Let’s say it while there’s still time: Jorie Graham is our most important living poet. “Our” being readers of American English; the time being late, inexorably approaching an end; “important” being as much a measure of the aim as the attainment. The judgment would be a little ambivalent even among her devoted admirers. Graham is an indulgent artist, and this indulgence has led away from easy pleasure. On the page, what Graham has wanted Graham has got. She denies herself no unlovely line break, no syntax clipped or extended beyond the ear’s sympathy, no recourse to abstraction or knotty elaboration natural only to its maker. Ever since her third book, The End of Beauty (1987), she has achieved a kind of escape velocity, ascending to a plane of self-license on which general criteria no longer apply. But no matter: she rigged the game. For nearly forty years her poems have issued from a voice so desperate and imposing that it has served as the guarantor of its own words. Do whatever she likes and she can’t quite lose. But the wins have not come as they once did.
Graham’s project increasingly rested in depicting the sundering to which mind and spirit are subjected in our arid modernity. The compositional attitude ran in the other direction, offering an air of unmistakable self-belief, abetted, surely, by the privilege of her existing accomplishment. None of her peers rendered doubt, dispersal or inner dissonance with greater certitude and command. Early on she seemed to hold the whole of the old gift in her grip: a thinking that made music, a seeing that returned thought. But more and more she didn’t use the gift in the customary ways, and in time she lived up to her audacious title. A conception of beauty no longer led her. And likewise, she had sought an ending, an outer limit to lyric delight, since long before landing on the climate story. Where the aesthetic principle once was, a sterner conception of responsibility was set. No more unwarranted refuge in lucid composure. Gone the little pleasure of a perfect line, the miracles of concision. Instead of rest, a frantic mapping of the damage. Instead of stillness, pace. Instead of compression, ceaselessness. Like this Graham traveled from relatively conventional beginnings, building, book by book, an invention all her own. Well before her latest volume, To 2040, she had left the syncretic plane of pure poetic contemplation for a direct encounter with the age, and her singular high style was marshaled to convey an unremarkable view: the age is not well.
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To begin at the beginning, Graham’s first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980) and its first poem, “The Way Things Work,” are surely among the more confident career-openers of the last half century. It was there in the titles, the promise of a poet with unusual access to the mystery, inaugurating a method that would braid the natural world with the phantoms of cognition. Though the book was thick with God, philosophy and the great dead, her voice was unfreighted, nimble, hopping birdlike on a wire of verbs. “The way things work / is that we finally believe / they are there, / common and able / to illustrate themselves.” A profession of the poet’s faith: mere presentation may be revelatory. That was the payload of the wakefulness to which the poems called us by force of attraction: the whole of the eternal in the nick of time rightly attended to, in the plain thing ravenously seen.
If Graham was on the scent of the old themes, the writing itself never felt rearguard. This, too, was part of her lesson: the mysteries were not lapsed but active, ever renewing. She was in thrall to all of it. Late but not belated. Her senses desirous but her intellect disciplined; the voice was eager though not yet rushed; awake, not yet manic; its engine appetite, not yet compulsion. Unmissable, too, was her sense of belonging in the visionary company, the certainty of election: “Step, anywhere you go / is yours.” In their avid apprenticeship to the deep life of spirit, matter and mind, the saints and artists she referenced were her equals, and her long career has paid out a great faith to this early sense of vocation.
And what was Graham’s speaker doing? She’s scanning the surfaces—sunsets, frescoes, the arcs of birds—looking always for the openings through which the creation might let slip its secret. Though willing to traffic in the big abstractions (necessary insofar as the mind’s desire overruns the objects at hand), the dominant instinct went the other way. This was art that believed the lower things to be the codex of the higher. Naturalism, ekphrasis and the meditative watching of the mind are undertaken as forms of knowing, ways of advancing on the ineffable and vast. Thus is the work of attention justified, almost without limit.
Still, the poet of a first book is necessarily a poet out to prove herself, and so attention’s returns are still judged by what they can supply her craft: a redolent image, a concrete embodiment of thought, something sonorous and lapidary. And so we get a stunning pastoral like “Tennessee June,” its romantic sensuousness unburned by the nervous critique it would later receive. If a loveliness sometimes gushed forth it never felt cheap, never untethered to the mind’s searchlight. The intelligence at work was at once formidable and featherlight, interested mainly in its own wayfinding rather than the arrival represented by positions or programs: “there is no / entrance, / only entering.” Though the early poems are not her most original, they remain the most memorable in a literal sense, the most keepable in the body, therefore in the soul.
