Frank Hecker

Tonight’s poet is Jorie Graham. Graham is a poet in the tradition of Wallace Stevens: good at abstraction and philosophizing, her poems often run aground when they attempt to deal with specific political and cultural topics.

Here’s an example of Graham at her best, in the beginning of her poem “History” (confusingly, one of two of her poems with that title). A woman on a riverbank watching birds settle into a tree experiences herself as an individual alive in the moment, this moment, as the force of history (“the creature”) sweeps all before it:

    So that I had to look up just now to see them
sinking — black storks —
    sky disappearing as they ease down,
each body like a prey the wings have seized . . .
    something that was a whole story once
unparaphrased by shadow,

    something that was a whole cloth floating in a wide
sky,
    rippling, studded with wingbeats,
something like light grazing in the back of light,

    now getting sucked back down
into the watching eye, flapping, black
    hysterical applause,
claws out now looking for foothold,
    high-pitched shrieks,

then many black lowerings — dozens —
    shadowing the empty limbs, the ground,
tripling the shadowload . . .
    Look up and something’s unwrapping —
Look up and it’s suitors, applause,
    It’s fast-forward into the labyrinth,

    smell of ammonia,
lassitude,
    till finally they’re settling, shadows of shadows, over
                                    the crown, in every
requisite spot.
    Knowledge.
They sit there. Ruffling. The tree is black.
    Should I move? Perhaps they have forgotten me.
Perhaps it is absolutely true this thing in the tree
                                            above me?
Perhaps as they hang on hang on it is the afternoon?
Voice of what. Seems to say what.
    This is newness? This is the messenger? Screeching.
Clucking.

. . .

If you’d like to read more

• Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Jorie Graham.
• Internet Archive:
  • The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, by Jorie Graham. This is Graham’s first “selected poems” collection, and provides a good overview of her early career. “History” is on page 144.
  • From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, by Jorie Graham. This is the second “selected poems” collection from Graham. She’s pretty prolific even into her seventies, and has published three more books of new poems since this was published.
• Bookshop.org:
  • The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, by Jorie Graham.
  • From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, by Jorie Graham.
• Other:
  • Graham has a personal website that links to a lot more material, including interviews, reviews, and other articles about her.