN ANGEL of Self-Knowledge" can serve as an example of the sense of estrangement that runs through the book. The speaker seems to be passing through a campus, noticing the students, "these desperate, aimless ones in twos along the built-up paths, / in ones in corridors, these ones so skillfully grouped up / in liquid clutches of impermanence [...]." A few lines later, the speaker notices "the phone-booth where one's crying / softly now / into the glistening receiver [...]." 

"Untitled Two" likewise seems to take place on a campus, the speaker noticing a group of four girls talking among themselves, perhaps dissecting an absent fifth: "and then a hard remark, slammed in, a lowering again / of tone, quick chitter from the group, low twist of tone / from in the midst [...]'" This passage convinced me Graham could have written an excellent novel, but it also deepend the collection's absence of comfort.

Then there are the seven aubades. The traditional aubade is set at dawn (aube, in French) and involves a lover addressing the beloved as they prepare to part. Graham seems alone in her aubades and not in any kind of afterglow. "Oblivion Aubade" begins with these lines: "What dimensions must the defeat acquire, the homecoming, / scrawling all over my skin, my sickly peering in, / for me to finally hear the laughter?" In "Red Umbrella Aubade," the speaker is out on the streets as dawn arrives:

On my way home I hear, somewhere near dawn,

forged and stamped onto the high air,

                            one bloodshot

cardinal-call--bejangled clarity gripping form--

casting its pulverized acrylic in-

                           terrogation

out -- plain out --

first once like a dropped red stitch

and then again like the start of

                a silky argument

unfolding....

The poem ends with "an aftertaste, as of ashes, in my mouth, / from listening." One recalls Romeo and Juliet disputing whether the bird they just heard was a lark or a nightingale. They were spared the cardinal's "pulverized acrylic interrogation."

And then there are the "manteau" poems. They need their own post.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The Errancy_ (1)

THE ERRANCY IS the first Graham collection to come in at fewer pages than its predecessor--112 pages to Materialism's 146--but the font is smaller in The Errancy, so it may be a wash. More interesting, perhaps, is that it is also the first collection without a dedicatee. The preceding collections had been dedicated, sometimes in various combinations, to Graham's parents, to then-husband Jim Galvin, to daughter Emily, and to, in parentheses, "Marilynne" (Robinson, maybe, but I don't know). But The Errancy bears no dedication.

What to make of an absence is a bottomless question, but I wonder if Graham was feeling alone when the book appeared (1997). She seems alone in a lot of the poems--not just alone, but estranged, removed, even alienated. In the first poem, "The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia," she seems to be looking at a party, but at a kind of remove, as though the party were in her backyard and she were looking out a second-story window: "how small they seem from here, / the bobbing universal heads, stuffing the void with eloquence, / and also the tiny merciless darts / of truth." You've been to parties like that, I suppose--some wine, some nice cheese, a few merciless darts of truth. A few lines earlier, the phrase about "the pollen-free abandoned marriage-hymn" strikes a similar note of disenchantment.

There are six other "guardian angel" poems. My guess about the guardian angels is that they represent the habits and practices that keep one functioning when circumstances grow stressful. The book as a whole faintly suggests that Graham's marriage was out of fuel and losing altitude during the time she was writing these poems, yet such strategies as the "Guardian Angel of Not Feeling" ("We gust that lingering, moody, raw affection / out, we peck and fret until it's / gone") and the "Guardian Angel of the Private Life" ("sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event / on the list / then checking it off") keep her going even while internal turbulence threatens to throw her into a tailspin.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Materialism_ (2)

SINCE REGION OF Unlikeness alluded to Exodus 33 and God's letting Moses see God from behind, but not face to face, I noticed that the cover of Materialism featured a drawing (based on a Mantegna painting) in which we see Christ's back, but not his face. Of this collection, too, we could say that God is absent, but not exactly, and that God is present, but not exactly. Divinity is present in its absence, maybe.

There are four longer poems (of twelve, eight, ten, and fifteen pages) in the second half of the book--"Annunciation with a Bullet in It," "The Dream of the Unified Field," "Manifest Destiny," and "The Break of Day"--that seemed to me central to the collection. I'm probably wrong about that--the "adaptations" and the five poems titled "Notes of the Reality of the Self" seem likelier to be the main building blocks, and those five shorter poems at the end. "The Dream of the Unified Field" and "Manifest Destiny" did make it into Graham's first book of selected poems, which even carried the title of the former, and they certainly  got my attention.

