In Jorie Graham’s Poetry, the End of Days and the Pleasures of the Flow

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<div class="css-vp77d3 epjyd6m0"><div class="css-1baulvz"><h1 id="link-161e5efd" class="css-19x4nmc e1h9rw200" itemprop="headline" data-test-id="headline">In Jorie Graham’s Poetry, the End of Days and the Pleasures of the Flow</h1><p class="css-1nuro5j e1jsehar1" itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">By <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/jeff-gordinier" class="css-brehiz e1jsehar0"><span class="css-1baulvz last-byline" itemprop="name">Jeff Gordinier</span></a><time class="css-129k401 e16638kd0" datetime="2020-09-14T11:46:36-04:00"><br>Sept. 14, 2020</time><strong class="css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10"><br></strong></p><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0"><strong class="css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10">RUNAWAY </strong><strong class="css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10"><br>New Poems</strong><br>By Jorie Graham</p></div></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">Let’s
 try an experiment. Let’s imagine that you have never heard of Jorie 
Graham. You have never encountered a line of her verse.</p><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">If
 you’re a steady consumer of poetry, that’s going to be difficult. Now 
70, Graham has claimed a berth in the American literary establishment 
for four decades. She is an empress of credentials, an avatar of 
all-the-right-moves: grew up trilingual (speaking primarily Italian and 
French into her late teens), was asked to leave the Sorbonne amid the 
student protests of 1968, got an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
 has taught for years at Harvard. “Writing about Jorie Graham at this 
point, seven books after she won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Dream of 
the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994,’ means joining a cacophony 
of voices,” Craig Morgan Teicher once wrote in this newspaper. And that 
was five years ago.</p><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">But let’s try 
anyway. Let’s say that someone has waved a neuralyzer (one of those 
memory-wiping wands from “Men in Black”) in front of your eyes, and you 
are picking up her new collection, “Runaway,” in a state of newborn 
cluelessness. You flip to the first poem, called “All,” and it starts to
 carry you away. Graham kicks off the book with a downpour, or its 
immediate aftermath. (Has Noah’s ark found land?) And she describes the 
sound of a drenched landscape with a vigilance that suggests she could 
lead a workshop on the art of panoramic listening:</p><blockquote class="css-q0oznx etf134l0"><p class="css-1y149mt evys1bk0"><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">… After the rain stops you hear the</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">washed world, the as-if-inquisitive garden, the as-if-perfect beginning again</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">of the buds forced open …</em></p></blockquote><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">She
 knows how to get your attention. As you move through the book, 
subsequent poems like “I’m Reading Your Mind” and “Rail” dare you not to
 get pulled into their riptides. From its opening page until its final 
lines, Graham’s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a
 young writer’s debut. True to its title, it hurtles forward. Poems pour
 forth, frothing and pooling and threatening, at times, to overflow 
their banks.</p></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"></aside></div><div class="css-79elbk" data-testid="photoviewer-wrapper"><div data-testid="photoviewer-children" class="css-16ycw34 ehw59r12" height="607.933349609375px" width="480px"><div data-testid="photoviewer-overlay" class="css-tux0zj ehw59r13"><div width="480px" height="607.933349609375px" class="css-1nq9n8e ehw59r14"><div style="visibility: hidden; transition: visibility 0s ease 0.5s;"><div class="css-8h527k"><div class="css-1xdhyk6 erfvjey0"><source media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 3),(max-width: 599px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 3),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 3dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 288dpi)"><source media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(max-width: 599px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 2dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 192dpi)"><source media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1),(max-width: 599px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 1dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 96dpi)"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0"></span><source media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 3),(max-width: 599px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 3),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 3dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 288dpi)"><source media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(max-width: 599px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 2dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 192dpi)"><source media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1),(max-width: 599px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 1dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 96dpi)"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><section name="articleBody" itemprop="articleBody" class="meteredContent css-1r7ky0e"><div class="css-79elbk" data-testid="photoviewer-wrapper"><div data-testid="photoviewer-children" class="css-1a48zt4 ehw59r15"><figure class="css-18sc81u e1g7ppur0" aria-label="media" role="group" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/14/books/14Gordinier2/14Gordinier2-articleLarge.jpg?quality=90&amp;auto=webp" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject"><figcaption class="css-1l44abu ewdxa0s0"></figcaption></figure></div></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">In
 this way “Runaway” extends the oracular alarm of Graham’s more recent 
books, such as “Sea Change” and “Fast,” in which the signs of impending 
global doom — climate change, species collapse, acidifying oceans, 
stupefying information overload, cataclysmic storms and fires — have 
catalyzed her urge to speak up and chronicle what we have before it is 
gone. Like Deborah Landau’s “Soft Targets,” <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/books/review/danez-smith-homie-victoria-chang-obit.html" title="">Victoria Chang’s “Obit”</a> and <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/books/review/this-blue-by-maureen-n-mclane.html" title="">Maureen N. McLane’s “This Blue”</a>
 (to cite three examples from the past decade), “Runaway” taps into a 
free-floating end-of-the-worldness (is there a German word for that?) 
