Jorie Graham.

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The Poetry of Jorie Graham
by Joan Zimmerman

Contents:
Books by Jorie Graham:

• Dream of the Unified Field,.
• The End of Beauty.
• The Errancy.
• Materialism.
• Never.
• Overlord.
• Region of Unlikeness.
• Swarm (8th book).

Dream of the Unified Field by Jorie Graham.

1995 retrospective.

The End of Beauty (1987) by Jorie Graham.

In this book, Helen Vendler writes, Jorie Graham makes a "definitive break with short-lined lyrics" and "to write a poetry of middleness, of suspension, is Graham's chief intellectual and emotional preoccupation in The End of Beauty. ... she defers closure in many poems by a series of ever-approaching asymptotic gestures, each one of them numbered, and each advancing the plot by a micro-measure ... [like] the cinematic freeze-frame ... her numerically interrupted frames say 'Look at yourself for a frozen moment; write it down. Gaze again; write it down. and now glance a third time; and write it down.' The alternations of consciousness as the pen succeeds the gaze are not concealed; rather they are inscribed on the page, number by succeeding number."

The Errancy by Jorie Graham.

Materialism (1993) by Jorie Graham.

This is the last book reviewed in Helen Vendler on Jorie Graham.

Vendler says that here Graham "combines the long line with its apparently ultimate narrative partner, the long sentence. Since the long horizontal line of extension in space toward the horizon is itself already formally effortful, it becomes even more especially taxing when it is joined to the long sentence (the conventional equivalent of temporal and conceptual complexity)."

"In order to maintain itself, this long-lined and outrider long sentence depends on several grammatical techniques of prolongation - present participles, appositions, relative clauses both adjectival and adverbial, parenthetical insertions, a colon, additive conjunctions like 'and,' negations, comparisons ('as if'), contemporalities ('also'), successivities ('then' and 'just before'), repetitions ('now ... now'), qualifications, and nominal simultaneities ('these walls these streets the light the shadow in them / the throat of the thing')."

Never by Jorie Graham.

I spent one WHOLE day reading Never. It is 'about' time - one of the subjects that interests me very deeply. While reading her poems I focused on (and in fact made note of) her words that relate to time. (Obviously all verbs are 'about' time on one level, so I excluded those.) With that concern of finding words, I had to read her very poems attentively.

That attention, like a meditation, stopped my mind from detouring into some of the usual distractions of a Jorie Graham poem, and avoided asking:

• why is she indenting in this varied way, like E.E. Cummings sitting on mice?
• another pair of parentheses? and now why the square brackets. (It seems, though, that parentheses are actually just the footprints of her own distracted mind.)
• why are we obsessing on colons in these line? I think the colons are intended to slow down the reader. I assume they are experiments rather than philosophies, as they occur in a few clumps in some poems.

She usually has something in the real world in each poem, to balance her mental gymnastics, and I specially liked her most coherent poems which are in section 2, whose material is about the ocean.

Overlord by Jorie Graham.

Region of Unlikeness (1991) by Jorie Graham.

Vendler sees this book as continuing the use of the long line as in The End of Beauty, but dropping "the open numbered space, which had represented being-in-pause". Also "the gaze turns to single autobiographical self-portrait (which replaces mythical dual self-portrait), and the plot of narrative replaces bundled quanta of perception."

Swarm by Jorie Graham.

• I could not make sense of Swarm and had to postpone reading it.

• I found the comparisons insightful in Lolita Lark's review of Swarm (at http://www.ralphmag.org/AA/jorie-graham.html). See her original for details:
  1. 'Jorie Graham, the critics tell us, can be compared to T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and e. e. cummings.' 'But when I read ... " East Coker," [quotation] I don't hear a sound, an echo, a trace of Jorie Graham.'
  2. 'the august Richard Eder in the august New York Times said hers was a "remarkable voice." He compared her to Rilke.' Well, the first of The Duino Elegies starts out [quotation] Graham? I don't hear her there, either, not a whisper.'
  3. 'on every page of this, her newest booklet, we find end-stopped lines ... also find a heap of five-dollar words, like "empyreal," "stasis," "spezzato," and "enjambment." And the volume is jam-packed with all your hoary classical references --- Agamemnon, Eurydice, Socrates, Lear, and Ulysses.'
  4. 'there are words and phrases that some of us innocents can't make head nor tail of: "the swag of clay," "nerves wearing only moonlight/whelm sprawl," "The furrow of the hard now."'
  5. 'What Eliot and Rilke have, flowing from their fingertips, is an art of poetry and a poetry of soul. [Eliot's] "The whole earth as a hospital" is a daunting image. [Rilke's] "Every angel is terrifying" is a wonderful twist of a holy image. But [Graham's] "a boat stills in a harbor and for a while no one appears" is not so much an image as a flat tire (... she repeats it twice in her title poem ...).'
  6. 'They tell us that she teaches at Harvard. ... If it is English, or Creative Writing, god help the future teachers and writers of America.'