If these briefer forms abetted certain intensities and evinced a craft practiced as though through a jeweler’s loupe, a poem like “At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body,” from Erosion (1983), gives an early sample of how her gift could play out at an extended stretch, where her capacity for leaping association would be challenged to sustain a fundamental coherence and keep the stakes from waning. The ekphrasis no doubt owed to her mid-century Roman childhood, during which she tagged along with her sculptor mother to take in the masterworks of the Old World. While the ostensible subject risks seeming arch or ossified, it’s extraordinary how alive and self-directed Graham’s mind is within it. After a philosophically bent engagement with the pictorial scene, she cannily lands on the detail that pulls us dramatically back from the represented to the real: the painter, working on commission, substitutes the face of his plague-dead son for the image of the dead Christ, to rest forever in the chancel of Orvieto’s hilltop cathedral. Graham’s crescendo leans on an anecdote—cribbed from Vasari—in which Signorelli, “heart-broken as he was, had [his son] stripped naked, and with the greatest firmness of soul, without lamenting or shedding a tear, portrayed him, to the end that, whenever he might wish, he might be able by means of the work of his own hands to see that which nature had given him and adverse fortune had snatched away.” The scene pulls together all the threads of Graham’s obsession: the frail and wondrous life of the body, the indefatigable scrutiny of creation, the meaning of earthly experience glanced from the light of the eternal.
So eager is Graham to enter the fleshy mystery that her version of the sketching of the deceased boy might be mistaken for autopsy. But no less does the passage function as tacit ars poetica, capturing Graham’s own ethos and aim. Signorelli—
then with beauty and care
and technique
and judgment, cut into
shadow, cut
into bone and sinew and every
pocket
in which the cold light
pooled.
It took him days
that deep
caress, cutting,
unfastening,
until his mind
could climb into
the open flesh and
mend itself.
The poem’s achievement is to transpose the Renaissance painter’s endeavor, however aged and laden with the Christian story, into the great present tense of permanent concern. Such was Graham’s double game, then as now. Beneath her iconoclastic surfaces, she was an agent of continuity. She valued the human, the senses, the soul and above all the mind, where the aforementioned might exist in synthesis (this synthesis being another idealization, one she sometimes called “the true”). Like W. S. Merwin a generation before, her distinct individual practice seemed to conserve a whole definition of the art.
It’s as though her own poems, for all their freshness and invention, were written atop a rich palimpsest—repatriating, in necessarily incomplete ways, the accrued capacities of the human tongue into new and vivid forms. It’s notable, then, that this famous poet of the doomed future began as a poet sifting the noble past for a usable tradition. Her cultural references, even in her twenties, ran classical, high, European. Cameos by Pollock or Rothko counted as concessions to the not-quite present. The repertoire recalls an aspect of Sontag’s sensibility: an adoption of canonical, even conservative preferences that are made to appear nearly radical by dint of how alive they are to a stylish, exuberant speaker. Right out of the gate the poems possessed an authority, an untroubled inheritance of broad swaths of cultural patrimony, an implicit right to fineness. No elevation was off limits, nor the contemplative tendency curtailed for ordinary exigency. The art was blessed to have such a star as this swim into its ken.
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Then comes the comet, The End of Beauty (1987), in which finely wrought verbal objects are abandoned for an audacious expansion. The rudiments remain familiar—Greek and Biblical myth, the names of flowers—but what’s made from them is a new thing under the sun. Graham follows her themes by way of Möbius-like recursions. The sui generis forms frame not only what you’d ordinarily call content, but also the poet’s mind turning that content over, modulating it, seeing what meaning will hold true under the sign of a strenuous endurance. The generative principle, too, has shifted: toward a comprehensive account of the storm rather than its lucid condensation. The aesthetic change registers most obviously in the length of the poems, but also in a number of rhetorical and formal properties. By this point the pages, even from an illegible distance, are identifiably hers: the imperious voice commanding the typographical space, meting out speech and silence according to the new dispensation. You can feel it: a voice learning in real time what it can do, and realizing that what had previously seemed the outward bound of the possible was only convention, a false wall, passable to one who possessed the will. Form no longer makes demands on her; she makes demands on form.
The core of the book consists in a series of character pairings, many of which, despite their binary basis, Graham calls self-portraits: “Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them [Adam and Eve],” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone,” “Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay [Penelope at Her Loom].” Though the framing offered by these titles remains hard to parse, the schema surely appealed because the “self” it sought was guaranteed to remain in the tension between opposed poles, and the lyric energized by inhabiting that charged field. As for the famous names invoked, this was myth as a kind of mental space more than a story, a variable score for advanced cognition. If what was sketched in this vertiginous verbal cascade was indeed a self, it was one composed of questions and capacities more than biographical experiences or anything approaching what you’d normally call personality. With hindsight, the reference that reveals most is the one to Penelope. Graham will remain at the loom, devoted, tireless, no longer quite expecting resolution. Where another poet would settle for some bauble of perception, some chestnut of epiphany or sense of an ending to seal the act, she stays awake in the space, because she is able to, because the search is not complete, because the engine of desire—even at this newly impersonal pitch—is endless.
