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.