STUDIES IN MAJOR
LITERARY AUTHORS
Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English
Wellesley College
A Roudedge Series
STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS
WILLIAM E. CAIN, General Editor
THE CARVER CHRONOTOPE
Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver's Fiction
G. P. Lainsbury
THIS COMPOSITE VOICE
The Role of W. B. Yeats in James Merrill's Poetry
Mark Bauer
ELIZABETH STODDARD AND THE BOUNDARIES OF BOURGEOIS CULTURE
Lynn Mahoney
AMERICAN FLANEUR
The Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe
James V. Werner
CONRAD'S NARRATIVES OF DIFFERENCE
Not Exactly Tales for Boys
Elizabeth Schneider
JAMES JOYCE AND THE PERVERSE IDEAL
David Cotter
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM
Jill Muller
GEORGE ORWELL, DOUBLENESS, AND THE VALUE OF DECENCY
Anthony Stewart
PROGRESS AND IDENTITY IN THE PLAYS OF W. B. YEATS
Barbara A. Seuss
FREDERICK DOUGLASS'S CURIOUS AUDIENCES
Ethos in the Age of the Consumable Subject
Terry Baxter
ARTIST-FIGURE, SOCIETY, AND SEXUALITY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S NOVELS
Ann Ronchetti
THE
T. S. ELIOT'S CIVILIZED SAVAGE
Religious Eroticism and Poetics
Laurie J. MacDiarmid
WORLDING FORSTER
The Passage from Pastoral
Smart Christie
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND THE ENDS O REALISM
Paul Abeln
WHITMAN'S ECSTATIC UNION
Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass
Michael Sowder
READY TO TRAMPLE ON ALL HUMAN LAW
Financial Capitalism in the Fiction of Charle Dickens
Paul A. Jarvie
PYNCHON AND HISTORY
Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon
Shawn Smith
A SINGING CONTEST
Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamu Heaney
Meg Tyler
EDITH WHARTON AS SPATIAL ACTIVIST AND ANALYST
Reneé Somers
QUEER IMPRESSIONS
Henry James's Art of Fiction
Elaine Pigeon
“NO IMAGE THERE AND THE GAZE REMAINS”
The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham
Catherine Sona Karagueuzian
“NO IMAGE THERE AND
THE GAZE REMAINS”
The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham
Catherine Sona Karagueuzian
Excerpts from Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, by Jorie Graham, Copyright © 1980 by Princeton University Press, and Erosion, by
Jorie Graham, Copyright © 1983 by Princeton University Press reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Specified excerpts totaling 169 lines from The End of Beauty, copyright © 1987 by Jorie Graham; specified excerpts totaling 201
lines from Region of Unlikeness, copyright © 1991 by Jorie Graham; specified excerpts totaling 192 lines from Materialism,
copyright © 1993 by Jorie Graham; specified excerpts totaling 194 Iines from The Errancy, copyright © 1997 by Jorie Graham;
specified excerpts totaling 135 lines from Swarm, copyright © 1999 by Jorle Graham; and specified excerpts totaling 225 lines
from Never, copyright © 2002 by Jorie Graham, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Published in 2005 by
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
270 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
2 Park Square
Milton Park, Abingdon
Oxon OX14 4RN
© 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
International Standard Book Number-0-415-97532-8 (Hardcover)
International Standard Book Number-978-0-415-97532-2 (Hardcover)
No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
and the Routledge Web site at
http://www.routledge-ny.com
For my mother
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Jorie Graham as Twenty-First Century Modernist
Chapter Two
The Impact of the Poet's Eye upon the World and the Word:
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion
Chapter Three
Self-Portrait and Autobiographical Vision:
The End of Beauty and Region of Unlikeness
Chapter Four
The Impenetrable World and the Poet's Frustrated Vision:
Materialism and The Errancy
Chapter Five
Linguistic Economy, Abstemiousness, and the Return to the Natural World: Swarm and Never
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many who have assisted me in various ways with the inception and completion of this
project. Thank you to Stephen Yenser, who encouraged, taught, and supported me since my first year
in the graduate program at UCLA; his careful and patient reading of multiple drafts and his thoughtful
questions have improved my work at every stage.
I am in debt to my friends, whose support made the hard work bearable and worthwhile. I am
immensely grateful to Michal Lemberger, whose love of poetry and friendship inspired me throughout
graduate school and who helped convince me of the strength of this project. Her commentary and
interest improved and broadened the scope of my work. I am equally grateful to my friend La'Tonya
R. Miles, who has never tired of reminding me that a fulfilling family life, laughter, and television
viewing are all compatible with scholarship. As I wrote, I was also inspired and diverted by Professor
Erin E. Clune, whose wit and love brightened my work days and helped me see light at the end of the
tunnel.
I must thank my family members, who always believed in my ability to complete this project
despite the fits and starts by which it proceeded. Finishing this project would have been much more
difficult without the help and rallying cries of my father, Dikran Karagueuzian, driver of the
bibliobus, procurer of books, and champion of libraries everywhere: his companionship in the last
stage of my writing made it pleasurable. Thank you also to my brother, Professor Dikran B.
Karagueuzian, who gave me the simple yet invaluable advice that dissertations are completed by those
who buckle down and do the work. Thank you to my husband, Mark Gibbons, who has lovingly
supported me through the inevitable crises of confidence of graduate school and writing. His love puts
everything else in perspective and truly made my completion of the project possible.
Chapter One
Jorie Graham as Twenty-First Century Modernist
Pulitzer Prize-winning, contemporary American poet Jorie Graham has been lauded as “one of our
most important living poets,” as “one of the best, and most intelligent, poets in the language,” the nonscholarly journal Current Biography reports, quoting from reviews of her books (199). Certainly,
Graham's recent work also has detractors, among them William Logan, who reviewed Swarm (2000).
Responding to the disjunctive, fragmentary nature of that book's poems, which reveal little
engagement with the visible world and even less in the way of visual imagery, Logan dismissively
charges that the poems are “reduced to those poetry magnets people stick on fridges” (969). Similarly,
Sven Birkerts, reviewing Graham's most recent collection, Never (2002), which both carries on
Swarm's project of the fragmentation of the line and the destabilization of the subject yet also renews
Graham's longstanding interest in the visible, notes with finality and dismay that “the disappearance
of the perceived thing or the felt experience into the inconclusive enactments of process points to a
dead end in Graham's art” (10). The breadth, ambition, and remarkable evolution of Graham's work
have nonetheless established her importance; and her career reflects that prominence. A recent issue
of Harvard Magazine, for instance, notes her “numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship
and a Pulitzer Prize”; the article also cites her more recent, 1998 appointment to “what may be the
most prestigious academic chair in American letters, Harvard's Boylston professorship of rhetoric and
oratory” (2).
The revisionist nature of Graham's work—each book seems an attempt to rework the questions
and preoccupations of the preceding book—compels consideration of her entire body of work, now
nine books of original poetry. Also inviting critical analysis is her characteristic, long-standing
interest in visuality—that is, in what is available to the poet or subject through sight; what the impact
of her looking is; how that might best be conveyed in poetry; and most important, how the pressure of
having to look and being looked at, in turn, impacts the subjects sense of self. Despite critics' general
and passing notice of Graham's concern with visuality and the visible, to date there has been no
sustained critical exploration of this aspect of her work.1 The weighty questions about visuality in
particular and metaphysics in general that Graham raises in her poetry and, no less important, the fact
that she maintains an unusual degree of faith that poetry may help answer those questions classify her
work, despite its very contemporary form, as an extension and expansion of an earlier twentieth
century poetical project, that of Modernism. It is in this respect that a book-length treatment of
Graham's work with visuality is not only warranted, but crucial.
