Harvard Review Online published a somewhat mangled version of this review.
Reviewed by William
Doreski
Jorie Graham has long
been among our most conspicuously architectonic poets. Her formal experiments and
innovations sometimes suggest the architectural playfulness of Culver City’s
Hayden Tract or Boston University’s new Center for Computing & Data Sciences,
which looks like a stack of misaligned stanzas. However, To 2040, her
latest collection, moderates this tilt toward concrete and visual poetry. Some poems are right justified, which forces
the eye to work against the grain, but most others are written in short-lined
quatrains, a particularly reader-friendly format that she has used before,
especially in her earliest books.
The insistence of this
collection is not aesthetic so much as it is thematic. Graham faces the coming
environmental apocalypse, an expression of her own mortality, and freeze-frames
its many clues and symptoms. The disruption of right-justification intensifies
the sense of crisis:
Everything
hangs in the balance, say the looping vines
the late red light begins articulating. Think about it, they
scrawl,
try to remember
what it was you loved, tried to clean up your memories
in time.
(“In Reality”)
The quatrain poems,
however, ease the reader by allowing the eye to move normally from line to line.
But they present other challenges. Like all of the poems in this book they
address a second person with whom the reader might choose to identify. But
identification is not enough. One of the central problems of 2040 is the
construction of a self of sufficient perception and cognition to deal with the
threat (or promise) of personal and species extinction. The search itself is
threatening, as it mirror-reverses and internalizes perception so that it and cognition
become indistinguishable:
Where
is my body to
guide me
I
think. I
tap at
the
prisoner in
there,
is that the
schoolroom,
the
blank in
the lesson,
is that
my soul
gradually
by its ten
thousand
adjustments
to its
own in-
creasing
absence opening
too far.
Is it blind. I
tap my
face which is
gone on
the glass which is
not
gone. Don’t stop
I hear
my mind hiss,
don’t
stop for
anything.
(“I”)
As the title of this poem reminds
us, I is someone else, as Rimbaud famously noted. But I is also the self being
constructed on the page before us. And it is an invitation to reconstruct our
own sense of personhood to face and redeem ourselves from the grammatical
notion of “I” to enter a difficult process of reorientation. I have previously
argued that Graham’s poetry tends to be more narrative than lyric. However,
that is less true of this book, which is primarily lyric in its stance and
tactics. Lyric poetry typically explores disjunctions: between self and another
(love poetry); between self and nature (nature poetry); between self and the
perceptible world (philosophical poetry); between self and the ineffable
(religious poetry). Graham adds another disjunction: between the part of the
mind that perceives nature and the part of the mind that is nature. At the same
time, she juxtaposes her sense of her own mortality with the coming planet-wide
extinction. This is complex territory, and Graham uses complex and subtle
rhetorical devices to engage it.
Yet in her summary closing poem
she invokes rain as the inclusive metaphor, a healing and critique. Here rain
is not just a renewal but the embodiment of creation. The speaker (and someone
else) first mistake it for wind. But they realize it is richer and more inclusive
than wind, a source of memory and cosmic reach.
as if the air
turned green,
as if the air
were the deep in-
side of the
earth
we can never
reach
where it
reaches out to
those constellations
we have not
discovered, not
named, & now
never will,
and which are
not dead, no—
And it brought
memory.
(“Then the Rain”)
Then she steps out into the
weather and sits on a wall and allows herself to be absorbed or sculpted by it.
The rain, a process more than an event, assures her she isn’t dying, although
much of this book suggest otherwise. The poem and the book conclude with the
rain, wind, earth, seeds and everything else urging her to “touch it all, /
start with your face, // put your face in us.” This play on “put your faith in
us,” as a lesser poet might put it, leaps the disjunction between self and
nature by asserting the sheer physicality of our bond. We are creatures, not
abstractions. In reading Graham’s earlier work I thought she sometimes treated
the self as an abstraction, as Wallace Stevens and other philosophically
inclined poets often do. But this collection comes down firmly on the
physicality of our being. Its urgency is infectious.