"Annunciation with a Bullet in It" and "Break of Day" use the adaptation technique, rearranging existing texts: Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz by Isabella Leitner in "Annunciation," and passages from several famous writers (Plato, Flaubert, Heidegger, Sir James Frazer, and Marx) in "Break of Day." That the texts were more arranged than composed by Graham may account for their being skipped in the selected poems of The Dream of the Unified Field, but they both present perceiving, reasoning subjects in earnest engagement with matter and, possibly, with the immaterial. Isabella hears an angel saying "FEAR NOT" (as Gabriel said to Mary) even in Auschwitz, and the juxtaposition of Plato's Allegory of the Cave with Emma Bovary will get you thinking about what counts as real even before Heidegger and Marx show up.

"Manifest Destiny" juxtaposes a visit to a (Civil War, I think) museum, the battle of Shiloh (especially the fight in the Peach Orchard), and...Leda and the Swan. I'm not sure whether Graham has the Yeats poem in mind--her note mentions a series of photographs by Diane Michener, not Yeats--but the middle section of the poem marries beauty to terror much as the Yeats poem does, as well as the sense that the conjunction of the divine and the human can portend catastrophe.

"The Dream of the Unified Field" is one of Graham's strongest poems. It begins simply: her daughter is having a sleepover at a friend's house, but has forgotten her leotard, and Graham is bringing it to her. The walk down a plain (Iowa City?) street with a leotard unlatches memories of Graham's own dance classes in Rome, in a Europe not all that far past the trauma of the war, and her teacher saying, when she thinks none of her students can hear her, "No one must believe in God again." Then Graham, leaving after dropping off the leotard, sees her daughter through a window, dancing...a lovely moment.  Maybe Europe and its blood orgies have been left behind, our children will be safe and happy? But then something triggers a scene of another historical trauma, the landing of the Europeans in the western hemisphere, and all that entailed.

Graham writes enough about the Holocaust that I wondered whether she was Jewish. Her mother was, according to the internet, but her father was Catholic, and growing up in Rome, she was exposed to Catholicism a lot more than she was to Judaism. Still, Jewish connections seem to matter in both "The Dream of the Unified Field" and "From the New World," and I count those as two of her strongest and most characteristic poems.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Materialism_ (1)

MATERIALISM CONTINUES THE trajectory of its two predecessors, I would say--intellectually ambitious, tending to longer-lined poems, deeply engaged in what the senses can gather at the same time that it keeps several philosophical (and maybe theological) conceptions in play.

I may be getting too literal about the title, but matter seems to be an abiding concern in Materialism. Fourteen texts in the book are "adaptations," passages from, among others, Sir Francis Bacon, Wittgenstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Benjamin, Dante, Jonathan Edwards, Plato, and John James Audubon about matter: what it is, how we can investigate its nature, what the human relationship to it is.

Accordingly, subject-object relations figure prominently in the collection. Having spent a lot of time with Charles Taylor's book Cosmic Connections recently, I promptly (maybe too promptly) started seeing Graham as working in the Romantic and post-Romantic tradition Taylor describes, trying to overcome or transcend the alienation generated by the Enlightenment's rigor in severing perceiver from perceived, trying to recover a sense of connectedness with the non-human. 

The six relatively shorter poems at the end of the book--"Invention of the Other," "Opulence," "Young Maples in Wind," "The Visible World," "Existence and Presence," and "The Surface"--all seem to be aspiring to a union between the perceiving "I" and the perceived natural world. "Opulence" gets really close, I'd say, but Graham being Graham, self-consciousness often opens up some cracks in "Young Maples in the Wind": 

                                            Reader,

wind blowing through these lines I wish were branches,

searchlight in daylight, trying as I 

                                            am trying

to find a filament of the real like some twist of handwriting glowing

                                                            in the middle

distance--somewhere up here, in the air, can we 

                                                    together,

(if I say salt, if I say fresh-cut grass, late April, the sound of

                                                             sprinkler on

some distance away but still within

staining range of the sinking whisperings of this gentle

                                                            wind,

and a hammer now, one car sputtering down)--can we.

                                                                together,

make a listening here [...].

I feel like saying, "yes, we can," but asking the question breaks the spell somewhat...but maybe it is healthier to break the spell? One of the "adaptations" is of Brecht on the alienation effect, insisting that representations ought to be  honest about their own status as representations, that anything less  than full honesty on that score is cheating and exploitation.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Region of Unlikeness_ (3)

 GRAHAM DOES NOT strike one as being personally religious the way, say, Marilynne Robinson does, but she certainly seems interested in theology. Those lines quoted in the previous post, near the beginning of "From the New World"-- "Can you help me with this? / Are you there in your stillness? Is it a real place?"--certainly sound like they are addressed to a divinity, but the colloquial tone of the very next line, "God knows I too want the poem to continue," lets all the air out of what was starting to sound like a prayer.

The collection's title comes from a passage out of Augustine's Confessions that is quoted in the book's "Foreword." Augustine writes that he "entered into  my innermost being" and "saw above the eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light. [...] I trembled with love and awe, and found myself to be far from you in a region of unlikeness." 

The region of unlikeness, then, is where Augustine is, a place wholly unlike the place where the light of God is, a place of estrangement...maybe also self-loathing, alienation, isolation.

The poem titled "Region of Unlikeness" seems to be about a memory, although the memory belongs not to an "I" but to a "you." (Which could still be Graham, I think.) A young woman, very young perhaps, wakes up in Rome next to someone whose name she does not immediately recall and then makes her way home at dawn. Self-loathing, alienation, and isolation all seem to be in the mix. The "you" has overnight become a person different than who she once knew herself to be, living in a different world than the one she lived in yesterday.

Not exactly a religious poem, but the sense of displacement and separation certainly parallels what Augustine was writing about. But the light mentioned by Augustine is harder to find. God is absent in Region of Unlikeness, but the absence is noticed, which makes a difference. Registering God as an absence certainly differs from from leaving God entirely out of the reckoning. 

The collection's last poem, "The Phase after History," gets explicit about God's absence, playing off of Exodus 33, where God partly grants Moses's wish see to him--but not face to face, only from behind, while Moses is tucked into a cleft place in a rock.

     And there is the Western God afraid his face would come off

into our eyes

     so that we have to wait in the cleft

rock--remember?--

     His hand still down on it, we're waiting for Him to

go by,

     The back of Him is hope, remember,

the off-white wall,

     the thing-in-us-which-is-a-kind-of-fire fluttering

as we wait in here

     for His hand to lift off,

the thing-in-us-which-is-a-kind-air

     getting coated with waiting, with the cold satinfinish,

the thing-which-trails-behind (I dare do all that may

     become a man,

who dares do more is none)

     getting coated, thickly. Oh screw thy story to the

sticking place--

So, denied God's face, we are waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the promised glimpse of His back, with our three things (soul, spirit, conscience?) getting a little worse for wear, and in the meantime we have turned into Macbeth...which portends no good at all, it seems to me.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Region of Unlikeness _ (2)

W. B. YEATS, IN one of his letters to Dorothy Wellesley, wrote that "a poem comes right with a click like a closing box." Graham seems to be pushing back against this idea near the beginning of "From the New World," asking someone (something? God?) for help with facing the horrifying story of Ivan the Terrible at  Treblinka.

   Can you help me with this?

Are you there in your stillness? Is it a real place?

 God knows I too want the poem to continue,

 

want the silky swerve into shapeliness

    and then the click shut

and then the issue of sincerity, [...]

The lines pose an interesting question: should a poem about an atrocity to be well-made? One could answer, well, yes, any poem should be well-made. But then again, should aesthetic considerations enter in a poem about an atrocity? Would making a poem about an atrocity beautiful be a betrayal of some kind?

I don't know how the answer those questions. "From the New World" is an aesthetic success, I would say, but it is not a well-wrought urn, by any means. It doesn't resolve into any kind of equilibrium, and it seems right that it does not.

And then that "click" becomes a sort of leitmotif in  the book. Sometimes it seems to be the shutter of a camera, as in "The Tree of Knowledge": "just appearance turning into further appearance, / click." More shutters seemingly go off in "What Is Called Thinking" --"Flight of a bluejay like a struck / match / Then twenty abreast (click) (click)"--but the sound turns out to belong to a cassette player doing an auto-reverse: "the click is my tape going into / reverse play." In "Who Watches from the Dark Porch," we are changing channels: 

Maybe if I turn the TV on?

   Let's graze the channels? Let's find the

storyline composed wholly of changing

   tracks, click, shall I finish this man's phrase with this

man's face, click, is this  the truest news [...]

The clicks could be chronometric, distinguishing one time-segment from another. But any kind of completion the sounds apparently signal, we realize, can only be an arbitrary mechanical one, something we supply in order to create demarcations in our experience. But our experience in itself offers no such handholds. What  happens if we attempt to do without them? 

"Have you ever wanted to put your hand right in," Graham asks in "The Tree of Knowledge," "to open it up and push it deep in there, / to make the other thing begin?" I have.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _The End of Beauty _ (4) and _Region of Unlikeness_ (1)

 EXTRAORDINARY POETRY COLLECTIONS do not necessarily make their authors famous, but The End of Beauty did put Graham into a whole new league. It created sufficient buzz that I heard of her, found a copy, and got hooked. This was about 1990 or 1991, I think; the book had already been out for a few years. I remember leaving it on a table in my office during the weeks I was reading it. A friend picked it up, spent about twenty minutes with it, and said, "This is the real thing."

The cover of the 1991 follow-up, Region of Unlikeness, bears evidence of its predecessor's impact. Blurbs from Frank Bidart, John Ashbery, and James Tate--a three-headed endorsement from the previous generation of poets that would be hard to surpass. The author bio mentions that Graham is now "on the permanent faculty" of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and has received a MacArthur grant. So, at 40, Graham is doing better than okay. 

Whatever fueled the takeoff of The End of Beauty is still burning hard and bright in Region of Unlikeness. The "Foreword," three pages of short quotations from Augustine, Heidegger, the Bible, and Melville, announces plainly enough that the poet's intellectual ambitions have not slackened. 

History is present here as mythology was present was in The End of Beauty, and as the myths of the earlier volume were presented as a kind of self-portraiture, so the big events here are infused with Graham's own circumstances. 

In "Fission," she learns of the assassination of Kennedy when a screening of Kubrick's Lolita is interrupted by the management to make the terrible announcement. That a 13-year-old girl is watching Lolita is enough for an unsettling poem, anyone might suppose, to say nothing of attending the showing with her parents, but to have so charged a moment as Humbert's first glimpse of Lo shattered by the announcement that the handsome young man whose arrival at the White House seemed to promise a transformative renewal has been shot dead.... 

Graham was present at les événements in Paris in 1968 and was even arrested, but "The Hiding Place" is not a call to action nor a nostalgic bliss-was-it-then-to-be-alive memory but a montage of grim details that suggest no one at the time knew exactly what was going on, not even Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red--if he is the "certain leader" Graham faced "above an open streetfire."

"From the New World" is one of Graham's most remarkable poems (it provided a title for her second book of selected poems). It is not "about" the Holocaust, exactly, but orbits a horrifying detail from the 1987 trial of John Demjanjuk, known as "Ivan the Terrible" while he was a guard at Treblinka. I can't say I really understand why Graham pairs this story with memories of her grandmother sliding into dementia. It might have to do with the slipperiness of identity, as one of the issues in the trial was whether Demjanjuk really was "Ivan," and Graham's grandmother does not entirely believe that the girl she is talking to is Jorie. It might have to do with how fragile things are, or how resilient things are, or the sheer power of the world's devouring maw. It's an arresting poem, though--and by "arresting" I mean it brings everything to a halt while you are reading it.

Walter Kempowski, _All for Nothing_, trans. Anthea Bell

 If YOU ARE in the mood for something bleak, sobering, and comfortless, here is a novel for you.