Though autobiography is scant in her poems, Graham's background helps to explain both her
attachment to tradition—she identifies as her influences such canonical predecessors as Eliot and
Stevens—and the experimental, formal inventiveness of her most recent work. Not surprisingly and
most obviously, the cultural associations of Graham's poetry are often European, in keeping with her
upbringing. Though she has chosen to live and work in the United States, writing poems in English,
Graham's native language is Italian. In 1969, at age nineteen, when she came to study film at NYU,
Graham spoke, as she reveals in a 1996 interview, only “broken English” (Cahill 18). Her parents,
Beverly and Curtis Bill Pepper, American expatriates of diverse backgrounds, met in Europe and
chose to raise their two children there; Graham spent her childhood in Italy and received her
secondary education in France. Graham's mother is Jewish, from Brooklyn, while her father is Irish
Catholic, from Virginia. Both professionally and personally, the artistic and intellectual interests of
her parents resonate throughout Graham's body of work.
Beverly Pepper, a painter and an internationally known sculptor, is described in the notes to her
permanent exhibition in the DeCordova Museum Sculpture Garden in Lincoln, Massachusetts as “one
of the most important outdoor sculptors of the late twentieth century”; a review of her work in The
New York Times compares her sculpture to that of Brancusi and Giacometti (Riding). Discussing
Pepper's significance and originality, critic Barbara Rose asserts that the “achievement” of the artist's
large body of work is “based on a lifelong dedication to developing and expanding her own personal
esthetic, an immense curiosity about the various forms and styles of world art, and an understanding
of the underlying universal principles common to all authentic expression of the spiritual content of
culture.” The engagement of Pepper's sculpture with the natural world also links her body of work to
that of her daughter. Pepper is known as an outdoor sculptor and has even collaborated with Graham
on a few recent projects. Pepper crafted, for instance, the monolithic stone structures that decorate the
courtyard of the Environmental Protection Agency building in Sacramento, California; Graham was
responsible for the images and text on the surface of the sculptures. Pepper's comments about the
project reveal an interest that mirrors her daughter's long-standing preoccupation with the visible,
natural world as well as, more recently, the environmental and ecological concerns evident in
Graham's most recent book, Never (2002), in which some of the poetry from the EPA project appears.
Pepper discusses the significance of the project on the EPA website, asserting that
… the protection and stewardship responsibilities of the EPA are sacred responsibilities. What is more important than
ensuring for our children and children's children a world of natural beauty and diversity, clean air and water, and a world
that can be lived in with pleasure and trust? The monolithic sculpture and configuration of the sculpture would invoke the
figure of the sentinel as a monument to the sacred duty of protecting nature (California Environmental Protection Agency).
The influence of her mother's vision is clear in Graham's poetry. Both the time she spent in
childhood in her mother's studio and her European schooling are evident in Graham's work:
thematically, in her primary interest in the visual; practically, in her extensive knowledge of European
art; and, what is most significant, ideologically, in her optimistic conviction about the import of art.
Graham credits her childhood in Italy with instilling in her a recognition of art's importance as the
locus of both religious and secular meaning. As she tells it in interviews, her youth was spent playing
hide-and-seek in the churches of Trastevere, the neighborhood in Rome where she grew up. In an
interview with Stephen Schiff, she explains, “[T]here I was, hiding and watching people and seeing
that something was hidden in them. And I think that was the beginning of poetry for me. I think I
ended up finding in poetry a middle ground between the secular and the sacred” (64). Identifying the
cultural and moral relevance of the church and of religious art, she explained in an 1996 interview
with Timothy Cahill that her mother impressed upon her that “the stories on the walls of the church
are news …, crucial news that continues to be news” (18).
Her father's career as a freelance television and film writer must have both provided a
counterpoint to and bolstered this early exposure to the visual arts. Indeed, Curtis Bill Pepper's
personal interest in theology may even have fostered what would become Graham's characteristic
poetic concern with philosophical and metaphysical questions. According to the poet, her father's
profession shaped her values. Graham herself attributes her conviction “that news was not only
important, it was mortal and critical” to her father's career as a newsman—Pepper was a war
correspondent, the head of Newsweek's Rome bureau (Current Biography Yearbook 201). It is just as
likely, however, that Curtis Bill Pepper's knowledge of art, in addition, of course, to his wife's, helped
prompt his daughter's own enduring interest in the visual arts: among the books Pepper has written is
An Artist and the Pope, published in 1968, “the story of the friendship” between Giacomo Manzú, the
twentieth century sculptor, a Communist, and Pope John XXIII (5). The book explores their unlikely
relationship in the context of Manzú's political convictions and his secular art and the Pope's piety and
theological preoccupations.
In the biographical information Graham has given interviewers, then, her childhood emerges as
neatly balanced between what the vocations of her parents taught her to value: a profile accompanying
a 1996 interview explains that Graham spent her childhood “in the border country between the
realities of journalism and the verities of art” (Cahill 18). Undoubtedly, though, Graham's
sophisticated childhood brought her close not only to contemporary and classical art but also to
influential and famous people. The 1968 Life magazine Editor's Note accompanying an excerpt from
her father's book, published when Graham was about seventeen years old, glamorizes the Peppers'
lifestyle. In the Note, Bill Pepper is quoted on his romantic, cinematic first meeting with Beverly in a
hotel lobby—they were married just a few months later—and, more generally, the note indicates the
cosmopolitan nature of the household in which Jorie Graham was raised:
“The Peppers are famous hosts and the house is a mecca for artists and writers and jetsetters and Italian nobility,” cables
Life's Eileen Hughes. “Nobody who is anybody comes to Rome without seeing the Peppers” (5).
Graham's family connections no doubt led to her first significant job. As a teenager, she did
research for filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni on the film “Zabriskie Point”; eager to cultivate her
interest in film, in 1969 she came to New York to begin a film program at NYU. That she originally
took a visual approach to her artistic study is not surprising, given the emphasis on the visual so
evident in her poetry, and, yet for Graham, film lacked the moral scope that she would eventually
come to find in the study and writing of poetry. In an interview, Graham explained why she chose
poetry over film: “Film wasn't giving me a context large enough to understand how I was supposed to
live my life. I was turning at night to [poetry] and finding a complexity and ambiguity in which easy
decisions were not possible. It was much more satisfying” (Cahill 19).
Complexity and ambiguity are rife indeed in the poetry that Graham reads and admires. The title
poem of the anthology Graham edited in 1996, Earth Took of Earth: One Hundred Great Poems of the
English Language, is a deceptively simple, anonymous work, pre-1400, the subject of which is
mortality and, implicitly, the cyclic nature of human life and the emphemerality of such a human
production as the poem itself. The poems rhyme scheme and repetition underscore the Sisyphean
nature of the human effort to overcome the constraints of mortality; and ultimately, while the poet's
craft—for instance, the structure of the poem—may be read as a challenge to the earth's dominion, the
finality of the poem's repetition undermines the strength of that challenge.
Earth took of earth with ill;
Earth other earth gave earth with a will.
