A Child of Whitman

View
Edit

Publication Type: *

Year of Publication: *

(Submitted, In Press or YYYY)

Title: *

Categories

Ranking:

select a ranking of the criticism or article - Only For Interviews or Bibliography Entries

Jorie Graham Titles: *

select one or more Book Titles as pertain to criticism, reviews, videos or audio recordings (hold the Ctrl key while selecting multiple Titles -- SELECT ALL FOR PROSE)

classification: *

select one or more classifications for the entry/submission (hold the Ctrl key while selecting multiple classifications)

Authors: *

Author names must be separated by semicolons

Magazine Title: *

Volume:

Issue:

Edition:

Number:

Date Published:

(mm/yyyy)

Publisher:

Place Published:

Type of Work:

Masters Thesis, PhD Thesis, etc.

Publication Language:

Author Bio:

ISBN Number:

ISSN Number:

Call Number:

Key Words:

Separate key words with a , character

Abstract:

Notes:

URL:

COinS Data:

This will be automatically generated, only edit if you know what you are doing.

Full Text:

Jorie Graham - THE ERRANCY <div>
124pp. Manchester: Carcanet. Paperback, 9.95. 1 85754 3564 
 
Since her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), regard for
Jorie Graham's difficult, infuriating and brilliant poetry has
consistently increased although she shows no signs of ingratiating
herself with her readers or of making any concessions, whether to our
frivolity or to the bluntness of our perceptions compared to hers. 
 
Graham is a poet of high seriousness. The subject of her new volume,
The Errancy, is, to quote the notes at the end of the book, the way in
which "knightly errancy begins with a gaze". The back cover tells us that "error
is the heroic form of finding one's way - a purposeful wandering toward
truth, a pilgrimage in which the heart's longing is guide".
There are a number of references to the Odysseus story in the poems,
and in time the reader begins to see the ambition of this volume.
Graham's subject has always been the aesthetics of vision, a theme
which has gradually deepened into a religious Preoccupation with
seeing. She is a minute observer of nature, but in a poem such as "How the Body Fits on the Cross" she takes observation beyond accuracy: 
"For a while I have been watching the shadow / try to fit itself onto its tree. / The slightest wind makes it throb." In the end, this seemingly simple notation is transformed into an insight about the body's relation to the soul, "the two rates of speed laid down upon each other, / almost right, the fit just-off in spots". 
 
Graham's philosophical intelligence, combined with her sensuousness of
apprehension, can make her poems seem intimidating or at least
daunting. She can hear that "all through the trees and grasses something ticks / at different rates"; she catches exactly how a willow moves, how its limbs are "jerked like a cough"; she can think her way into "my name / flapping in the wind like the first note of my absence"
(why else would we need names, if not for other people to call us when
we're gone?). Graham is an on-line poet, one who creates the
experiences she describes for the reader, not recollected in tranquility, but on the page as you're reading - the experience of
scanning for a radio station, of listening to a river at night, of
being caught in a traffic jam. She is not afraid of the ambition of her
project, nor of sounding pretentious (of which she is sometimes,
wrongly, accused). Her lack of inhibitions enables her to go more
deeply into the nature of perception and its mimesis than other, more
self-conscious poets. Some writers might use this extraordinary acuity
to make themselves appear superior, but Graham is a child of Whitman
and shares his broad gestures of inclusion. She makes it clear that
she's interested in herself only in as much as it helps her to say 
"us": 
 
 </div><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="border: medium none ; margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 40px; padding: 0px;">For you - for us - I know 1 should listen hard, but to penetrate what? -. . . Where are we going, friend? </blockquote><div> 
 
In the service of clarity she can give us clumsy phrases such as "liquid clutches of impermanence", "exfoliation of aural clottings" and "undulations of cooing". But then she describes a night river in full-blast music: 
 </div><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="border: medium none ; margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 40px; padding: 0px;">I can hear its small wrestling-sound, its pasture of shutting and re-shutting pockets, its sideways-sound and long sleek zoneless mildly-enameled inherencies ... but cannot see-... how like a heart I think, imagining that self- insuck. </blockquote><div> 
The control of tone here is exemplary. The point is that the kind of
truth which Graham is trying to convey on the page - the way in which
the world unfolds to our gaze, how we become implicated in its beauties
~ itself resists the easy memorability of pat lyricism. These insights
are elusive, and, once seen - on the highway, in a parking lot,
wherever - difficult to articulate. 
 
What we receive in these poems is nothing less than the way the world
lends itself to our senses and at the same time resists them. Graham's
attention doesn't stop at conventional beauty. Sitting in gridlock, she
notices her "strangely distant lap"; the whole experience of being
caught in a crossroads is made into a religious meditation which
reaches its climax as a plastic bag is lifted on an updraft, </div><blockquote class="webkit-indent-blockquote" style="border: medium none ; margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 40px; padding: 0px;">"now
gathering shine, now quarrying the emptiness for furling laws and, up,
up, wielding utter particularity in this pregnant bagfulness, and so on". </blockquote><div>
 
The erotic is another name for Graham's attentiveness, and some of the
best poems in this book explore a kind of metaphysics of lust. In
"Studies in Secrecy", two lovers look for secrets in each other's hair,
ears, necks, eyes. In "The Strangers", Graham wonders whether her hand
exists as she makes love, the kind of skewed existential perception
that, even if we can register it, most of us can't hold on to, let
alone write about. We should be grateful to Jorie Graham for her own
heroics of perception, even if they show up our ordinary sight. If we
can't see, with Graham, "the spots where the birds must eventually land", at least we know now where we should be looking.</div>

You may enter a full text or HTML version of the publication here.

Input format

Filtered HTML

Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Allowed HTML tags: <a> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Full HTML - With WYSIWYG

More information about formatting options

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
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 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)

Jorie Graham

Navigation

A Child of Whitman