This is the juncture in Graham’s career at which the feeling of pace first enters the frame, presaging her later books Fast (2017) and Runaway (2020) and her interest in the technologies of speed and saturation. In the Adam and Eve poem, for example, the numbered sections winnow until dense chunks of language give way to fragments of single sentences. In fact, it’s not clear that the language changes much; it’s rather that the discourse is subject to increasing interruption—almost syncopation—by numbered section breaks, such that her speech keeps spilling past the symbols of closure and conclusion. The effect is core Jorie: we are sped up, breathless, forcing every moment to its crisis—and all of it happening in a way that’s unusually independent of what’s actually being said.
The speed also begs a different rhetoric, a new extension of the voice. The language is untethered, for the first time, from the conscious aspiration to the sonorous or the eloquent. The urgency of her project is incompatible with the old decoration. Any given clause or syntactical unit is passed briskly enough as to never quite rest under the microscope, and so is not built to instruct or amaze in isolation. So central is this feverish accretion that the effect is not really capturable in quotation; many of the lines, pulled from the rush, would not even register as especially poetic. The word orders—plain, paratactic, often abstract—are transmuted into poetry by dint of their speaker’s daunting intention, ionized in the force field of Graham’s voice. If the poet is living in all sorts of risk, threading a thin, vertiginous wire, it hardly matters; she’s not looking down, only ahead to the next few words that will bear her desperation and want as moment tips into moment, line into line. Not since Pound has an American poetic voice seemed a screen for such undiluted force of will. And as with Pound, a challenging grammar is authorized by sheer self-confidence.
If the capacious and encompassing technique that made Graham famous came at a cost, the bill wasn’t yet due, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the shock of possibility The End of Beauty registered. The next couple books were lit, in varying degrees, by the same flame, and a selection of the first five volumes, The Dream of the Unified Field, won the Pulitzer in 1996. Her ascent to the crest of the profession was secure. All relevant prizes, excepting the Nobel, would follow. From her post at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she becomes one of the most influential teachers in an MFA world that had by then more or less emerged into its modern form. She founds no aesthetic school, builds no movement, but many of her students, diverse in style and approach, are among the more interesting poets of the next generation, charting a third way with respect to what was then the field’s governing dichotomy between “official verse culture” and a coldly intellectual and academically captured avant-garde. The students did not, for the most part, want to write like her, but they all cited her catalyzing example. It could seem that Graham had it all: an easy brilliance in conversation, a generous and uncynical bearing, the right kind of face for an author photo. She ennobled poetry, and by extension us as poetry people. She was, as one critic put it, “internally enormous”—the kind of person America isn’t supposed to produce.
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There’s a kind of artist for whom the engine of creation is encumbrance, difficulty, as much the resistance of the materials as their agreeability. The works of such artists tend to accrue not only solutions to the problems of creative production but iterations or voicings of the problems themselves. Such an artist may eventually relinquish the dream of resolution in favor of finding ever more engaging versions of the encumbrance. Language’s half-adequacy, the unsatisfied rapport between sense and abstraction, the habit of every image to both veil and reveal underlying truth—if these seem the favored problems of many great poets it’s because in addition to implicating the phenomenal world, they also implicate poetic labor and form. They lend themselves to embodiment, not just expression.
For Graham, problems like these had been a wealth. But by mid-career she was hemmed in her own maze. Responses to the usual prompts became convoluted and circuitous. The poems were darting, frenzied, unleavened. There was a misalignment of the limiting principle. The poems had trouble stopping themselves, trouble deciding what did and didn’t belong. Room was made for alternate phrasings, aporias, even the unsayable—all represented by a burgeoning repertoire of dashes, blank space, brackets and parentheticals. Harsher registers entered the fray. At times she actively sought what would interfere in the conventional action of the poem. It’s not that the poetry wasn’t easy, but that it was against ease. She asked the reader to bear the encumbrance with her. She asked her forms to hold rather than resolve it.
I sometimes harbored a fantasy that beneath these distended artifacts lay a poem of beauty bare, a lucent and sinuous statement that, on account of the poet’s commitments or compulsions, couldn’t be allowed into the light unfettered. This hypothetical pure lyric had been overwritten in a thickening palimpsest until the bulging text matched the condition of mind from which it emerged, or the one the poet was fated to equate with the art. Hearing Graham describe her method for a few poems in Overlord (2005), which involved waking in the dark and scribbling unsighted with great speed in a state of half-sleep, I learned that my metaphor hadn’t fallen far from the literal truth. She’d become more invested in the saying than the said. If the books of the middle period were sometimes endured more than enjoyed, readers tended to say so only at a hush. But any ambivalence on the part of the audience was matched by the poems themselves. Graham had always written, as did Stevens, “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” But both form and content kept telling us that nothing suffices. Here was a rare thing indeed: a great poet who actively impeded our ability to experience her work as rewarding.