Earth laid earth in the earth stock-still:
Then earth in earth had of earth its fill (Earth Took of Earth 3).
Graham's choice of the title poem for the anthology thus underscores the clear thematic concern of
this book—one that its editor reveals, elsewhere, in her own poems—with metaphysical and
epistemological questions. Graham is in earnest, it seems, about her expectations of literature, as she
has identified them in describing her own work, to address responsibly “final questions: metaphysical,
intellectual, emotional questions. Spiritual questions” (Lambert).
Critical examination of her poetry, as well as her comments about it, only heightens the
impression that Graham's editing of this anthology reveals those poets who have most influenced her
work—those she reads and whose work displays commonality with her own. The poets included in
Earth Took of Earth inspire and appear in her work to such a degree, in fact, that it is not possible to
explore here all of the connections Graham's poetry makes to the work of these poets, who are as
diverse as Thomas Traherne and John Berryman. A few, easily appreciable examples of the echoes of
these poets in Graham's work will establish the breadth of the list of what she refers to as her
“indispensable” poems (Earth Took of Earth xvii). In Graham's “Of Forced Sightes and Trusty
Ferefulness,” from her 1987 book The End of Beauty, for instance, she quotes from and is inspired by
Wyatt's “My Galley Charged with Forgetfulness,” one of the poems in Earth Took of Earth ; “Event
Horizon,” from Materialism, her 1995 collection, is mindful of Wallace Stevens' “The Idea of Order at
Key West,” also included in the anthology; and her 1997 book The Errancy directly quotes from the
poems by George Herbert and Theodore Roethke that she has selected for Earth Took of Earth.
Grahams choice of poems for this anthology is to a great extent canonical: most, in fact, are
widely anthologized. Graham's inclusion of several anonymous lyrics and a Navajo Indian chant, as
well as her selection of less-collected titles from many of the poets, such as Dylan Thomas, Louise
Bogan, and A.R. Amnions, distinguishes the anthology from, for instance, The Norton Anthology,
reassuring the reader that her editing is not completely determined by the academic canon. In his
newspaper column “Poet's Choice” for The Washington Post in May 1996, Robert Hass goes so far as
to assert that the book is a “completely fresh reading of the canon of English and American poetry”
(X2). Despite Hass' enthusiasm, Graham's editorial choices are relatively conservative. What is
surprising about Graham's anthology, however, is that despite its chronological range of nearly one
thousand years, of the one hundred poems included, nearly half are written by twentieth-century
American poets. The publisher's parameters for the book—as Graham explains, “[t]he selections cut
off at the generation born in 1927”—largely dictate the book's chronological range, but the anthology
does include, as Graham also admits, “much more contemporary work than the project originally
envisioned” (“Earth Took of Earth” ix). Though the exclusion of her chronological contemporaries
from this anthology is thus a function of publishing constraints, it seems fitting that it is many of the
poets included here and not poets of the same generation as Graham who are often mentioned by way
of comparison in critical commentary on Graham's poems. Her poetry is frequently compared to that
of an older generation of poets born twenty or more years before she was. Steven Schiff, for instance,
in his profile of Graham in The New Yorker identifies among Graham's “idols and forbears … Eliot,
Bishop, and Ashbery” (63).
Graham concludes her introduction to the anthology on a romantic note, with an affirmation of
the power of verse that suggests the ideological stance of an earlier era. What she idealistically hopes
that such a collection of poetry can accomplish is obviously a function of the intended audience for
the book, but her optimism also constitutes a belief in the power of art, an ideology atypical of much
of the ironically-tempered poetry more contemporary than what is included in this anthology. In short,
Graham reveals a conservative idealism about poetry's impact and import. Closing her address to the
reader in the Introduction, she articulates her desire for what these poems and “the mystery they hold”
might accomplish:
It is my hope, that if you read these as a sequence—as a crossing—you will feel our common humanity rise again and
again to the oftentimes joyful, oftentimes heart-silencing occasions of mortal beauty in the dazzling integument known as
‘English’ (xvii).
Graham is forthright elsewhere, as well, about the poet's responsibility to serve the end of “our
common humanity” by writing honestly. Responding to interviewer Timothy Cahill's question about
her feelings upon winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, Graham explains that she is excited to have her
work grouped with other modes of writing or “uses of language” that aspire to veracity, “… dramatic,
novelistic, journalistic, poetic, biographical. All of them seem to be searching for versions of what one
would call ‘the truth’” (19). The end of poetry, in Graham's view, is the discovery of the truth, at least
as it appears to the poet; correspondingly, Graham is adamant about her opinion that the production
and process of a poem must be emotionally true to the poet's experience. Graham revealed in a recent
interview that a poem, in her view, duplicates “a moment of acute surprise that occurred in the soul of
the speaker”; if a poem is successful, the reader is “able to undergo the experience the writer has
undergone in the poem” (Lambert). As she explains it in an early essay on writing entitled “Some
Notes on Silence,” “my choices in poems are never merely aesthetic or technical, but always,
somehow, moral” (171).
The critical notion that Graham is an old-fashioned poet in this respect is not an original one.
Bonnie Costello, for one, has described Graham as “a natural heir to modernism, the foremost poet to
carry forth its ambitious project, discredited by recent purveyors of the new” (“Review of The
Errancy”). She goes on to explain Graham's connection to Modernism: “The search for unified
meaning in a chaotic world, the struggle to affirm the spirit in a dehumanized cultural condition, the
attempt to understand the self in the moment of desire—these are on the unfinished agenda of our
[twentieth] century” (“Review of The Errancy”). Even when unaware of it, critics seem to want to
describe Graham's work as one would describe that of a Modernist poet. Stephen Schiff writes, for
instance, that “Graham speaks to a moment in history when all the old ways of making sense seem to
have failed” (67). That Graham is alienated by the ironic cast typical of much recent poetry also
encourages the critical classification of what she does value in poetry as proto-Modernist. Graham,
interviewed in 1996, explained that “the biggest problem” with young poets “is that their senses are
occluded…. They develop an ironic distance …” (Cahill 19). She maintained, further, that “if they're
going to write poems, they precisely have to dismantle that numbness, they have to undo that ironic
stance” (Cahill 19). Graham's holding out hope that a new(er), more honest poetic form might prove
revelatory explains, to a degree, at any rate, the propensity of critics to discuss her work as though it is
somehow historically or formally retrospective, despite her avant garde poetics and her reinvention of
her own poetic mode in each book she writes.
It is also the case that a sustaining focus in Graham's poems, and always the beginning impulse,
can be interpreted as a High Modernist problem: the interaction of the subject's eye, the mind, and the
visible world. Favorable responses to Graham's work, and unfavorable ones as well, have consistently
commented on the interest in sense perception, specifically sight, that is evident in her poetry. What
marks her poetry as Modernist in part is its emphasis on the phenomenological, more specifically, the
visual, and the connection of the visual to questions of subjectivity, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Most generally, as Karen Jacobs explains it, “… gaze and its object collude to produce meaning in
many modernist texts” (1). More specifically, critic P. Adams Sitney explains, “Modernist literary …
works stress vision as a privileged mode of perception, even of revelation, while at the same time
cultivating opacity and questioning the primacy of the visible world” (2).
