~EDWARD BYRNE~
JORIE GRAHAM: NEVER
Graham perceives the
landscape with
a sense of immediacy
and urgency, and she promotes an interactive involvement
with the environment through encounters in which the poet's
structural technique and sensuous language reveal an individual
in the act of contemplating the beauty or the disfigurement
of the world she discovers around her.
In her ninth collection of poems, Never,
Jorie Graham offers poetry that appears to again position her among
such
varied and ambitious voices of the American landscape and philosophy as
Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, and John
Ashbery, just to mention a handful. As in Graham's previous
books,
the works included in Never challenge readers to re-examine
their
approach to evaluating poetic presentation and invite readers to
re-experience
some of the more common subject matter found in American poetry.
This collection particularly suggests new
ways of viewing and understanding today's natural world: Graham
perceives
the landscape with a sense of immediacy and urgency, and she promotes
an
interactive involvement with the environment through encounters in
which
the poet's structural technique and sensuous language reveal an
individual
in the act of contemplating the beauty or the disfigurement of the
world
she discovers around her. In this manner, she also constructs
an 
ongoing
commentary, both to describe her emotional reactions and to convey an
intellectual
understanding. These deliberately detailed, though sometimes
difficult,
meditations manage to praise the classic power and magnificence of
nature
while also warning about the dangers of diminishment or perceived
possibilities
of desecration sometimes evident in contemporary social or political
conditions.
Like the smoothly layered brush strokes of
those nineteenth-century Luminist painters whose meditative portraits
of
nature evoked emotions in viewers — such as the sense of awe implied by
the colorful cast of illumination across a rugged landscape or the
serene
mood suggested by the slanting light of a sunset over a craggy
shoreline — by carefully placing precise details in vast vistas on the
canvas, Graham's
lines of poetry, often extending from one margin to the other or even
wrapping
at the end of the lines, cover the page with images that elicit a
complex
reaction of emotional and intellectual responses from her
readers.
Graham's magnificent images often seek to
unite the earth and sky, to merge elements with one another, or blur
the
distinctions separating the physical from the abstract, as in
"Afterwards":
"... the river is melting the young sun. / And translucence itself,
bare,
bony, feeding and growing on the manifest, / frets in the small puddles
of snowmelt sidewalks and frozen lawns hold up full of sky." In
this
poem Graham also displays a desire to combine the visual and the
lyrical:
"... attention can no longer change the outcome of the gaze, / the ear
too is finally sated, starlings starting up ladders of chatter."
Indeed, the seamless lyrical surface that continually blends the senses
— sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste — demonstrates one of the great
strengths of Graham's poetry.
In this way, Graham facilitates an entrance
into the images, asking readers to reflect and contemplate upon what
they
observe in order to recognize the depths that lie beneath the surface:
"Shouldn't depth come to sight and let it in, in the end, as the form /
the farewell takes: representation: dead men: / lean forward and look
in:
the raggedness of where the openings / are: precision of the limbs
upthrusting
down to hell...." Helen Vendler has spoken of similar
ever-present
characteristics in Graham's previous collections of poetry. In
her
book of criticism, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics,
Vendler writes how "Graham's subject is the depth to which the human
gaze
can penetrate, the opening in reality into which the poet can
enter.
Under the clothed, she seeks out the naked; over the soil, the air;
inside
the integument, a kernel; through the cover of the grass, the snake;
from
the bowels of the earth, the interred saint."
In "Prayer," the opening poem of the
collection,
which begins with a situation reminiscent of Walt Whitman's "Crossing
Brooklyn
Ferry," the speaker stands at a dock railing observing an immense
school
of minnows: "... the minnows swirl / themselves, each a miniscule
muscle,
but also, without the / way to create current, making of their
unison
(turning, re-infolding, / entering and exiting their own unison in
unison)
making of themselves a / visual current...." In this poem — as
occurs
repeatedly in many of Graham's other works where the poet addresses
examples
of transition, transformation, or even stagnation, as well as
conditions
after undergoing the effects of change — the speaker declares: "...
this
is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets / what
they want. Never again are you the same. The longing / is
to
be pure. What you get is to be changed." In "Afterwards,"
Graham
concludes: "We left the party without a word. / we did not
change,
but time changed us."