• Sharon Cournoyer (Department of English and American, Literature and Language, Harvard University) in a letter retrieved Wednesday, September 21, 2005 4:36 P.M. from http://www.ralphmag.org/AQ/letters.html, defended Jorie Graham but not Swarm. Cournoyer failed to give any specific quotations from or discussion of the poems themselves in Swarm. Thus Cournoyer failed to provide the interested reader (me) a way into Swarm. The wording of Cournoyer's emotional attack on Lolita Lark's review is a religious proclamation, not the counter review I hoped for. Cournoyer characterized Lark and her views as:
  1. 'contemptuous'
  2. 'puerile, off-the-cuff'
  3. 'more interested in her own cleverness and ability to dash off a few zingers than in forming a thoughtful, careful, and mature opinion of the poetry'
  4. 'the worst form of literary sycophancy: paying more attention to what's said about a work than to what the work itself says'
  5. 'unprepared to find value beyond the familiar and canonical'
  6. 'encounter[ing] her [Jorie Graham] with ... fear and loathing'
  7. 'judge[s] ... pedagogical skill while still possessed of an abysmal lack of information about it'
  8. 'quite unnecessarily, invoked divine aid' for '[some] new American writers'.

  and characterized Jorie Graham as:

  1. 'one of the most interesting --- and innovative --- poets writing today'
  2. deserving that 'those of us who are truly invested in the growth and vitality of poetry encounter her with gratitude and respect'
  3. 'an even better professor of poetry than she is a poet.'

• Suspect (but am amused by) Jason Bredle's Amazon review, which claims "This is a superb poetic adaptation of Irwin Allen's 70's super-thriller 'The Swarm'. ... Later disaster books, most notably Paul Andresen's Deadly Swarm, tried to replicate the brilliance of the original with CGI effects, but poetry audiences just weren't fooled... See also: Never, based upon Mosquito, by Gary Jones. In it, Graham magnificently adapts the tale of a group of mosquitoes who feast upon the corpses of space aliens and subsequently terrorize every camper and sex-crazed teen they meet."

Helen Vendler on Jorie Graham: The Breaking of Style.

Vendler studies Graham's work at the level of the line: "Historically, the line has been the characteristic unit distinguishing poetry from prose; it is the most sensitive barometer of the breath-units in which poetry is voiced."

"Jorie Graham began as a writer of short poems in short lines... And then, with a burst of almost tidal energy, Graham began to publish long poems in long lines, poems that pressed toward an excess nearly uncontained by the page."

Graham's short-line poetic form "above all represents deliberation. ... Step by step, accreting perceptions ... [This] represents ... a faith in the power of the patient mind. ... that it is the poet's duty to take the symbolic through the beautiful into the true is not in doubt."

"The long line, therefore, is first generated by Graham as the formal equivalent of morality, dissolution, and unmeaning."

In The End of Beauty, "The long line, therefore, is first generated by Graham as the formal equivalent of morality, dissolution, and unmeaning."

Time and again, Vendler qualifies her statements with small adverbs (often the tiny 'almost' or 'nearly'), as if she wants to claim not only a statement but also its opposite, e.g. writing of Graham's short lines when she began writing poetry: "one's heart, reproducing these poems, almost found a new way to beat." Vendler is saying that she thought hers did, but then found it didn't. As a further hint to reading Vendler, ignore such statements: don't worry about her feebleness; don't waste time speculating what Vendler really thinks (and is shy of claiming); what matters is what you think, so simply use her book as a tool for your own opinions.

See also our blog of "Jorie Graham: The Moment of Excess" in The Breaking of Style by Helen Vendler. Her book is a set of three essays analyzing the changes in the work of three poets, the changes being on a scale of decades (Hopkins), days (Heaney), and instances (Graham).

Arbitrary Elements of the Bio of Jorie Graham.

• Born in NYC in 1950, according to The Best American Poetry: 1990, which she edited. Thus she was not born in Rome (as some texts say) nor in 1951 (as other texts say).
• Father (Bill Pepper) was head of the Newsweek Rome bureau.
• Mother, Beverly, was a sculptor.
• Studied film at New York University.
• Raised in Italy and attended a French school in Rome.
• Fluent in French, Italian and English.
• Attended the Sorbonne and New York University and the University of Iowa.
• Helen Vendler discovers and begins promoting Graham's poetry.
• 1982: first book, Hybrid of Plants and of Ghosts.
• Became professor of English at the University of Iowa.
• 1990: Editor (with Series Editor David Lehman) of The Best American Poetry: 1990, a remarkable collection.
• 1996: Pulitzer Poetry Prize for The Dream of the Unified Field (poems from 1974 to 1994).
• 1996: Awarded a MacArthur 'genius' grant.
• 1997: named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
• Became Harvard University Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (following Seamus Heaney). [Her admirer Helen Vendler is at Harvard.]