TOP12-DES11
This Old Poem #12:
Jorie Graham’s Of The Ever-Changing Agitation In The
Air
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 7/29/02
1 would be
hard-pressed to find a more stereotypical example of current PC Elitist Academia
than poetessaster (poet-disaster?) Jorie Graham. She’s white, she’s female, she’s
middle-aged, she has no real writing talent, yet her poetry is the sine
qua non of the workshop poem- it does not offend nor inspire, it just
sort of lays there. Her poems generally deal with little things- she’ll take
on personae, flutter about in wind. Is she a terrible poet? No. Is she a good
poet? Not even remotely. She is a total lightweight. A feather that cannot land
on any –ism’s earth. Yet the New Yorker magazine- a few
years back- called her ‘the closest thing American poetry has to a rock
star.’ Why? No one really knows. Does she get the usual sizable crowds
that a published poet gets? Yes. But nowhere near the response a Maya Angelou
gets, or an Allen Ginsberg got. Neither her poetry nor personality lend
themselves to something bordering on the electric.
A few years
back a book of her poems came out- it was called The Errancy. Naturally,
the cover had a painting on it, 1 by Rene Magritte- Pascal’s Coat. This
is a tiresome ploy whereby the lightweight poet tries to siphon off some of the
‘magic’- real or presumed- of the painter. Yet her writing is almost
uniformly of the generic workshop variety. Here is an example of the type of
poem which has won her drooling raves as an ‘observer of nature’:
For a while I have
been watching the shadow
try to fit itself
onto its tree.
The slightest wind
makes it throb.
[from
How the Body Fits on the Cross]
Does this
enlighten you? Is this some incredibly musical concatenation of words? No.
It’s fairly rote description of something the speaker presumes. In fact,
it’s almost totally generic- I have seen slight variations of this idea done
many a time by many a poet- often much better. Yet critics have gushed all over
JG, & awarded her all sorts of prizes, up to a Pulitzer!, describing
her with terms that have little bearing on her person or writing. She is a difficult
poet, expresses her vision with great seriousness, she is a sensual
poet, she has a great acuity, is loaded with philosophical
intelligence, & can be a frustrating & infuriating
poet. Keep terms in mind when I dissect her poem. These, & similar
meaningless phrases, with no bearing on her work, litter the criticism of her,
& are repeated ad nauseum by critics who shamelessly crib off
of each other, & many who have never bothered to read more than a poem or 3
from each book they review. It’s like a music critic judging an album by the 2
or 3 most played hits. & do not believe, for a second, that this is not a
widespread practice. Here’s a typically myopic & PC snippet of a review of JG’s The
Errancy by British poet Gwyneth Lewis:
In
the service of clarity she can give us clumsy phrases such as "liquid
clutches of impermanence", "exfoliation
of aural clottings" and "undulations
of cooing". But then she describes a night river in full-blast
music:
I can hear its small wrestling-sound,
its pasture of shutting and re-shutting pockets,
its sideways-sound and long sleek zoneless
mildly-enameled
inherencies ... but cannot see-...
how like a heart I think, imagining that self-
insuck.
The
control of tone here is exemplary. The point is that the kind of truth which
Graham is trying to convey on the page - the way in which the world unfolds to
our gaze, how we become implicated in its beauties ~ itself resists the easy
memorability of pat lyricism. These insights are elusive, and, once seen - on
the highway, in a parking lot, wherever - difficult to articulate….
Poets are not tame. The good ones are writers who push, and probe, and
say “Look! See what’s in front of your eyes.” Those poets don’t try to
make things pure and pretty. They want us to see what is.
The man held his hands to his heart as
he danced.
He slacked and swirled.
The doorways of the little city
blurred. Something
leaked out,
kindling the doorframes up,
making each entranceway
less true.
And darkness gathered
although it does not fall . . . And the little dance,
swinging this human all down the alleyway,
nervous little theme pushing itself along,
braiding, rehearsing,
constantly incomplete so turning and tacking --
oh what is there to finish? -- his robes made
rustic by the reddish swirl,
which grows darker towards the end of the
avenue of course,
one hand on his chest,
one flung out to the side as he dances,
taps, sings,
on his scuttling toes, now humming a little,
now closing his eyes as he twirls, growing smaller,
why does the sun rise? remember me always
dear for I will
return --
liberty spooring in the evening air,
into which the lilacs open, the skirts uplift,
liberty and the blood-eye careening gently over
the giant earth,
and the cat in the doorway who does not
mistake the world,
eyeing the spots where the birds must
eventually land –
