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?
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