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: