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.