Graham's ideas about subjectivity are revealed in the preoccupation her poetry displays with the
hypothetical and elusive relationship between the visible and the invisible, as well as in her desire for
the possibility of poetry's conveying a link between the two, a desire reminiscent, of course, of
Wallace Stevens. Her work has always concerned itself with this split and with the parallel, related
tension between selfhood and what is exterior to it. Graham has explicitly identified her senses
(including of course, sight) as the source of her perceiving a connection to a realm beyond the tangible
world; her poetry explores the impact of this potential connection on the formation and stability of
subjectivity. She remarks, “In my physical experience of reality … I feel the presence of another
world, whether we think of it as the world in the instant before we perceive it, or the dead , or the
invisible. … I feel most alive in the particular enterprise which involves sensing the translation of the
invisible world into the visible” (Gardner, “Accurate Failures” 2). Graham is suspicious, however, of
her desire to identify a connection between what we see and what might lie beyond it: regarding such a
consoling bridge as seductive but Active, as might Stevens, she is wary of trusting it. As Willard
Spiegelman has aptly pointed out in an essay that discusses Graham's acts of looking, she never
equates or even draws a direct connection between the seen and the unseen: Spiegelman asserts, “She
dreams of wholeness, of a connection between the ‘real’ and the ‘seen’ even when she knows better”
(257). Further, with his choice of the word “real,” Speigelman implies that what can't be seen may be
more important to Graham than what can. Perceiving modern experience as characterized by
fragmentation and, correspondingly, aspiring to a restorative but elusive condition of “wholeness,”
Graham has aligned herself with the preeminent poets writing in English in the first half of the
twentieth century.
James Longenbach undertakes a more specific discussion of Graham's link to the Moderns,
asserting that the formal inventiveness of her work evokes the style of such poets as Eliot and Stevens.
The critic discusses Graham's ambitious, earnest questing—what the poet herself names the ‘big
hunger’—in terms of “the formal audaciousness and cultural relevance [Graham] associates with
modernism” (101). Arguably, though, the assertion that Graham's formal audacity, her
experimentation, somehow aligns her with a Modernist poet like T. S. Eliot is easily disputable; in
fact, formal experimentation, relatively speaking, is characteristic of much poetry in the latter half of
the twentieth century, both Modernist and Post-Modernist poetry, one reason among many that
distinctions between the two movements are hard to delineate. Graham's recent work, for instance, in
its fragmentation of the line, its avoidance of organizing narrative structure, and its eschewal of the
easy equation of language and fixed meaning, is formally, at least, similar to late-Twentieth Century,
Post-Modern poetry such as that of the Language Poets.
More defensible, then, is Longenbach's view that Graham is more aptly compared to the
Modernists, ideologically speaking, than to those poets who succeeded them and who are closer to
Graham chronologically. Longenbach explains that despite her identification with such writers as
Eliot and Stevens, Graham “is young enough to feel that the moderns are separated from her by
several generations of equally formidable writers”; he also asserts, moreover, that Graham perceives
the Postmodern poets who separate her chronologically from the moderns as having, to her
disappointment, “narrow[ed] the scope of American poetry,” having limited themselves to, as Graham
herself puts it, ‘a strictly secular sense of reality (domestic, confessional)’ (99, qtd. in Longenbach
99). Longenbach identifies this narrowed scope as a result of the sort of integrity that, paradoxically,
Graham strives for. This integrity, according to Longenbach, is analogous to the quality that James
Merrill so admired in Elizabeth Bishop's work: the refusal ‘to tip the scale of being human / By adding
unearned weight’ (qtd. in Longenbach 100). Longenbach complicates his discussion, however, by
suggesting that the Moderns themselves were suspicious of poetry made heavy with “unearned
weight.” Even the Moderns, Longenbach argues, were eventually disenchanted with their own lofty
strivings—albeit after the fact: the critic writes that Eliot, for instance, after the publication of The
Waste Land “began diminishing the poem as nothing but ‘rhythmical grumbling’” (100).
Similarly complicating Longenbach's argument is the clear admiration Graham professes for
those poets writing in the shadow of the Moderns. Despite her allegiance to Stevens and Eliot, Graham
also aligns her poetry ideologically and formally with such poets as Bishop and Ashbery, whose work
she described to Stephen Schiff as following “‘the path of the left hand … the only way some of us
feel you can crack the surface illusion and get inside’” (63). Suspicious of the allure of formal closure,
Graham strives, from her third book onward, to write an expansive and fragmented poetry, albeit in
service of an ideological wholeness. Quite persuasively, then, Longenbach perceives Graham as
having situated herself between “the longing for ‘the big hunger’” and “the fear of ‘unearned weight’
in the poetry of both the moderns and their successors” (100). It may be, then, that while the formal
reinvention—most recently, the breaking apart of the poetic line—of Graham's work is no doubt very
contemporary, the motivating ideology and philosophical earnestness of her poetry are anything but.
Examination of the textual and ideological connections between Graham and T. S. Eliot and Graham
and Wallace Stevens illuminates what can be defined as Graham's continuation of the Modernist
project.
Graham has told more than one interviewer the rather romantic anecdote about how, as a graduate
student at NYU, hearing a poem of T. S. Eliot's read brought her to the study of poetry. She explains:
I ended up in the wrong hallway and I heard these lines of Eliot's flowing out of this doorway—‘I have heard the mermaids
singing each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.’ And I just went into this huge, long classroom and sat and
listened. I had never heard poetry in English before. It was like something being played in the key my soul recognized
(Schiff 64).
Graham's affinity for Eliot extends well beyond this early enchantment with “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock.” Her knowledge of Eliot's work is evident in the textual echoes and the ideological
and metaphysical similarities to his poetry that appear throughout her own body of work.
On the broadest level, ideologically, Graham's view of writing poetry is reminiscent of Eliot's.
She subscribes, it seems, to his well-known mandate in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that
poetry not be a vehicle for personal expression, but rather that it largely avoid the expression of
personal detail. As Helen Vendler explains it, by shunning autobiographical detail, Graham's work has
achieved a near elimination of personality: speaking of Graham's poetry in general, Vendler asserts
that “[s]he's writing a poem about the self without saying ‘I, me, my wife, my husband’—it's writing
in a completely objective way” (Lambert 6–7). Graham's eschewal of autobiographical detail in her
poetry does not, of course, establish her particular connection to Eliot. Her thematic kinship with the
earlier poet is more significant.
An early essay Graham published on writing poetry argues for the general importance of
metaphysics and epistemology to poetry. Graham asserts that poems, all poems, we can infer, are
“dialogues between the song of man and the silences of God” (“Some Notes on Silence” 170). It is not
simply that Graham would admire Eliot's choice of subject matter in such a poem as Four Quartets,
though, clearly, she would. Rather, Graham regards such a confrontation and reconciliation as Eliot
orchestrates in that poem—the struggle “to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless /
With time …”—as integral to the writing of poetry (“The Dry Salvages” 198). And though Four
Quartets is formally unlike Graham's recent poetry, which is characterized by fragmentation, blank
spaces, and multiple voices and more resembles The Waste Land , what Eliot's poem discovers about
language is also a conclusion drawn by Graham's most recent poetry, diffuse and fragmentary though
it may be. Four Quartets reveals that in what Eliot calls “the intolerable wrestle / With words and
meanings,” or the poet's effort to use language to describe and contend with the ineffable, “words
strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish / Decay
with imprecision” (“East Coker” 184, “Burnt Norton” 180). Graham, too, has long been cognizant of
the “strain” the poet places on language in attempting to describe the inchoate, the invisible, or the
ineffable; in a recent interview, she explains that “[p]oetry is a way of saying something that can't
quite be said—yet you have to use words” (Lambert 7). More basically, Graham realizes that language
is ill-equipped to grasp even the visible. An early poem of hers, “For Mark Rothko,” reveals her
resignation to the inadequacy of any artist's vision of perceptible reality: the poem implicitly
juxtaposes Rothko's abstract expressionist visual art with the poet's verbal attempt to convey reality as
witnessed “within [her] windowframe” (36). Indeed, one of Graham's latest responses to the
limitations of language has been to adopt a new mode of writing, in which the fragmentation of the
word has been fully realized and may, she hopes, effect a radical new degree of insight and connection
to the invisible.
