Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (2)

IN PLACES, THE book’s anxiety that some last opportunity to avert a slow-motion disaster has been missed takes on a generational aspect. Born in 1950, Graham is a boomer, part of a generation that came of age both in the U.S.A. and in Europe with a sense of mission, an aspiration to enlighten and transform the world. As an undergraduate, Graham took part in one of the more spectacular attempts to realize that vision, the student uprisings of Paris in May 1968. Recalling les évènements later in “The Hiding Place,” a poem in Region of Unlikeness (1991), Graham depicted a state of confusion, even the leaders having scarcely an idea of what was happening or what might be achieved; a similar cloud of worthy but futile intentions hovers in “Demonstration” in Killing Spree. “I took off my glasses / & pocketed them” the poem begins, a sensible precaution as the speaker approaches the crowd.

[…] The others

were all already

there. There was

 

chanting, there were orders, the instructions were

loud.     (10)

The year may be 1968, or we may be at a No Kings rally. Whenever this event is happening, the speaker hopes it will be unifying and effective, will “become a river of selves, of dis- / appearing selves, us all / stepping again now into the self-erasing / crowd […]” (11). The chanting intensifies: “it sounds just like / answers but what was / the question” (13). It turns out no one knows, exactly. 

[…] I think one sd

it’s a game, it’s a theory, but 

just then everything

 

you’ve read about  

for all these years

began. Right then. As if it were planned. As if we were

expected. It has not ceased since.      (13)

Whatever the demonstration was aimed at, the Fifth Republic or Donald Trump, was ready and waiting and was not about to abdicate, no matter how intense the chanting. The poem ends:

If you can hear me there,

if this reaches you,

forgive us,

we did not know who we were.

Whether the setting is 1968 or 2025, we hear a generation saying to its children, its grandchildren, and its great-grandchildren: we intuited something was wrong, we tried to do something, but we failed. In “Who,” Graham writes, “that power that / ferocity we had / to reach out—reach out-- / something was done to that” (6).