Walt Whitman's words from Leaves of Grass
are again brought to mind by Graham in "Philosopher's Stone," where she
reports: "Footsteps bent the grass a bit / to get us here." In
this
poem, the Romantic elements of nature and memory are employed.
Memory's
mental images exist like pictures that still time; yet, unlike
photographs,
they still continue to be influenced and adjusted by time: "there's
ongoingness — / no — there's an underneath. Over it we lay / time
— actually
more like takes and re-takes by / the mind (eyes closed) then clickings
of / its opening-out and the mind fills / with gazes...."
In a strong poem titled "Gulls" Graham's
speaker
has the ability to express herself in words literally taken away by an
element of nature when she tells how "The wind swallows my
words."
Nevertheless, in many ways, Never is a collection that, maybe
more
than any other by Jorie Graham, solidifies the critical view of her as
a contemporary poet devoted to following those principles and
philosophies
established in the Romantic tradition, especially the tendency to
regard
nature as a source of inspiration and model for poetic
expression.
In a poem titled "In / Silence" Graham's speaker confides: "How for
song
/ I looked long and hard at a singing bird, small as my hand, inches
from
me, seeming / to puff out and hold something within." In many
instances
Graham's poetry almost treats natural elements not only as influences
on
the speaker, but as literal parts of speech that mirror the formation
of
words or sentences in her own poetry. In a lovely poem whose
title,
"Evolution," directly indicates conditions of change, Graham writes
about
the
whole retreating
ocean laying
microscopic
and also slightly larger fiercely-lit
kelp in streaks
of action—
long sentences
with branchlike off-widths indicating
acceleration brought forth
and left-off,
phrases of gigantic backing-off
from a previously
held
shore,
rivulets of sand left visible in raised inscription
whitening where
moistened....
Elsewhere in the same poem (there
is another
poem titled "Evolution," just as there are a couple called "Prayer"),
Graham
examines "where the broad / nouns of large clamshells / flayed open by
gulls lie / in punctuating sunlit stillness...." Finally, at the
close of the poem, the speaker asks, "What good is my silence for, what
would it hold / inside, keeping it free?" The response she offers
the reader again fuses elements of landscape and language, nature and
poetry:
Sing
says the
folding water on stiller water—
one running
through where the other's breaking. Sing me
something (the
sound of the low wave-breaking)
(the tuning-down
where it deposits life-matter on
the uphill of
shore)(also the multiplicity
of deepenings
and coverings where whiteness rises as a
manyness)
(as the wave
breaks over its own breaking)
(to rip in
unison)(onto
its backslide)—
of something
sing, and singing, disagree.
Similarly, Graham begins "Dusk
Shore Prayer"
with the following lines: "The creeping revelation of shoreline.
/
The under-shadowed paisleys scripting wave-edge down-slope / on the
barest
inclination, sun making of each milelong wave-retreat / a golden
translucent
forward downgrading, / golden sentences writ on clearest moving
waters....."
The images of nature — their sounds and textures, as well as visual
beauty — are transformed into poetic segments of language. In
turn, Graham's
lush and lyrical lines seem patterned like music, the long and looping
lines often moving with the rhythm of jazz. However, the dominant
impression is again that of a painter filling the canvas with striking
shapes of objects depicted in vivid pigments. A section titled
"(Palm Beach, Todo Santos)" from a poem, "The Time Being," that closes
part two of the book, presents an excellent example of Graham's lyrical
and visual poetic
skills:
The
whole of
the unfolding like a skin
coming-off.
Sand striated everywhere by tide-action
packed hard
onto it in tiny color variations and
speckling and
runs of diamond-pattern where tide
has
receded.
Monkfish with their porcupine-quilled
tapering backs,
all head and side-eyes and quickly
left by the
tides. At tide-line, with each
lapping, shrimp
left at the greenish fanning wave
edge.
Retreat and
more retreat. Tiretracks
recriss-crossing
the marbled sandskin. Footprints,
birdprints,
feathers, broken glass. The fishermen
in the distance
on the rocks casting out.