Then appears—here and there in the early millennium and all at once with the suitably titled Sea Change (2008)—a means of self-rescue. A less elusive object or problem, one rooted not in speculation or the vapor of spirituality but in the outward world. The crisis was no longer mental but material, the stakes inarguable and immediate. The thread was already there: in a quoted headline about the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, in a poem inspired by a statement of the Union of Concerned Scientists; another in which a girl cries over a climate report (“Let her weep … Tell her to tell the others. Let the dream of contagion / set loose its virus”). But by Sea Change the thread is pulled central, where it will govern the weave and become the ground note of her public reception.
I recall a vague lament—even the faintest possible scandal—among a few poet friends that Graham should direct her gift to something so topical. (In her defense, the “topic” is now difficult to avoid.) Could it be that uncomplicated, that the poems were simply about climate change? She had been exemplary in suggesting another kind of “aboutness,” one that, among the language arts, was poetry’s own province. She’d always praised the practical value of unknowing, the suspension of certitudes, the capacity of the poem to accomplish things ungoverned by the author’s intentions. The poem (as she literalized in Overlord) was an act of wayfinding in the dark; the meaning or message was adumbrated, made, earned en route. To engage with and admit responsibility to the great subject of the planet’s fate was, more and more with each book, praised as an act of engagement and responsibility. Graham’s public profile evolved a new dimension: the “serious poet” was now also the exemplary “literary citizen.”
If the individual poems remained acts of discovery, if they still resisted easy paraphrase, we nevertheless knew in advance how they were supposed to make us feel. Many perhaps found comfort in this more closed circuit of meaning. The combination of high-end artifice and prayerful chastening proved an appealing literary product. An insecurity was eased: no matter their struggle with any individual poem, the reader could be assured that they had handled a totem of conscience, a form of presence to an ungraspable disaster.
Graham had found not merely a subject but a remit, a role: “The central impulse of each new book involves my wanting to go into a more moral terrain—a terrain in which one is more accountable.” The role fit because it played to who she already was—it sponsored her existing disposition and apologized for its discontents. What if the dire pitch was all along justified by the hard facts, and verbal ceaselessness the analog of ethical vigilance? What she identified as the “central impulse” of each book, phrased above as a rigorous demand, was in practice also a permission structure. If philosophical lucidity or aesthetic majesty proved unyielding, they are also recast as less than ultimate ends. Her aim was so high, so morally inflected, as to be both more and less than writing an excellent poem. The self-conception was vitalizing and validating; her tireless inner labor now applied, complexly but inescapably, to a public problem of the greatest possible importance, just as that problem entered its decisive phase. Her hermetic art was “alive in the death / of this iteration of / earth.”
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We arrive, finally, at the present (a present, for Graham, made largely of the impending future). The horizon has dimmed (what other direction would history travel?). Graham has combined with the global (war, wildfire, whatever MSNBC is covering) the local: cancer, the mourning of her dead mother, the serious injury of a husband. She has a new book, To 2040, published last year, and the four before it have been collected in a single volume, [To] The Last [Be] Human. Her late period is now clearly in view. The work’s insistence on its own lateness is of course unmissable, almost its very message, its every constituent word weighed against our vanishing. So opens the first poem in To 2040, “Are We”:
extinct yet. Who owns
the map. May I
look. Where is my
claim. Is my history
verifiable. Have I
included the memory
of the animals. The animals’
memories. Are they
still here.
It’s a good poem and the one that early reviewers have been most inclined to quote, invariably invoking the ready-made package of responsibility and engagement, as though these lines could only issue from a vivisection of the terrible now. The presentist framing is abetted at every turn: Robert Macfarlane’s introductory essay to [To] The Last [Be] Human lists the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere in the first and last years the anthology spans, and in passing claims the totality of world-historical strife from 2002-2020 for the poems—the era’s more auspicious developments, obviously, don’t cathect. The timeliness of lyric, however, often involves a sleight of hand. Except for its nervy, staccato enjambments, “Are We” wouldn’t be so out of place in Merwin’s The Lice (1967), another book that responded to then-present calamity by regressing toward the primal mind and conjuring a barer, more oblique landscape than reportage could possibly require. Yet Merwin learned The Lice’s indelible voice not from the news or activist fashion but by translating the oldest things he could find.
In resisting aspects of Graham’s self-conception and certain wagers of her craft, this essay may scan as “negative.” Such is the moment’s timid and ingratiating critical culture—nowhere worse than in poetry. I watched reviews of To 2040 come in and waited for them to tell a different story about the work than Graham herself might tell. A low bar, but I never saw it cleared. Reading these pieces, one feels Graham’s actual poems recede in favor of an amalgamated object: a mix of the poet’s stated aims, the attractions of her person and accomplishment, the recent pathos of her biography and, chiefly, the gravity of the issues to which she’s applied her gift. She is, as the Guardian had it, “weather vane, sentinel, about-to-be lost soul. What makes her work required reading is her readiness to go where angels fear to write, to do the terrifying work of visualising the future.” What reviewers now seem to value is less the art than the human example interpolated therein. We know we cannot feel what must be felt, cannot summon a subjective experience equal to our occasion. We would like to imagine that someone can, a figure of emotional surrogacy or vicarious conscience. (So it is that international media and world leaders have found symbolic use for an autistic teenager holding lonely vigil, equipped only with the force of her attention and the depth of her feeling. The market in climate affect must be understood accordingly.) The poems be what they may: they can be projected on all the same.