Graham's recent collection, Swarm, is concerned with “negotiating] passionately with those
powers human beings feel themselves to be ‘underneath’: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love”
(Dust Jacket Swarm). Swarm's poetry attempts to embody a new way of speaking and writing that can
contend with these powers more fruitfully than her past efforts: voice is hard to locate precisely in the
poems, language is used tersely, and imagery of the visible has been virtually excised from the poems
in an effort to avoid the allure of the visible and to yield a more honest approach to the divine. In this
book, the poets quest for a new means of seeking the ineffable has demolished the structure of her
lines, with gaps becoming as significant as words. In an early essay about what she admires and
strives for in writing poetry, Graham might easily be describing her own work in Swarm or Eliot's in
Four Quartets. She explains that “… in those poets who confront the unknown, the holy, most head-on
… the syntax begins to buckle and bend back and break” (17). Stephen Yenser's review even draws an
explicit connection between Eliot's doubt and faith and Graham's mood in Swarm: “If T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets were to collide with The Waste Land the debris pattern might look like Swarm” (187).
And while Graham's work is always less resolved than Eliot's post-conversion poetry, both poets are
convinced of the existence of the divine they strive to approach.
Reviews of Swarm remark upon the Christian context of its poems. Adam Kirsch's review of the
book, for instance, comments that Graham “seems resign [ed] … to the possibility that only the
traditional deity can secure meaning and order” (40). In “Some Notes on Silence,” Graham describes
her own efforts to explore territory very similar to the intersection of mortality and eternity Eliot
seeks in Four Quartets. She defines her interest as being in “that boundary … between flesh and time,
between what's sealed and what's open, between the words we speak and those that unspeak us”
(“Some Notes on Silence” 171). Though the answer to Eliot's quest is perhaps easier to come by—
organized religion equips him with a degree of certainty about the timeless and the invisible that
Graham does not seem to possess—the fact that both poets perceive the answer as available to them
through poetry establishes their kinship.
Textually aligning Four Quartets with Graham's work is Eliot's exploration of the gap between
the eternal and the ephemeral in his poem in terms of ekphrasis, the poet's attempt to negotiate the
tension between the visual and the verbal. Graham has also articulated her long-standing exploration
of visuality in terms of ekphrasis. In Four Quartets, the metaphysical struggle to reconcile the
moments in time that characterize human experience—the memory of the garden in “Burnt Norton,”
for instance—with what is representative of the eternal or divine—the fire, the “heart of light,” or the
Incarnation—is resolved in the poem in part by means of the poet's reconciliation of the visual and the
verbal (“Burnt Norton” 176). Making reference to Keats' Grecian Urn—as does Graham's early book
Erosion—and its “unheard melodies,” Eliot unites the temporal motility of the words and “music” of
poetry with the spatial “form or pattern,” the “stillness, “representative of not only the eternal, but on
a lesser level, perhaps, of the words on his page (“Burnt Norton” 176, 180). Keats' urn poses the
ekphrastic question of whether or not static, spatial visual art such as that of the urn is more
permanent and thus more valuable than the more ephemeral, temporal art of poetry. While Keats
ostensibly celebrates the “still unravish'd bride of quietness” and maintains that the urn's “unheard”
melodies (and, we can infer, those of the visual arts in general) are “sweeter” than the “heard” ones of
poetry, his ambivalence about this position is clear throughout the Ode (619). In Eliot's poem,
however, the Chinese jar, animated by means of the poem, marries motion and stasis, time and the
eternal, as it “[m]oves perpetually in its stillness” (“Burnt Norton” 180).
Graham's poetry has always negotiated the same extremes. In an early ekphrastic poem, “The
Lady and the Unicorn and Other Tapestries,” from her second book, Erosion, Graham reveals that
poetry, as it is able to bring together the eternal and the temporal, the visual and the verbal, is
tantamount to religion for her. She writes, “If I have a faith it is something like this: this ordering / of
images / within an atmosphere that will receive them, hold them in solution, unsolved” (37). Graham
imagines that the quail she watches “on our back field” live in time as they “run free and clocklike”;
yet she conceives of them imagistically, fixed outside of time as they “rise up in gusts, stiff and
atemporal” (37). Seeking the invisible by means of the visible, the eternal by means of the ephemeral,
Graham revisits the epistemological subjects of not only T. S. Eliot, but also Wallace Stevens.
Graham is frequently mindful of Stevens in her exploration of the visible world: she adapts his
“abiding concern with the interactions of imagination and reality … [of] mind and world” and carries
on his poetic representation of the mind engaged in thought so that in Graham's work, as in that of
Stevens, as David Perkins has put it, “Whatever is affirmed is at once questioned” (Miller 986; 299).
Graham's ekphrastic exploration of the poet's attempt to master the visible world linguistically as a
means of approaching the invisible is also parallel and indebted to Stevens' poetical project. Helen
Vendler characterizes the earlier poet's work as always essentially ekphrastic: Vendler asserts that
Stevens' poetry animates his visual, primary apprehension of the world by endowing it with
temporality. As Graham's experience of living is arguably as essentially visual as Stevens' experience,
the critic's comments are applicable to Graham's early work at least, as well. Vendler writes that
“[the] transformation of a spatial object into a temporal event is for Stevens the axis on which poetry
turns. The world presented itself to him in visual terms; and yet poetry turned the visual object into
the temporal integration, into that musical score for experience that we call a poem” (Wallace
Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire 7).
Graham's connection to Stevens extends beyond the similarity of each poet's ekphrastic project to
encompass the doubt that Stevens, too, expresses about his poetical project of reinventing the world.
As Graham herself points out, the reassuring force of the formal means Stevens uses to describe and
contain the visual never entirely supersedes the uncertainty that he associates with what cannot be
seen. In an interview with Thomas Gardner, Graham explains her admiration for Stevens as a function
of his balance between the safety of formal structure and the threat of the ineffable: she argues that
[w]hat's so extraordinary about Stevens is (among other things) the marriage he effected between being at genuine risk and
having all his formal understanding operative—without putting himself in a situation where the formal understanding is
such that it's already a contract, where the end is guaranteed. That, to me, is the ideal, and why poetry is such an
extraordinary medium for spiritual undertaking (94).
Graham carries on what both she and Stevens perceive as the poet's necessary work of writing
about the contention and cooperation of imagination and reality, and the poet's mind, eye, and voice.
