Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Sea Change_ (1)

THE FAMOUS PHRASE from Ariel's song "Full fathom five" in The Tempest tells us that a "sea change" is a transformation "into something rich and strange," as in the line Eliot lifted for The Waste Land, "Those are pearls that were his eyes." (We are talking about Shakespeare's Ariel here, by the way, not Disney's, though both get memorable songs.)

As a title for a poetry collection, "sea change" throws down a gauntlet; it seems to declare, "expect radical departures, new forms, startling transformations."

I wouldn't say Sea Change provides any of those things. 

It does differ from preceding collections in a few ways. It's the first to be dedicated to Peter Sacks, whom Graham married in 2000. It's the first not to include a "Notes" section at the end, identifying sources of quotations, so it is up to you to spot that the poem "Full Fathom," like Sea Change, derives its title from Ariel's song. It's the shortest Graham collection yet at 56 pages, although that may be due in part to none-too-large font size.  It includes no longer poems, everything coming in at two or three pages. She relies heavily on the ampersand. But nothing in all that compares to an eye becoming a pearl.

Maybe the change here is not a departure from, but a doubling-down on the Grahamian. Nothing is more Grahamian than the lineation device that every poem here deploys: a long line flush left, followed by one-to-six shorter lines indented two inches ("outrider" lines, I think Helen Vendler called them). A sample from "Just Before":

coral, sponge, cocoon--this is what entered the pool of stopped thought--a chain suspended in

                                                         the air of which

                                                         one link

                                                        for just an instant

                                                        turned to thought, then time, then heavy time, then

                                                        suddenly

air--a link of air!--& there was no standing army anywhere,

                                                        & the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all

                                                        the cities of

                                                        what was then just

                                                        planet earth

were lifted out of their sleeping [....].

Graham had been using this strategy since The End of Beauty, so it is not at all new for her, but using it for a whole book, as she does in Sea Change... that is new. Likewise, the very long sentences were a long-established characteristic of his poetry, but they dominate here.

Sea Change does often raise ecological concerns, a deepening concern for Graham (as for all of us) in the years ahead, but these are not new for her, either, as such concerns also appear in Swarm and Never.

So I am wondering, why this title for this book? And I am also wondering whether Graham was familiar with the work of J. H. Prynne, who was using the "outrider lines" device in the late 1960s. I bet she was.