Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Overlord_ (2)

OVERLORD BEARS A title of more referential precision than Graham collections tend to have. "Never," "erosion," and "swarm" are words that one might use in quite a few circumstances, and even "materialism," while not an everyday word, could pop up in many contexts. "Overlord" has nothing everyday about it, being the title of a job that in its original sense no longer exists (e.g., "feudal overlord") and these days tends to be applied ironically or metaphorically (e.g., "Elon Musk is the overlord of X"). 

But "Overlord" was also the name of the enormous World War II operation in which the Allies landed in Nazi-held France to open a second front. Quite a few poems in Overlord refer to this event, especially the series of poems titled "Spoken from the Hedgerows."

So what might this mean?

The 2005 author bio notes that Graham “divides her time between western France and Cambridge, Massachusetts […].”  If “western France” in effect means Normandy, then perhaps spending weeks or months in the place where D-Day occurred inspired an interest in the event. Then, too, the poems bearing dates pinpoint composition during 2003 and 2004, when the Iraq war was particularly intense. Being in a place where the United States was once engaged in an arguably legitimate war while it is engaged in an arguably illegitimate one may be part of the mix.

The “lord” in “overlord” tips a few theological dominoes, too, though, and Graham seems always interested in such questions, as she does in the six poems titled “Prayer” in Overlord and several other passages.

Operation Overlord involved highly centralized and hierarchical planning and decision-making. The aim was to anticipate every single contingency and to coordinate the whole effort, down to the smallest detail, to a single overarching goal. Things did not completely conform to expectation, of course—that is what the “Spoken from the Hedgerows” poems emphasize—but the operation nonetheless calls to mind a certain theological conception natural to monotheistic religions, in which God has foreseen the whole infinitely intricate unfolding of creation and everything, literally everything, is part of the design, providence in the fall of a sparrow, all part of the plan…that sort of thing.

We can connect this conception to a vein in High Modernism—the lingering idea that there was a pattern to things, a controlling center, a master design. Yeats and his gyres, for instance, or Pound and paideuma, or Eliot’s wish to be in a society like Dante’s in which every art and every science was subordinated within a Christian cosmos, or Wyndham Lewis’s fable about the caliph’s design. 

Graham, I think, feels the attraction of this idea, but is also (and quite rightly) wary of it.

More on this later.