Re-reading Jorie Graham: _Runaway_ (2)

 SOME FORMAL DEVELOPMENTS are going on in Runaway. The right-margin-justification form that Graham used for “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me,” the final poem in Fast, is used again in several poems, some of which seem crucial to the architecture of the book: “[To] the Last [Be] Human,” “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” “Scarcely There.”

It occurred to me that this form would be tricky if one were writing a first draft by hand, as you have to guess how much space the line’s letters would need before you started writing it. In a word-processing program, however, nothing tricky at all, just hit a couple of buttons. Does this mean Graham composes directly into a word-processing program? I suppose a lot of poets do these days.

The poems with classically Grahamian long lines tend to be arranged in quatrains, giving them a seeming regularity that turns out to be only superficial, because within those very stately-looking four-line arrangements we have that old Grahamian cataract going wherever it wants to go.

The new departure is what I am going to call the “rivulet” poem, with (for Graham) startlingly short lines, one, two, three words long, dropping vertically straight down the page. There are just four “rivulets,” but they include the title poem, “Runaway,” and the collection’s last three poems, inclining one to think that Graham has come up with something new that she is keen to explore. And explore it she did in To 2040.

Besides "Runaway," the rivulet poems are "In the Nest ®," "The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem." 

"In the Nest®" is in the dystopian vein that widened in To 2040, the "Nest" being a collective name for some of Google's "smart products." Amid the anxiety over surveillance are some poignant lines addressed to "Mother": "Mother. See us. / Mother it's / a strange new // winter here."

"The Wake off the Ferry" and "Poem" combine Graham's penchant for longer sentences with the drops-like-a-plumb-line verticality of the "rivulet" poems, and the combination...definitely...does something. Damned if I can say what. But the rhythm feels very different, somehow, more headlong, more we-are-getting-somewhere-before-we-are-ready-to-be-there. Something urgent, insistent. The poem is about a couple on a ferryboat, looking at its wake, and addresses the problem that we are always already not the persons we think of ourselves as being. Short but packs a punch.

"Poem" could be a key note for eco-Graham: "The earth said / remember me."

"Runaway" deserves  to be the title poem. The long sentences in very short lines creates that urgency again, that feeling that like Alice we are not keeping up with ourselves, combined here with the crisis of our own technology rapidly consuming our substance and likely to consume a lot more of it before we get around to applying the brakes. 

Runaway makes a terrific introduction to To 2040. Or To 2040 makes a terrific sequel to Runaway. Take your pick.