Just as her Modernist predecessors did, Graham believes in the necessity of seeking meaning through
poetry in a world that has been fractured by modern experience. Discussing “the paramount relation
between … modern man and modern art,” Stevens himself argued that “in an age in which disbelief is
so profoundly prevalent… the arts are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men
feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince” (The Necessary Angel
171). Graham also matches Stevens' qualms about the poet's mastery of the visible. As J. Hillis Miller
explains it, though Stevens regarded poetry as, in the poet's own words, ‘a response to the daily
necessity of getting the world right,’ he also maintained that “even the most potent poet never
succeeds in getting it right once and for all” (qtd. in Miller 989, 989). While Graham's initial poetic
impulse is equivalent to the earlier poet's, she is even more forthcoming than he about her view of the
uncertain nature of any poet's imaginative attempts to order reality and access the invisible. As critic
Willard Spiegelman puts it, explaining that despite the draw of the visible for Graham, she never
allows herself to revel in it,
her visual delight in the world is matched by an opposing resistance to the visible…. She has revived the grand ambition of
poets like Wordsworth and Stevens but has also undercut the very grounds that make those ambitions possible. She asks us
to see the world anew (247).
In the conclusion of her poem “Event Horizon, “from her fifth book, Materialism, Graham
challenges her own view of poetry's power to approach and know the ineffable. The poem's beginning
and final image, that of a dress, “The flapping, thrumming dress all / sleeves of wind,” recalls Stevens'
image from “The Idea of Order at Key West,” of the water as “like a body wholly body, fluttering / Its
empty sleeves” (54, 128). Stevens' poem describes a woman, representative of the figure of the poet,
singing as she walks along the shore. In Stevens' view, the natural environment does not conform to
the poet's vision of it—“the water never formed to mind or voice”; yet the poet's imagination makes
significant and organizes the visible world—“[I]t was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its
vanishing” (128, 129). The singer or poet's production provides human meaning, too, clues “of
ourselves and of our origins” (129). In Graham's view, however, the poet's work is solipsistic and
ultimately, she fears, fruitless. In “Event Horizon,” all that remains of the poet's projection is an
empty image and the still unsatisfied eye of the poet. The image of the “flapping thrumming dress” is
deprived of even the imagined wholeness it has in Stevens' poem and becomes in Graham's poem a
mantle or garment that cloaks or clothes nothing. Not surprisingly, Graham's hungry eye concludes the
poem: deprived of substantive vision, the gaze persists. In “Event Horizon,” Graham presents a bleak
view of her craft—that the only lasting byproducts of the poem are its insatiable impulse—the gaze—
and its meaningless word—the dress.
Nonetheless, Graham obviously considers the subject of the poet's imaginative interaction with
the visual worthy of revisitation. And though she is more troubled by doubt than was Eliot, reassured
by the structure of his faith, or Stevens, consoled by the Active projection of his poetry, Graham
earnestly considers it her responsibility as a poet to address the questions of epistemology that
preoccupied Eliot and Stevens long before she began to write. The ambitious scope of Graham's poetry
is not in question. What makes her poetry elude easy alignment with the High Modernist work of the
poets she so admires, however, is most obviously her radical revision of form: Graham's philosophic
concerns are raised in abstract, obscure, and, lately, fractured remnants of poems, in which a lyric
subject is hard to discern, and language is condensed, its meanings made questionable. Even the
poems in Graham's most recent collection, Never (2002) which are characterized by a unified speaker,
appreciable point-of-view, and visual imagery complicate meaning and interpretation with line breaks
and the proliferation of punctuation such as brackets, colons, and parentheses. Her work is difficult
not only to comprehend and interpret, but also to classify.
Given her displacement of narrative and her efforts to thwart conventional strategies of reading
and interpretation, Graham is frequently compared to the Language Poets. She, and other poets of her
generation, notably Brenda Hillman and Anne Carson, have adopted the techniques and ideology of
Language Poetry to the medium of the lyric. Hillman is of the same age as Graham and also received
her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Like Graham, too, Hillman is noted for her relationship to the
Language Poets. Mark Jarman, who has written on both Graham and Hillman, points out in a review of
Hillmans Bright Existence (1993) the indebtedness of each poet's work to that school. Further, though
he gushes about Bright Existence, labeling it “a wonderful book,” he also diminishes Hillman's
adaptation of Language Poetry in relation to Graham's:
Like Jorie Graham, Hillman has attempted to assimilate some of the mannerisms of the Language Poets, but not so
wholeheartedly or brilliantly, I'm afraid. Thus she will play with punctuation, lining up excess commas or ending poems
with a dash, and interrupt the sequence of the book with breathless, parenthetical passages each called ‘(interruption)’
(“Journals of the Soul” 422–3).
Despite what sounds like Hillman's and Graham's similarity in form, however, it is not the case that a
recent Hillman poem looks much like a recent Graham poem. Graham has surpassed the play
Hillman's work engages in either to structurally demolish and recombine her lines or to punctuate her
lines with complicated layers of brackets and parentheses.
Philosophically, Hillman and Graham's shared interest in the exploration of such dualities as
space and time or such dichotomies as body and soul has encouraged reviewers to classify the
ambitious nature of Hillman's subject matter with Graham's. Discussing Hillman's 1997 book Loose
Sugar, reviewer David Wohan lauds the reach of her poetry: “Of all the poets of Hillman's generation
—I'm thinking of those writers born since 1950—only Paul Muldoon and Jorie Graham can claim a
body of work as ambitious and demanding as that of Hillman” (187). While the questions that provoke
Hillman's poetry are indeed metaphysically similar to those that inspire Graham's, both the means
Hillman uses to address those questions and the end they eventually lead her to ultimately belie the
notion of her kinship with Graham.
Hillman's work, she reveals in Bright Existence, is inspired by Gnosticism; clearly, as the more
recent Loose Sugar reveals, the philosophy of such texts as the Nag Hammadi Library, the writings of
Coptic monks, are still an influence. Though her Gnostic-inspired belief in the body's utter disparity
from the soul differs from Graham's materialist conception of spirit, Hill-man, like Graham, is
convinced of the soul's existence. Like Graham, too, she searches for “that mediating metaphor
between body and soul that not only establishes a similitude but expresses the absolute identity of
each” (Jar-man 421). “Little Furnace,” a poem from Bright Existence, for instance, develops the
tension between material life and its hypothetical, larger significance. Interrogating her conversation
partner, “the lower wisdom” of religion, which puts its faith in “spirit held by matter,” the poem's
speaker insistently asks, “What is the meaning of this suffering” (1). The voice of the lower wisdom
replies, “you are the meaning”; and yet the speaker, maintaining the soul's division from the body,
insists “No, no… that/is the shape what is the meaning” (1). Though the voice of religion has the last
word in the poem, Hillman concludes with a grammatical gesture that Graham has also made much
use of—the inconclusive dash—and thus refuses to resolve the conversation, much as Graham has.
More generally, the exploration of the subject's essence—“you who do not exist”—that Hillman
orchestrates in her poems indeed parallels the interrogation of subjectivity inherent in such questions
of Graham's as “Is this body the one/I know as me?” (Bright Existence 5; Materialism 3). For Hillman,
however, unlike Graham, that material body is not a connection to the immaterial soul.
Hillman's methods of exploring the problems of subjectivity and the ephemerality of matter and
human experience, however, are distinctly opposed to those Graham uses: one of the strengths of
Hillman's poetry is its immediacy, which depends largely on its autobiographical basis and detail.