Set in East Prussia (a territory now mostly within Poland and partly within Russia) in the early months of 1945, All for Nothing is about the von Globings, a family belonging to the provincial nobility. The father, Eberhardt, is in Italy with the German army, leaving the rest of the family--his attractive wife, Katharina, his adolescent son, Peter, an aunt, Peter's tutor, and a few other retainers--in their grand old family home out in the country, near the town on Mitkau.

The von Globigs are not fervent Nazis--they look down a little on the local party boss, Herr Drygalski--but they have gone along to get along. They have sold most of the land of their estate well before the novel begins, and the investments they relied on for income have been upended by the war, but they do have Eberhard's officer pay.

They are all settled into their routines when the novel opens, routines that begin to get frequently interrupted by folks coming through from the east, looking to stay a while before pressing on to Germany or other points west. Each chapter looks closely at one of the von Globigs or at some party of visitors: "the Painter," "The Violinist," and so on. The steady stream of temporary guests is due to the  Russian army's progress to the east. The von Globigs are not too concerned about this, though, assuming things are bound to turn around.

By the time they realize things are not turning around and start packing to leave, the situation has deteriorated badly, society is coming unglued, and they find that nothing and no one can be relied on.

By the end...well, I'll avoid spoilers here. But just to repeat: bleak, sobering, and comfortless. And powerful in its understatement, its restraint, its telling the whole story without any melodramatic gesture at all. 

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

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

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

the howling and biting gap--

and our two faces raised

that nothing begin (don't look away),

that there be no elsewhere,

that there be no elsewhere to seed out into,

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

     look afloat on want,

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

     blossomfree,

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

(only quicker, much quicker, a conflagration)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-Reading Jorie Graham: _Erosion_ (2) and _The End of Beauty_ (1)

 SIXTEEN OF EROSION's thirty-three poems use a stanza of six short lines, the first, third, and fifth usually of three accented syllables, the second, fourth, and sixth usually of two (and slightly indented). The combination of the short lines with Graham's typically complex sentence structure creates a headlong tumbling or falling movement, straight down as it were, as though into a well, or as though we were trying to catch up with the White Rabbit.

Graham was obviously a bit in love with this form at the time she was writing the poems in Erosion, so it surprises that in her next book, The End of Beauty, foof, it's gone. In Helen Vendler's chapter in Graham in The Breaking of Style, she explains how Graham, in her third book, goes for a whole different kind of form, with lines stretching across the page like midwestern horizons. (The End of Beauty was Graham's first book with Ecco, who accommodated her with wider and wider pages, eventually getting to the almost square pages of Swarm, Never, and Overlord.)

Vendler makes an interesting argument about the shift from the vertical to the horizontal, from going down to going across, and how Graham seems to now be in a different mode, lighting out over the territory rather than excavating.

Vendler also notes a couple of other distinctively Graham-ian moves that make their debut here:

(1) the fill-in-the-blank spaces where the syntax suggests a word is called for, but the word has been omitted or never supplied, e.g., "looking into that which sets the _______ in motion," from "Orpheus and Eurydice."  For someone my age, this device infallibly recalls tests in junior high or high school along such lines as "The chief exports of Chile are _____, ______, and _______." Insofar as  the device recalls the stress of being tested to choose the one-and-only right word, it is a bit unnerving; since this is a Graham poem, however, and one senses she herself might have filled the blank in any number of surprising and counter-intuitive ways, one gets a heady sense of possibility as well, an invitation to participate in the creation of the poem. Can one feel intimidated and liberated at the same time? That's a close as I can come to describing the effect. It may be the cosmos beings set in motion, or it may be the mojo.

(2) the numbering of lines--or, it may be, the numbering of sections that consist of only one line--in several of the poems, e.g., "Self-Portrait as the Gesture between Them" or Part II of "Pollock and Canvas." Vendler calls this device the "freeze-frame," as in a film projected frame-by-frame so that each image gets its own moment rather than blurring into the illusion of movement--as in Douglas Gordon's art installation "24 Hour Psycho," say. This strikes me as an ingenious way of conveying Graham's desire to notice everything she can about a moment before it hastens on its way, making it...slow...down...like...this so she (and we) can get a good look at it. 

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Erosion_ (1)

 AS NOTED EARLIER, Hybrid of Plants and of Ghosts already sounds like Jorie Graham, but Erosion (1983) sounds even more like Jorie Graham.

