The Dream Behind the Wall of Words

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<div><span style="background-color: transparent;">From the New World: Poems 1976–2014</span><br></div><div>by Jorie Graham</div><div>Ecco, 359 pp., $29.99</div><div><br></div><div>Some writers prompt us to respond in kind, to reply—speaking out loud to the page, or scribbling notes, or, if we are writers ourselves, riding the energy of the words we have read to make our own. Among poets, surely Walt Whitman has always been one of those prompters—for good and ill—to his enthusiasts. Not only is it almost impossible to read Whitman quietly to oneself; as well as declaiming him about the house, or reading him aloud in a group, writers and would-be writers almost always leave a session with Whitman by running to the page or screen or soapbox to spew. And although Whitman’s specifically King James Bible cadences have been taken up by only a few poets, most notably Allen Ginsburg, his covering-the-page tidal-wave poetics set their own broad style for American poetry, a wall-of-words (like pop music’s “wall-of-sound”) mode that has carried forward through such otherwise disparate and magnificent poets as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, A.R. Ammons, and John Ashbery.</div><div><br></div><div>Jorie Graham has been producing her own powerful wall-of-words poems for several decades now. But unlike many of her fellow garrulous poets, Graham does not tend to incite her readers into their own words of response. Rather, her gorgeous, dense poetry more frequently works as a preemptive force, stunning her readers—this reader, anyway—into a deep and interior silence. So for me it is almost a betrayal of the experience of reading Graham to write about the work, a paradox indeed.</div><div><br></div><div>But the interiority she inspires is worth dwelling on: like incantations, her best poems cast spells that enforce rapt readerly attention to the speaker’s interiority, and then in turn call up a shared sense of privacy. Whether Graham is writing about a philosophical/metaphysical problem, as she often is (concerning materiality, or what can be known, or time), or politics (particularly, of late, the fate of the natural world), her childhood, or simply, as so many lyric poets have, describing the items in the local natural landscape—she dramatizes the mind, her mind, in movement over the problem, the memory, the landscape. And that drama—the drama of the mind in motion—is what holds our attention.</div><div><br></div><div>Her new collection, From the New World: Poems 1976–2014, is arranged chronologically. The opening poem is a very early one, “Tennessee June”:</div><div><br></div><div><i>This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything</i></div><div><i>and loves the flaw.</i></div><div><i>Nothing is heavier than its spirit,</i></div><div><i>nothing more landlocked than the body within it.</i></div><div><i>Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns</i></div><div><i>bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine</i></div><div><i>your mind wandering without its logic,</i></div><div><i>your body the sides of a riverbed giving in.</i></div><div><i>In it, no world can survive</i></div><div><br></div><div>[...]</div><div><br></div>

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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
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

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The Dream Behind the Wall of Words