At times in her poetry one receives the
impression
that Jorie Graham's work contains a constant pursuit of the impossible,
an attempt to preserve the Romantic idea that memory and imagination
provide
keys to comprehending the world in which we find ourselves, that same
world
which now so often seems intent on rejecting such a notion.
Clearly,
the Keats epigraph at the beginning of the book establishes a tone that
is continued throughout the collection. Keats responds to his
first
view of the Lake District scenery with amazement and questions: "How
can
I believe in that? Surely it cannot be?" The initial lines
of "Covenant" address the conflict between such a welcoming attitude of
emotional wonder or mystery one might find in the Romantic sense of
Keats,
who proposed the term "negative capability" as a way to describe
emotional
and intellectual curiosity that does not need to reach after fact and
reason
to attain fulfillment, and the current desire for practical
explanations
or rational answers for everything:
This
is an age
in which imagination
is no longer
all-powerful. Where if you had
to write the
whole thing down, you could.
(Imagine: to
see the whole thing written down).
Everything but
memory abolished.
All the
necessary
explanations provided.
A very round
place: everyone is doing it.
Perhaps the contrast between a
Romantic philosophy,
that relies on memory, imagination, mystery, and ambiguity, and the
realistic
conditions of an impatient society that prefers to believe an
immediately
transparent and certain explanation can solve all problems supplies
some
of the tension and suspense evident in much of Jorie Graham's
poetry.
In addition, Graham's concern with the concept of time, especially the
unstoppable passage of time, compares favorably with the explorations
of
time, timelessness, and no-time one finds not only in the poems of
British
Romantics such as Keats or Wordsworth, but also in some of the best
works
of that handful of American poets mentioned earlier: Whitman, Eliot,
Stevens,
Warren, and Ashbery.
In "The Time Being" Graham guides the reader
with a metaphor for observing a few various characteristics of time:
"drifts
of / miniscule dune-structures building like sound-waves / then
lowering
in sun in fast-moving clouds: making / for the time being, the time
being:...."
Near the end of the same poem, Graham comments:
...
The time
presses.
The sense of
one's person
numbs as in
having been too long in too
strong a
wind.
The idea won't
hold as I push
it out. Then it will. Then it
is held [not
by me]. Then it is all gone.
Near the closing of "Covenant"
Jorie Graham
proposes the following (though with a little less excitement and
confidence
one might find in Emily Dickinson, another American precursor to
Graham):
"Silence is welcomed without enthusiasm. / Listening standing now
like one who removed his hat out of respect for the passage. / What
comes
in the aftermath they tell us is richly satisfying."
Perhaps partly because a number of the poems
in this book were originally written upon commission by various
organizations — the Environmental Protection Agency, the National
Millennium Survey Project,
and the New York Times Magazine — and specifically designed to
focus
on the themes of time and endangerment to the environment, the works
contained
in Never present a directed sense of unity in purpose, often as
spiritual as they are philosophical in their meditations on
nature.
Despite the complicated and sometimes seemingly chaotic appearance of
the
lines within each poem, especially those that rely heavily on complex
syntactical
sentence structures or unusual punctuation used to imitate simultaneous
actions or observations, a comforting connecting thread exists
throughout
this volume.
Conscious of the historical significance of
time at the end of the twentieth century, and arriving at an increasing
awareness of personal mortality, Jorie Graham's poetry in Never
examines with a sense of urgency one woman's concern for the past
century's
natural and unnatural causes for erosion of the environment, as well as
the present threats to a landscape she believes must be preserved and
protected
before it is too late, and she peers forward toward the elevated level
of danger she perceives the world faces ahead. (As she remarks at
the end of "Prayer": "I cannot of course come back. Not to this.
Never. / It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: Never.")
In this elegant collection of poems, Jorie
Graham expresses one poet's advanced approach to her art form at the
beginning
of the twenty-first century. In addition, she exhibits an
accomplished,
innovative poetic process that began with her first book of poems, Hybrids
of Plants and of Ghosts, in 1980 and has evolved gradually, but
dramatically
into a mature, distinctive style through a number of stages readers
have
had the pleasure to witness over the course of nine books and nearly
twenty-five
years.
Graham, Jorie. Never.
New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. ISBN:
0-06-008472-3
$13.95
© by Edward Byrne