In making a fetish of this extraliterary role, these readings miss, among other things, the work’s ambivalent self-recognitions. If, like Graham, you spend decades showing up to the empty page bent on being searching and honest, you’ll end up seeing yourself, and at least a part of you will know, better than any critic, the equivocal nature of the thing you’ve made. Let’s sample the new book at its most symptomatic: “If I am a messenger, what is // my message. I fear / it is fruitless. It is un-/yielding.” So fears the reader. The book’s overburdened title poem closes on the same note: “What was it, u must remember, what was yr message, what were you meant to / pass on?” Who, if not she, shall answer this? Her vision now lives alongside the specter of its exhaustion. “I do not want // to bear witness / anymore I say. It is / impossible. There is no / story.” Whether she likes it or not, whether there is or isn’t a story, the witness will most certainly continue. Ongoingness, for Graham, is what it means to live in a mind. Few poetic projects have to such an extent cast their lot with the present-tense action of verbal cognition, cognition independent of use or yield, operating under a ferocious injunction not to flag (“Don’t stop / I hear my mind hiss, / don’t stop for // anything”). But the mind’s firehose is an ambivalent aid to artmaking, and in at least the following respect the movements of the waking mind are akin to dream: you can’t assume the interest they hold for others in advance. To commit to thought unleavened by other modes of presence, unchecked by other values, unwilling to release its favored objects, is already to swim near a few DSM categories.
In her later poems, screens increasingly appear. VR, autocorrect, chatbots and drones cameo as objects of vague threat and spiritual dislocation. Yet one thing the tech that both attracts and appalls Graham has taught us is that attention can be made to serve distraction’s own ends. Reading Graham’s recent work, not only does one notice the incursion of onlineness as occasional subject, but as a suite of mental habits: the ever-replenishing logic of the feed, the fugues of diligent despair, the particular flavor of affectual theater that arises less from actual life than from living near select discourses. How else would you arrive at the remarkably partial picture of the moment as basically the marriage of tech and climate change? We get the following from a beautifully written if rather besotted profile: “It is on her phone, against the advice of her oncologist, her husband, her daughter, that Jorie Graham reads the news: Ukraine, flooding, famine. ‘She can’t help it,’ a friend said.” Form follows content: it’s doomscroll all the way down. From “Cage”:
—it’s yr cage, it’s leaking everywhere, lacking
everything—the shape of poverty is time, the form of time is
poverty, we
starve, you’ve no idea how fast we
starve.
How fast the notion of unstinting witness sponsors a kind of disaster tourism of the imagination. It’s as though The Road were being put forth as nonfiction or something near it. This is a tenured Harvard professor, as materially secure as an American poet can be, able to pass the COVID lockdown from the comfort of Martha’s Vineyard. Why the wish or inclination to claim such deprivation as this book is riddled with? Because, Graham might say, it’s nearly here, no matter where you live. She’s made a physic bet on the near future, coming due as soon as the year chosen for her title. But perhaps the imaginative lure of bare life emerges not only from the need to picture what’s to come but from the need to deny or flee what’s already here: abundance, decadence, sclerosis, teleological collapse. Which is only to say what should be obvious but is in fact notably absent from the conversation: that on the other side of the realities the project bravely faces are those it is unprepared to see. Who speaks from these poems but a privileged, post-belief subject stuck in the empire’s gentle senescence, at once wanting and fearing the return of absolute stakes, snared by a narrative both authentic and diversionary? The poems do not entirely resist this self-awareness. From “Time Frame”:
The American experiment will end in 2030 she said
looking into the cards,
the charts, the stars, the mathematics of it, looking
into our palms, into all of our
palms, into the leaves at the
bottom of
the empty cup
It plays interestingly against activist certitude to admit this braid of science and soothsaying, expert consensus and doom-casting. We should take the hint and consider the way the climate story folds into an older end-times imaginary and its enduring attractions, one of which is the desire to inhabit—and, for the poet, to speak at—history’s crescendo. Another of which is simply the promise of rest, an end to the tension of this interminable threshold. It’s counterintuitive but hardly a contradiction to fathom concern for the planet coexisting with the phantasmagoric pull—as old as culture itself—toward the one condition that would cauterize the drives, close the search and end the poem.