There is more of that hyper-attention, that intense focus on the moment, as if trying to notice every single thing about the moment before it goes, before it gives way to the next moment. I wonder if the tendency of the details of one's surroundings to fade and disappear is what the title is naming. The collection does include a poem titled "Erosion," which begins by claiming to love sequence, one thing giving way to another, slow disappearances: 

Today, on this beach

I am history to these fine

pebbles. I run them

through my fingers. Each time

some molecules rub off

evolving into 

the invisible.

But since this poem involves a "we," I started to wonder if the erosion was going on in the relationship as well, that it was wearing away, that its end it was in sight. The poem ends ominously:

Outside the window it's starting to snow.

It's going to get colder.

The less full the glass, the truer

the sound. 

This is my song

for the North

coming towards us.

Is the relationship also about to evolve into the invisible? 

Elsewhere, the poems seem to want things to stop, or hold still long enough to be completely experienced, even inventoried. This may be why the poems often look at paintings, where motion is arrested--one poem is about two portraits by Klimt, but more typically the paintings under our eye are by masters of the Italian Renaissance. 

But then the paintings start moving, as in what may be her first great poem, "San Sepolcro," in which we behold "this girl / by Piero / della Francesca, unbuttoning / her blue dress, / her mantle of weather, / to go into // labor." 

     Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
     forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
      is a button 

coming undone, something terribly

     nimble-fingered

finding all the stops. 

Childbirth is, famously, an event that is not stopping or holding still for anyone, and to have that turn into music--the breath and the stops suggest a recorder or flute to me--the art perhaps most enmeshed in time--well, that works for me. Poetry has affinities with painting on the one hand, making things stand still, but affinities with music on the other hand, dits effects occurring through the modality of time.

    

Daniel Kehlmann, _The Director_, trans. Ross Benjamin

 FIRST NOVEL I have ever read by Daniel Kehlmann, but it won't be the last. Brilliant writer. 

The Director depicts the bad luck and worse choices of G. W. Pabst, legendary German film director of the silent era (Pandora's Box, et al.). When the Nazis take power, Pabst takes his wife and young son to Hollywood, figuring he can make the transition á la Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Unfortunately, he gets assigned only mediocre projects over which he has only limited control. Disappointed, he takes wife and son back to Europe, figuring he can do something closer to what he wants to do in Switzerland or France. However, they are in Germany visiting his aging and ailing mother when the war starts, and they can't get out. As soon as the Nazis discover the great Pabst is back in Germany, they swiftly recruit him to make films--the films he wants to make, of course, within reason, but naturally he wants his films to be suitable for the New Germany, doesn't he? Doesn't he? Hmm?

What kind of compromise, how many compromises, are you willing to make to pursue your vocation? In Pabst's case, as imagined by Kehlmann, the answers are "any kind" and "as many as it takes."

Being a film director, Pabst is in a situation more like an architect's than a writer's. A writer could just keep writing whatever he felt called to write, but keep it all in a drawer, waiting for things to change. Making a film, though, like raising a building, requires capital, materials, expensive equipment, and people with highly specialized skills. Anyone with a phone and editing software could make a crude movie now, perhaps, but Pabst had no such options. In the 1940s, you need real resources to make films. And so the Faustian bargain was made, with the usual results.

So, a morally serious novel, and a historical novel that economically and vividly evokes another era, but what really struck me is how versatile Kehlmann is in handling point of view. The chapters often give us Pabst's point of view--most memorably, I'd say, in his interview with a shape-shifting Goebbels who seems able to be in two places at once as well as to say two very different things at the same time. But we also have a chapter in which Pabst's wife has to navigate a Nazi book club, another in which his son has to stay on the right side of his school's Hitler Youth, and a couple (which open and close the book), set in the 1960s or 70s, in which Pabst's cinematographer, succumbing to Alzheimer's, accepts an invitation to appear on a TV talk show and answer questions about his old boss. Kehlmann's ability to click from one character's perspective to another's dazzles.

The chapter that took the cake for me was from the point of view of P. G. Wodehouse (unnamed but easily recognizable), who, in the middle of making his own compromises with the devil, meets Pabst at a film premiere.

Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts_

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.