This is not to say that Hillman's subject matter is ever unexamined or uncomplicated: as one reviewer
puts it, discussing Loose Sugar, Hillman's work takes “the kind of risk” linguistically and
philosophically “that propels the work beyond the 19th century construct of narrative and personal
voice” to “loo[k]… into the dark gnosis” (Svoboda 9). Hillman's autobiographical framework
classifies her poetry, despite its explorations of language, as the descendant of the Confessional Poets.
It is the poets of the second half of the twentieth century, then, who seem to have had the greatest
impact on her work. Though she addresses metaphysical questions, Hillman, unlike Graham, is not
haunted by Modernism's approach to those same questions.
If it is the nature of the questions behind Hillman's poetry that reminds readers of Graham, it is
the learning behind the work of Anne Carson that is reminiscent of Graham's poetry. A professor of
classics at McGill University, Carson writes books of poetry that bring together poems and essays. In
fact, Carson so eliminates the boundaries between prose and poetry that she has been accused of not
writing poetry at all. Adam Kirsch, for instance, complains of Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse
that the very premise of “‘a novel in verse’ is too much like playing tennis with the net down” (“All
Mere Complexities” 39). Even a more generous review of Carson's Men in the Off Hours (2000)
describes it as “a book… not of poetry, per se, but of translation” (D'Agata). It is no surprise, then, to
learn that Graham admires Car-sons work: the notes to Swarm refer to Carson's Eros the Bittersweet as
an inspiration, and as editor of the Best American Poetry series in 1990, Graham included all fourteen
pages of Carson's “The Life of Towns.” Nor is it surprising that Adam Kirsch, who has written of
Graham's lines that “[t]hey sound merely like prose,” assesses Carson's work as having taken from
poetry “not verse, but a sort of license for intellectual recreation, for mental game playing” (“The End
of Beauty” 42; “All Mere Complexities” 39). And while Graham's formal strategies of
experimentation never come as close to prose as does, for instance, Carson's novel in verse,
Autobiography of Red, Graham's recent radical disjunctiveness has certainly led to the critical charge
that she has left poetry behind.
Such a charge is complicated by the increasingly expansive conception of what constitutes
poetry; a broad definition of poetry is, in part, a function of the sort of experimentation that
characterizes the work of the Language Poets as well as what Adam Kirsch explains as “the fruit of the
literary and linguistic theory of the last fifty years”—the recognition that language is an arbitrary
system, neither inherently meaningful nor fixed in its definitions of meaning (“All Mere
Complexities” 39). Discussing the problem of how to classify Carson's work, whether as poetry or
prose, critic John D'Agata recounts another critic's defense of Carson's Autobiography of Red: D'Agata
reports that Bernard Knox
argued… that Carsons problematic lines… could be considered formally close to the dactylic rhythms of Homeric
hexameter and therefore an entirely appropriate English free-verse version of the elaborate triadic arrangement… in the
original Greek text on which Carsons story was based.
What D'Agata recounts of Knox's ultimate conclusion about the poetic qualities of Carson's book,
however, points to an important question about both Carson's and Graham's work: how is verse as
opposed to prose particularly suited to the expression of the concerns of each poet? In his review,
Knox “admit[ed] that ‘for the most part the diction is that of prose,’ and wonder[ed] aloud, ‘Was the
decision to tell the story in verse justified? Why did Carson not leave it in prose…?’” (D'Agata). Even
those readers whose definition of verse is more expansive than that of the conservative Kirsch, who
has written that today, “‘verse’ is generally thought of as anything with an irregular margin that is not
as well-written as prose,” might question the classification of some of Carson's work as poetry (“All
Mere Complexities” 39). Graham's return to imagery grounded in the visible and the re-expansion of
her line in Never (2002) to include more musically patterned language than her poetry immediately
prior, however, ensure her work's classification as poetry and distinguish her further from Carson.
Another critical complaint about Graham's work, however, is also made of Carson's—both are,
some critics charge, limited and lessened by their erudition and corresponding obscurity. Once again,
Adam Kirsch is repelled by the same quality in Graham's and Carson's poetry, though arguably, he is
harsher in his criticism of Carson and what he terms her “self-congratulatory artifice” than he is in his
review of Graham (“All Mere Complexities” 39). Kirsch writes that Graham's poetry “is obscure
because it is not turned sufficiently outward to the public realm; because it refuses to leave behind the
private wellsprings in which all poetry begins” (“The End of Beauty” 39). Of Carson's poems, on the
other hand, disputing her artistic merit, he claims, “They are like Escher drawings: one leaves them
with a sense of having labored much and gained nothing” (“All Mere Complexities” 41).
Clearly, both Graham and Carson, whether successfully or not, have applied vast learning to the
background and foreground of their poems. Despite their shared allusiveness, however, Carson and
Graham ultimately have very distinct poetical projects. Carson does not concern herself with the
retrospective metaphysical questions that haunt Graham. In fact, one reviewer, Calvin Bedient, has
referred to Carson's work as “Post-metaphysical”: further, he continues, “Carson is a representative
poet in an age in which technology prevails over a vision of roots and ends” (“Celebrating
Imperfection” 44). What Bedient refers to as her “technical resourceful [ness]”—is, admittedly, in its
risky departures from lyric, like Graham's (“Celebrating Imperfection” 44). Carson's work, though, is
not concerned with what most preoccupies Graham's, the Modernist fascination with intersection of
the visible and the invisible and the question of how language might best wrestle with the ineffable.
Carson instead concerns herself with questions of translation, as D'Agata puts it, “between languages,
between identities, and ultimately, between genres”: in Men in the Off Hours, for instance, Carson
explores the problem of translating between the classics such as Catullus and her own work;
translating between masculine and feminine modes of discourse, those of Thucydides and Virginia
Woolf, for instance; translating between poetry and prose, and even between the visual arts and
poetry, respectively, the paintings of Edward Hopper and her own poems on those paintings.
Although Bedient identifies in Carson's work both “intellectual and emotional knowledge” and
critic Jed Rasula admires Carson because, in his opinion, “the fertility of formal invention does not
obscure a passionate nature” in her work, Carson's passion is much less apparent than the emotions
behind the philosophical earnestness and profound search for metaphysical certainty that informs even
as difficult a book as Swarm (Bedient, “Celebrating Imperfection” 44; Rasula 32). Throughout Swarm
and Never, indeed, the earnestness of Graham's metaphysical struggle is paramount. Several poems in
each book, for instance, are entitled “Prayer”; and the poet's many entreaties—“Oh my beloved I'm
asking”—make it clear that what motivates her search through both the phenomenological universe
—“the atom laying its question at the bottom of nature”—and her intellectual universe—populated in
large measure by “the thing that cannot be thought”—is a sincere desire for spiritual wholeness or
fulfillment (“from The Reformation Journal” 5, 4; “2/18/97” 15). Anne Carson's exploration of the
intellect's confrontation with the world is similar in that it constitutes an effort to know the world
afresh—“by a cherrying of your mind”—but in its Steinian play with language and ironic
juxtapositionings, Carson's poetry is hardly as earnest, searching, or emotional as Graham's (Men in
the Off Hours” 10). In a representative line from the Catullus “translation” “Odi et Amo (I Hate and I
Love Perhaps You Ask Why),” Carson uses repetition as a means of highlighting the arbitrarily
constructed nature of the self and language, and arguably, little else: “Why why why why why I why
why why why why” (42).