I’ve begun to adumbrate these poems as the kind of thing Graham’s audience can’t stop insisting they are: political or pseudo-political objects. If you’re a prophet, it matters only that your eschatological vision be correct. If your aim is the reorganization of power to better existing conditions (politics), then it matters that your vision be useful. You need a theory of the case and the role of your action within it—or you need to admit that you’re doing something else. I hoped not to have to say as much. Usefulness is not a criterion congenial to either poets or critics, and debates about poetry as a form of political practice are uniquely tedious, shot through with projection and cope. Start having one and you’re soon fated to play either the naïve believer, letting wishes override verifiable results, or the complacent dandy, denying others their just comforts and suggesting, perhaps, that you can afford to leave things as they are. It feels unnatural to reduce Graham’s inimitable rhetorical practice to the strenuous and literal measures of political application, but it’s no longer possible to approach her work without wending a hedge of epithet and insinuation aimed, with utter confidence, in that direction.
Let’s take the insinuation seriously. If the poems are necessary and good by extraliterary measures, a series of corollary questions might follow: To what supra-personal program are they allied? If politics implies contestation, to what persons or interests is that program opposed, and why have the opponents been granted the unusual benefit of being unidentified? To what extent is feeling personally implicated in civilization-scale malady a political good? To what extent does this writing share in the contemporary preference among segments of the educated and professional classes for responding to social iniquity by varieties of inner work and affective labor over and above material change? If Graham’s project is brave on the level of social statement, where has she diverged from the views common to this class? Where in her corpus has her formal daring been equaled by a risk of analysis or position? If the world is ending, why is morality, in particular, the highest end? What news, as it regards moral attainment, does Graham bring?
The political framing of Graham, which includes her own, is, whatever else, an anxiety symptom arising out of an insecurity in weighing countervailing values against incontestable exigency. In our time it is a form of honor, a port against the storm of ambivalence, applied frictionlessly because political experience itself has come to mean pain and piety attaching to varieties of information consumption. It is, like many of her poems, an exercise in wakeful agitation. It is to hear and feel the bad news. Because it so avidly bears that news and its spiritual aftershocks, her late work is praised as “necessary.” Yet the historically necessary poem is not just the one that responds to its moment, but the one that is produced by it. And there’s something to be learned by placing this essay’s more local act of criticism within a larger historical story, one consisting not just in parts of carbon or iOS updates but in the long denouement of the twentieth century and the fate of the nation (and the generation within it) that rode from its crest to its anxious present.
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Let’s try to figure, node by node, a path leading from the particulars of a life back to the grand sweep. A girl who would become a poet is born into the heart of the baby boom to Americans living in Rome. Her father is a foreign correspondent, her mother a sculptor from humble roots who works tirelessly to carve a career just below the lights of her generation. Jorie Pepper speaks Italian and French before learning English. She receives from her mother an enviable art education in the form of their field trips and a living example of what the vocation requires. Her father is no less interesting. A military intelligence officer deployed in the Italian campaign, he returns to the country as a graduate student studying the Renaissance and before long is filing reports for Edward R. Murrow’s CBS. He eventually heads Newsweek’s Rome bureau, a role in which he has audiences with the Pope and profiles world leaders. To those of us hailing from one American non-place or another, born to parents more dully employed, the scenario is impossibly attractive—an ideal scene of poetic development.
The generational math is neat. She’s eighteen, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. It’s 1968. After her expulsion for protesting she lands in New York, where she hears Eliot’s siren song through the open door of an NYU classroom. The calling is instant, irrevocable. Soon after she marries the son of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. The family is generationally wealthy and intimately networked in D.C. These are the years of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and if there’s a new fault line between institutional power and civic conscience, Kay Graham has a foot on either side. Jorie’s first marriage doesn’t work, and anyway this outward story of proximity can no longer be privileged above the one happening in the poems. The professional ascent will take care of itself (Iowa, then Harvard, in an endowed chair first held by John Quincy Adams). There will be significant events in the conventional register (remarriage, divorce, miscarriage, the birth of a child, cancer) but the real action and agency is henceforth on the page.
Nevertheless, let’s scrape the last two paragraphs for proper nouns. What do these names, taken together, mean? Coincidence, accomplishment, class position, the ideational cortex of the postwar West? We might emphasize that to be born in Rome in 1950 is to be born nearer to the seat of American power than to be born in Duluth. We might note that having a father in military intelligence and a vanguard artist mother belonging to a blockbuster generation is to implicate the “free world” project in both its cultural and covert flanks. We might say that to be of the Paris ’68 cohort would be to know the boomer idealisms at their most emergent and pure, especially the dream of a revolution in consciousness, from which world-renovating good might flow. If our protagonist were a poet, we might say that to arrive at Iowa in the 1970s would be to witness a boom of another kind: the expansion of the modern creative writing program. The place of poetry in society is newly settled: in higher educational institutions most directly, but more broadly in the cultural institutions of the ruling class—the latter category encompassing both private foundations and state arts endowments. The coin is prestige, honoraria, sinecure, rather than mere mammon. But if the discipline of the market hardly applied, it didn’t mean the space of these institutions was without a disciplinary aspect.
