Jorie Graham
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Jorie Graham Titles:
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From The New World
To 2040
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
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Two Days
Deprisa
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fast (IT)
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Our World (CN)
Prześwity
Runaway
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Selected Poems
Shënime nga realiteti i vetes
The Taken-Down God
To 2040 (UK)
[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)
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<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 1.2px; font: 18.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px"><b>Like a Chafing of the Visible*</b></span></p> <p style="margin: 15.4px 0.0px 0.0px 1.2px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">BY CALVIN BEDIENT</span></p> <p style="margin: 15.4px 0.0px 0.0px 1.2px; text-indent: 16.5px; font: 14.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px"><b>Soul Thinks</b></span></p> <p style="margin: 12.5px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.7px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">Soul—according to "Soul Says," the afterword of Jorie Graham's </span>fourth book, <i>Region of Unlikeness</i>—doesn't want to be "held by brittle-<span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">ness, shapeliness. / By meaning." But neither is it happily enmeshed "in hunger, in boredom, the spindrift, the ticket" (a grammatical trashing of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.1px">logic, of order). Not even with the sweet intrigue of</span></p> <p style="margin: 14.1px 0.0px 0.0px 72.0px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.1px">The flash of <i>a voice. </i>The river <i>glints.</i></span></p> <p style="margin: 1.5px 0.0px 0.0px 72.0px; font: 12.0px Georgia">The mother opens <i>the tablecloth up into the wind</i></p> <p style="margin: 13.2px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia">—not even if you throw in the likes of these.</p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">"A form of matter," Soul is the form that wants to matter, and the matter that wants form. But form is empty of meaning. Meaning is Being-</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">in-indivision. "I must uphold—faultless—each outline—up—," says her guardian angel of point of view in <i>The Errancy, </i>"each sloughing-off of </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">meaning / into form." Yet, in a way, Soul belongs (inexactly) where it can never belong (exactly), here where it is idiomized but out of key, inappro</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">priate, curious, driven, harried, irked, unappeased, tired, oh so tired, and </span>absurd. Soul is logically impossible, as Being is impassable.</p> <p style="margin: 5.1px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p> <p style="margin: 5.1px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">What can Soul do? At its most heroic, go somewhat shamefaced </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">to meet its fate:</span></p> <p style="margin: 12.7px 0.0px 0.0px 72.0px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">Now then, I said, I go to meet that which I like to <br> (even though the wave break and drown me in laughter)<br> the wave breaking, the wave drowning me in laughter—</span></p> <p style="margin: 12.9px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">(Compare the opening of the new poem, "Studies in Secrecy": "The secret </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">we don't know we're trying to find, the thing ««-/seen,/ is it ironic?") Or perhaps it is most heroic when it thinks about its dilemma—thinks and thinks and thinks—whatever the inevitable errancy. This is its role in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.1px">Graham's new book.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">The great virtue of "Soul Says" is that it thinks profoundly in </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">compression; it doesn't <i>think out </i>all its folds like an obsessed person trying </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">to smooth out completely a savagely crumpled sheet of paper. Yet there is drama, depth, weight, and philosophical nobility in such thought-investigation. <i>The Errancy </i>is replete with these qualities—an extraordinarily rich and grand achievement.</span></p> <p style="margin: 23.5px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-indent: 17.2px; font: 14.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px"><b>The Skin of Days</b></span></p> <p style="margin: 12.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px"><i>The Errancy </i>carries to a logical extreme (perhaps; leave it to this poet to try and go further) the project of Graham's two preceding volumes, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px"><i>Region of Unlikeness </i>and <i>Materialism: </i>that of defleshing story until it's </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">nearly all thought. The beauty of the earlier book <i>The End of Beauty </i>was that it thought by means of myth, in mythic flesh, even as it thought myth </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">through, brilliantly. <i>Of course, </i>it whispered throughout, <i>the story pan is already a form of soul-thought, archetypal. </i>Even so, it tolerated narra</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.1px">tive—that which Graham has more and more sought to reduce to a </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">detached skin, in the image of her brutal parable "Chaos": "Here is the skin of days in the one hand of God, drooping, the face running like ink in rain."</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.2px">By now, in Graham's work, "the storyline" is a slur-motif. </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">That—fakery! That paltriness! Soul distrusts—dislikes—all such petty patchwork coherences. It wants, what it will never achieve, the articulation of an inarticulable totality.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.5px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.5px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.4px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 17.2px; line-height: 12.9px; font: 12.0px Georgia"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1px">*Review of Jorie Graham, <i>The Errancy: Poems </i>(N.Y.: The Ecco Press, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.6px">1997)</span></p>
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