Perhaps the easiest parallel between Graham and Carson and, in fact, between Graham, Carson
and Hillman, is that each poet can be discussed in light of gender politics. Most obviously, both
Carson and Hillman address themselves to a largely male tradition of writing, discourse, and thought.
Evident in Carson's writing is, as William Logan rather nastily puts it, “temperature-taking
feminism”: bringing Virginia Woolf into conversation about war with Thucydides in a volume that
includes “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity,” Carson is
obviously concerned with gender and its relationship to subjectivity (“The Way of All Flesh” 68). Her
more primary subject, however, is human subjectivity. As she puts it, “I wonder if there might not be
another idea of human order than repression… another notion of human virtue than self-control,
another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another
human essence than self” (qtd. in Rasula 33). Brenda Hill-mans exploration and interrogation of the
concept of a stable subjectivity is, on the other hand, much more consciously feminist. Laura Mullen,
reviewing Hillman's Loose Sugar, is mindful of the book's cognizance of “the fragility of reality and
identity” and asserts Hillman's connection to Kristeva: Mullen argues,
Writing into “the loved interval” of “the mothers body” (99) “the unfillable interval” made where “[a] mother's sentence
[was] wrenched from her body” (105), the author of Loose Sugar goes into a tropic mer(e) to recover the “sea babble”
blurring the line between self and other— “keeping me mixed with them” (101)—the fluid language Kristeva identified as
the semiotic, and Hillman feels the freedom of: “A power came up; it was in between the voices./It said you could stop
making sense…” (115).
Like Hillman and Carson, Graham has explored the permeability of the subject and the
slipperiness of language in terms of gender (most notably in The End of Beauty) both overtly and as a
subtext. What most compels con-sideration of Grahams work in a feminist light, however, is the same
indisputable fact that ultimately makes her work more broadly historically meaningful that that of her
peers: the fact that Graham addresses herself to the male giants of Modernism, making their questions
relevant to a woman writing at the end of the century in which they began writing. Female experience
in an autobiographical sense is rarely primary in a Jorie Graham poem, but the poet's status as a
female is important in light of her Modernist preoccupation.
The recurring preoccupation with the visible that is Graham's means of exploring her favorite
Modernist questions of epistemology and metaphysics has yet to be adequately explored. Her concerns
about the poet's ability to explore the possibility of a connection between the visible and the invisible
worlds are evident in all her books in both literal and metaphorical acts of looking: the visual is a
generating force behind her poetry even when it is absent from that poetry. In her first book, Hybrids
of Plants and of Ghosts, Graham reveals her discomfort with what she perceives as the disjunctions
between what the eye of the subject beholding the object sees, what that subject sees in the mind's eye,
and what the subject or poet can convey of either reality through poetry. For Graham, understandably,
both looking and the manipulation of what is seen through description constitute artistic endeavors.
The poet thus defines her many acts of looking in the poems of Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts as acts
of creation, akin to her poetry, her vehicle for description. Relentlessly compelled to describe, in these
early poems at least, Graham is nonetheless troubled by her inability to report the truth of the world as
she experiences it, as well as, more subtly, by the possibility that her voyeurism and subsequent
description constitute the subjugation of what she sees. Graham's early complications of looking in
Hybrids mark the inception of the questioning of identity that she later associates with seeing and
being seen.
Because Grahams struggle with seeing and being seen can be interpreted as a effort to explore
how the self is constituted, psychological criticism is clearly an appropriate and fruitful means of
analyzing her work. Jacques Lacan has dealt with the relationship between the subject and what is
external to it in terms of sight. Even more fundamentally, however, Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism
grapples with the relationship between the self and the other as it is manifest in the look exchanged
between them. Lacan's division of the three cognitive orders—the real, the imaginary, and the
symbolic— also resonates with Grahams work. All three orders comprise the psyche, and yet Lacan
asserts that the language and culture that denote the symbolic order are distinct from both the
imaginary order—“the dimension of images,” conscious and unconscious—and the real order—not
what is objectively perceptible, but rather “a kind of residue” of what the symbolic has overwritten,
“present in the unconscious, which must remain outside of speech and language” (Childers and Henzi
151, 254). More specifically, as well, the Lacanian idea of language as characterized by lack or
absence helps explain Graham's difficulty with knowing the apprehensible world by means of words.
Graham's work both demonstrates and attempts to negotiate her separation from the object being
described; within her poetry, she also defines that separation as a function of language, her poetic tool.
In general terms, Lacan's distinction between language and an elusive real, which is in turn distinct
from the visual images that help to impart one's sense of self, resonates with what is irreconcilable in
Graham's poetry: the subject's beholding eye, the observable world, the descriptive word, and the
subject's unified sense of self.
Graham's effort to know both the visible world and the absence it implies is eventually enacted
ideologically in her poetry. Exploring the mastery inherent in acts of looking, she strives in her work
to engage in creative acts of seeing and to convey those acts through an art that avoids objectifying or
subjugating what is seen. The poet's voyeuristic viewpoint in her earliest book is noteworthy in light
of the exploration of looking in later books, specifically, in The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,
and Materialism. In these collections, Graham identifies, questions, and even attempts to subvert the
scopophilic mastery of the object that is presumed in looking, especially when looking is cast in terms
of the male subject defining or possessing the female object by means of the gaze. As part of her
effort to avoid attempting mastery, Graham employs the visual arts literally and metaphorically in her
poems, which engage in and question her own spectatorship in regard to art and the world and even, at
times, attempt to adopt the techniques of the visual arts. Though the connection between Grahams
poetry and the visual arts is initially latent, eventually Graham employs the visual arts directly, as
both subject matter and methodological inspiration for her poetry.
Erosion, Grahams second book, is largely ekphrastic. Throughout the book, Graham is less
paying tribute to works of visual art, as a more traditionally ekphrastic poet might, than invoking
images of painting in an effort to expand her poetic powers of observation and description. The
remarkable number of poems in Erosion that address or mention works of visual art has been noted by
critics: while many mention it, Bonnie Costello is one of the few to identify what she sees as its
source.2 Costello's view is that “in Erosion… Graham treats the icon as a form of rescue from the flux
and as a veil which shrouds but also discloses the infinite” (395). Undeniably, Graham does temper
her inability to describe with truth or accuracy by writing ekphrastically.
I n Erosion, however, the poet also seems to come to terms with her inability to convey reality
accurately, celebrating it, even as she reconciles that inability with the compensatory transformative
power of the imagination and the art it produces, “a beautiful lie” (“Reading Plato” 6). Bonnie
Costello has persuasively identified Grahams reasons for invoking the visual arts in this book and,
notably, associates Graham's ideology here with Modernism; but Costello does not adequately account
for Grahams differentiation between what she hopes the visual arts can attain and what poetry actually
does achieve. The critic recognizes and explicates Graham's celebration of art's power to create and
sustain isolated moments of beauty and the illusion of permanence in an impermanent world.
Ultimately, however, Costello overlooks Grahams essential differentiation between her own iconic
poetic constructions and those of the visual arts. In doubt about the validity of what Costello calls “a
unifying presence” from the outset, Graham actively celebrates art's power to promote the illusion of
resistance to erosion, even as she explores the danger of believing in art or in the fictive unity it
promotes (383).