Why say any or all of this? Just to open the aperture and suggest a gestalt, however distant, against which an individual sense of civilizational coherence and degeneration might form. Just to sketch a sentimental education and give shape to the world that seals a radiant and productive solitude. Just to mark an as-yet-unrealized aspect of Graham’s eventual reception, a shade of meaning her work will one day obtain when her poems take their rightful place alongside Lowell’s in the literature of the crisis of the blue-state Brahmin. Just to say that if the poems are late Anthropocene, they are also late empire.
Late empire, not as a strict prediction of sovereign collapse but as a kind of psychosocial condition, is famously captured in C. P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” The poem is useful here less because it advances my argument than because it provides a place where Graham’s vision can join my soft dissent in a kind of synthesis. Cavafy’s poem conjures both civilizational peril and the sclerotic state of the society contemplating it.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Who among us hasn’t lamented as much? But the problem with the senators here isn’t they’re complacent, insufficiently aware or bought off by competing interests. Rather, their imagination of the coming threat has become overdeveloped; it no longer spurs action but induces a kind of monomania, the products of which are limited to gesture, affect and speech. The period of politics has elapsed for a fated spectatorship. Those in ostensible power have retreated into rituals of self-decoration and a kind of declensionist reverie, waiting for an outside force to intercede in their paralysis. The barbarians have become, as the poem famously concludes, “a kind of solution” to their anemia.
The poem is perceptive for its schema of center and margin, as well as its sense of the social use of what we might call a negative metanarrative. Given her tableau of birds and trees and the isolation and extremity of her voice, we inevitably imagine Graham’s missives issuing from beyond the city walls, where the veritable wild things are. She’s praised as a late prophet; perhaps it’s partly true. But a prophet hath no honor in her hometown, and Graham hath every honor there is. If she can hardly be said to be one of the senators, her instincts nevertheless share in the spiritual condition of the high institutional class, and the voice emanates from some adjacent sanctum, from a perch of noble office: her title as Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory recalls a role quite literally descended from the world of Cavafy’s poem.
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There’s a split identification at the heart of contemporary poetry. Nearly every individual poet understands herself—and not for no reason—to be marginal, outside, wounded by social power rather than wielding it; the voice of one crying out in some wilderness or another. Where this self-conception is most explicit, it tends to align, at least rhetorically, with radically emancipatory ends. But poetry itself, as a social and economic formation, is almost wholly yoked to elite institutions, its patronage downstream of either oligarchy or the state. Yet we often reflexively believe the legitimacy and authenticity of a poet lies in one’s distance from exactly this social base.
While Graham owes no special responsibility to this contradiction, emphasizing this unseen inside-ness, this sense in which her poems give us (like Lowell’s) the mind of the ruling class in extremis helps correct a misconception as to the true social role of her poetic program. The typology is remote to us now, but there’s no lack of precedent for taking prophecy, moral instruction and even visionary speech into the institutions. The role is that not of the activist but of the high cleric: on the side of good, but from a vaulted perch; answerable not to ordinary exigency, but to the highest end.
Yet by the cruel contingency of history, she’s a cleric who can’t in good conscience offer a redemptive or consoling program. And so there exists a cleavage between her ostensible psychic supposition (more dire means more true) and our response to it. Listen to the interviews—on stage, on podcasts or YouTube—and you’ll hear one interlocutor after another enlivened, thick with awe, almost agape. Even as she takes the pessimistic line and asks that we not shrink from imagining its terminus, she returns us to the mystery, to our inner scope. She undoes our habitual and defensive narrowing. This is her program’s curious double identity: she’s an evangelical bearing the charism of tongues, here to waken us to the good news—only she knows none. We seem to receive it all the same.
What the later Eliot did with a religious and rightward inflection—combine aesthetic vanguardism, astringent moral instruction and institutional authority—Graham attempts for the secular progressive. And perhaps Eliot, with whom her vocation began, also offers a lesson near the vocation’s end: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” We might add to this maxim its inverse. If we must wait without hope, we must also wait without hopelessness. For our despair has the wrong object, and our fear, passing as it does through so many local distortions and needs, is never quite fear of the right thing. It fills a void that ought to remain open. Something waits to be born there. Not the aesthetic ennoblement of the mind of the age but instead its vital alternative, its counterclaim, its successor.
As I wrote this essay in New York City last summer, the skyline began to fill with smoke. Outside it smelled like a campfire. Allegedly the fire was in Canada; I would’ve guessed it was the next street over. “Nobody gets / what they want. … What you get is to be changed,” Graham wrote in one of her greatest poems. What’s coming will change us, and not only for the worse. Nothing is ever only one thing. All things that are, are lights. It’s a hard wisdom, and perhaps no one but a fool or poet would follow it.
