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.