Jorie Graham's P L A C E

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Jorie Graham's PLACE Weston Cutter On
one level, this is simply a note that a significant book’s
been released: Jorie Graham’s <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780062190642-0">Place</a>,
which I’ll contend is her best book in a decade. The easy
charge against <a href="../../">Graham’s</a> work is that it
strikes some readers too arch or intellectual or studied or
crafted: if one comes to Graham’s work after having spent
time reading a good chunk of other contemporary poets (the bulk of
whom are writing in Block-O-Poem form), it’s hard not to feel
radically adrift—her work’s hugely more messed- and
fussed-with, almost sort of Rube-Goldbergian: lines stretch away
and contract and break off. She’s quite simply doing more,
engaging more, with structure than 99.9% of poets presently
working. If you read Graham and feel her, the structural
tinkering and finickiness ultimately resonates doubly,
quadruply—her layout decisions will seem shockingly smart,
twitchily incredible, generous to the reader (because of how much
it’ll feel like she’s thinking of the poem, of how to
make it deliver in as many ways as possible). If you don’t
feel her, her moves will likely leave you thinking she’s just
trying to play her intelligence across various levels, like
she’s showing off.
Writer friends of mine have said they can get through
Graham’s first two books—Hybrids of Plants and
Ghosts and Erosion—but thereafter they lose the
thread. My own belief is that Graham’s crowning masterwork
has, so far, been Never, her book from ’02, but the
caveat is that the full glory of Never becomes most clear
once a reader’s read the rest of Graham’s work, in
order—start with Hybrids, do Erosion and
End of Beauty and Region and all that, up through
Swarm (her strangest, most murky work) and then hit
Never. Here’s why <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780060084721-2">Never</a>
is, for my money, among the most beautiful books of poetry of the
last half century: Graham’s very first poem in her very first
book is titled “<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-way-things-work/">The Way
Things Work</a>” and is a brief lyric considering just what
the title says. Right before the poem’s end, however,
Graham’s narrator says “I believe in you— / your
head is the horizon to / my hand. I blieve / forever in the
hooks.” It may as well be a statement of purpose on
Graham’s part, a line that’ll echo over and through all
her work: she’s writing ultimately for connection,
and not just the abstract, we’re-all-human connection, but a
specific one between writer and reader—there’s a
contract she’s looking to enact. If you like Graham, the
feeling of her poety is seismic for the ways in which she tries so
hard to get you to feel and understand, in all complexity,
the issues she’s tackling (without getting too bogged in this
stuff: each of the books can, in ways, be understood as focusing
specifically on central issues—art, masculinity and feminity,
history). In Never, Graham’s focus is hard to make
pithily clear: her attention’s ultimately on the unravelling
and disconnect between physical and spiritual (that’s almost
comically an understatement), and she’s writing in that book
with as much second-person reach and charge as she ever has.
It’s a phenomenally powerful book, one which asks a good deal
but gives infinitely.
Okay, so now: since Never, Graham’s released
Overlord and Sea Change and, now, Place.
Here’s where things get a bit dicier: I believe
Place is a beautiful and interesting book, if not, in my
own estimation, as powerful and complete a book as
Never was (nor, even, as complete a book as Sea
Change was, in its way). That said: Place is
Graham’s best book since 2002, and maybe the most tender,
fragile book she’s done.
Something to consider: <a href="../../interview_grubisic">Graham’s
never gone as long without a book as she now has—a three year
silence elapsed between the arrival of Sea Change and the
poems that make up Place</a>. Where in other, older books,
a reader could quickly find some route into the larger issues
Graham was exploring, in Place the reader is, through the
very first poem, introduced not to some obvious larger theme
(environmental ruin, experiencing art or history, etc.) but is
instead invited into a specific place and time for the purposes of
being there exactly. If you’ve read Graham you’re
already bucking: she’s always inviting the reader into a
specific place and time—and that’s true,
certainly, but the difference is that in Place the being
there together, with an awareness of the precision of experience
despite/within/through the chaos of life, is enough (to fracture
and mess with some Stevens).
Perhaps this is a misread, but I’d invite any reader to
attempt “Lapse,” the first of the book’s trio of
final poems, and not be sort of stunned by several aspects, not
least of which is that there seems more autobiography in
Place than in any of Graham’s previous books.
“Lapse” of course has the requisite beauty and
insistent questioning that marks all of Graham’s work, but
the big, generous ah-hah moment Graham so often provides
is not, in this poem, the result of a brilliant mind grafting
larger philosophic ideas onto experience (as, for instance, she
does in Reguin of Unlikeness‘s
“Fission,” in which the speaker’s innocence is
burned away simultaneously by watching Kubrik’s
Lolita and hearing about JFK’s assassination, or in
Never‘s “High Tide,” in which the
speaker’s experience of a homeless woman is transformed in a
goosebumpy way—just read that poem, it’s crazy how good
it is). Okay, so, with all that: in “Lapse,” Graham
writes of pushing her daughter on a swing in 1983 in Iowa City, and
that:
&nbsp;
I was not yet so tired of believing—
I was still in the very beginning of being human,
the thing no one can tell another—he didn’t find
what he searched for, she didn’t understand what she
desired—
&nbsp;
These lines by themselves go some ways in articulating what
“Lapse” is trying to address: how do we find ways to
believe through the exhaustion that trying to believe induces? How
do we live with the fact that our searches fail and that
understanding and desire are thwarted? Ultimately what the poem is
dealing with and addressing is the moment of the speaker’s
daughter’s self-awareness coming online—a realization
of being there, of being alive. It sounds simple, but
it’s anything but; most of Stevens’s stuff, in fact,
danced similarly. What makes Place so interesting great is
the fact that Graham’s said, <a href="../../interview_grubisic">in an
interview</a>, that with each book she’s trying to work her
way into more moral territory. In that push, Graham’s seeming
to, with Place, let go of larger drums to beat and flags
to wave, and is offering more personal poems, ones in which the
enacted dramas are still high-stakes, as Graham always makes them,
but also deeply personal. You’re unlikely to find as
refreshing and emotionally intelligent book of poetry anytime soon;
get reading.

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From The New World
Rompiente
il Posto
P L A C E
P L A C E (UK)
Sea Change
Overlord
Never
Swarm
The Errancy
The Dream of the Unified Field
Materialism
Region of Unlikeness
The End of Beauty
Erosion
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
The Earth Took of Earth
The Best American Poetry 1990
To A Friend Going Blind
All Things
Lines/Lignes, Réflexions/Reflections
Two Days
Deprisa
fast
fast (IT)
fast (UK)
New Poems
Our World (CN)
Prześwity
Runaway
Runaway (UK)
Selected Poems
Shënime nga realiteti i vetes
The Taken-Down God
[To] The Last [Be] Human
[To] The Last [Be] Human (UK)
The Lives of the Poems: Twelve Drawings on Canvas
Photographs & Poems
In the Pasture
The Turning
La Errancia
L'angelo custode della piccola utopia
Region der Unähnlichkeit
Zwischen den Zeilen
Sea Change (UK)
Overlord (UK)
Never (UK)
Swarm (UK)
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems (UK)
The Errancy (UK)
FRAZA (PL)

Jorie Graham

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Jorie Graham's P L A C E