that so many of us feel even if we can’t express it.</p></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"></aside></div><div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">Graham
 abandoned the tidy compression of her early work — if you’re a fan, you
 might think of poems like “An Artichoke for Montesquieu” or “San 
Sepolcro” — a long time ago. Her latter-day poems arrive instead like 
effusions, Whitmanic gusts of words, as if she’s channeling a sort of 
emergency scripture. “Runaway” feels as though it has been written for 
right now, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, 
but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on. You 
imagine someone in the future flipping through it, finding a record of a
 great unraveling, and spending hours trying to decipher it. In the poem
 “I’m Reading Your Mind,” Graham appears to anticipate engaging with 
such a reader:</p><blockquote class="css-q0oznx etf134l0"><p class="css-1y149mt evys1bk0"><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">here again I put the olive trees in …</em></p></blockquote><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">Deciphering
 it won’t be a cakewalk for that future pupil. The suggestion that 
Graham can be willfully cryptic is not a new one. (One voice from that 
aforementioned cacophony, David Orr, referred in The Times to “the 
fogginess that has been a chronic problem in her work” back in 2005.) 
Another way of saying it might be that she chooses to err on the side of
 Team Beauty instead of Team Coherence.</p><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">But
 if you really are new to Jorie Graham’s body of work, you could read 
her poems, as you might read Nathaniel Mackey’s or John Ashbery’s, less 
for a quick <em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">click</em> of understanding
 than for the pleasures of the flow. Snippets of her lyrics can stop you
 in your tracks. Look anywhere: “Stillness in time. Rich concentrate.” 
“Honeysuckle, / bramble, vine, / vibration / and / web-tremble.” “Take 
this October. The deep white turn the air is taking. / How many more / 
Octobers. Is there another October with us in it. / Blood flows in my 
hand writing this.” “The phone call comes. You pick up the / receiver 
and hear the / final sounds of the islands. They are murmuring we want 
to / weep and lie down.” And “on the screen / in the screen / you die. 
Are / dying. It’s taking / time.”</p><p class="css-158dogj evys1bk0">Over
 the years, in poems such as “The Surface,” Graham has written 
skillfully about rivers. Her body of work, too, can be experienced like a
 river, a current that passes through patches of stillness and 
turbulence and winds up being all the more mesmerizing because of its 
constant movement. “Runaway” reminds us that Graham is aware of where 
that current is heading — for her and for all of us. If the book begins 
with a wet roar, it ends with a dry whisper, when Graham’s narrator — 
“accidentally / listening” — picks up a signal from the home that 
humanity seems determined to leave in ruins. This last poem in the book 
is simply called “Poem,” and here the churn of Graham’s language settles
 into a benediction that couldn’t be clearer:</p><blockquote class="css-q0oznx etf134l0"><p class="css-1y149mt evys1bk0"><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">I</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">hear it every-</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">where. The earth</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">said remember</em></p></blockquote><blockquote class="css-q0oznx etf134l0"><p class="css-1y149mt evys1bk0"><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">me. I am the</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">earth it said. Re-</em><br><em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">member me.</em></p></blockquote></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"><div id="c-col-editors-picks" class="css-j64t31"><br></div></aside></div></section><div class="bottom-of-article"><div class="css-1yif149"><p><strong>RUNAWAY</strong> <br>New Poems<br>By Jorie Graham <br>83 pp. Ecco. $26.99.</p></div></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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In Jorie Graham’s Poetry, the End of Days and the Pleasures of the Flow