Art credit: Fiona Finnegan. Crystal gazing, the burning house, 2023. Oil on linen on wood, 32 x 40 cm. Moonbow, 2023. Oil on linen on wood, 40 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Let’s say it while there’s still time: Jorie Graham is our most important living poet. “Our” being readers of American English; the time being late, inexorably approaching an end; “important” being as much a measure of the aim as the attainment. The judgment would be a little ambivalent even among her devoted admirers. Graham is an indulgent artist, and this indulgence has led away from easy pleasure. On the page, what Graham has wanted Graham has got. She denies herself no unlovely line break, no syntax clipped or extended beyond the ear’s sympathy, no recourse to abstraction or knotty elaboration natural only to its maker. Ever since her third book, The End of Beauty (1987), she has achieved a kind of escape velocity, ascending to a plane of self-license on which general criteria no longer apply. But no matter: she rigged the game. For nearly forty years her poems have issued from a voice so desperate and imposing that it has served as the guarantor of its own words. Do whatever she likes and she can’t quite lose. But the wins have not come as they once did.
Graham’s project increasingly rested in depicting the sundering to which mind and spirit are subjected in our arid modernity. The compositional attitude ran in the other direction, offering an air of unmistakable self-belief, abetted, surely, by the privilege of her existing accomplishment. None of her peers rendered doubt, dispersal or inner dissonance with greater certitude and command. Early on she seemed to hold the whole of the old gift in her grip: a thinking that made music, a seeing that returned thought. But more and more she didn’t use the gift in the customary ways, and in time she lived up to her audacious title. A conception of beauty no longer led her. And likewise, she had sought an ending, an outer limit to lyric delight, since long before landing on the climate story. Where the aesthetic principle once was, a sterner conception of responsibility was set. No more unwarranted refuge in lucid composure. Gone the little pleasure of a perfect line, the miracles of concision. Instead of rest, a frantic mapping of the damage. Instead of stillness, pace. Instead of compression, ceaselessness. Like this Graham traveled from relatively conventional beginnings, building, book by book, an invention all her own. Well before her latest volume, To 2040, she had left the syncretic plane of pure poetic contemplation for a direct encounter with the age, and her singular high style was marshaled to convey an unremarkable view: the age is not well.
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To begin at the beginning, Graham’s first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980) and its first poem, “The Way Things Work,” are surely among the more confident career-openers of the last half century. It was there in the titles, the promise of a poet with unusual access to the mystery, inaugurating a method that would braid the natural world with the phantoms of cognition. Though the book was thick with God, philosophy and the great dead, her voice was unfreighted, nimble, hopping birdlike on a wire of verbs. “The way things work / is that we finally believe / they are there, / common and able / to illustrate themselves.” A profession of the poet’s faith: mere presentation may be revelatory. That was the payload of the wakefulness to which the poems called us by force of attraction: the whole of the eternal in the nick of time rightly attended to, in the plain thing ravenously seen.
If Graham was on the scent of the old themes, the writing itself never felt rearguard. This, too, was part of her lesson: the mysteries were not lapsed but active, ever renewing. She was in thrall to all of it. Late but not belated. Her senses desirous but her intellect disciplined; the voice was eager though not yet rushed; awake, not yet manic; its engine appetite, not yet compulsion. Unmissable, too, was her sense of belonging in the visionary company, the certainty of election: “Step, anywhere you go / is yours.” In their avid apprenticeship to the deep life of spirit, matter and mind, the saints and artists she referenced were her equals, and her long career has paid out a great faith to this early sense of vocation.
And what was Graham’s speaker doing? She’s scanning the surfaces—sunsets, frescoes, the arcs of birds—looking always for the openings through which the creation might let slip its secret. Though willing to traffic in the big abstractions (necessary insofar as the mind’s desire overruns the objects at hand), the dominant instinct went the other way. This was art that believed the lower things to be the codex of the higher. Naturalism, ekphrasis and the meditative watching of the mind are undertaken as forms of knowing, ways of advancing on the ineffable and vast. Thus is the work of attention justified, almost without limit.
Still, the poet of a first book is necessarily a poet out to prove herself, and so attention’s returns are still judged by what they can supply her craft: a redolent image, a concrete embodiment of thought, something sonorous and lapidary. And so we get a stunning pastoral like “Tennessee June,” its romantic sensuousness unburned by the nervous critique it would later receive. If a loveliness sometimes gushed forth it never felt cheap, never untethered to the mind’s searchlight. The intelligence at work was at once formidable and featherlight, interested mainly in its own wayfinding rather than the arrival represented by positions or programs: “there is no / entrance, / only entering.” Though the early poems are not her most original, they remain the most memorable in a literal sense, the most keepable in the body, therefore in the soul.
If these briefer forms abetted certain intensities and evinced a craft practiced as though through a jeweler’s loupe, a poem like “At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body,” from Erosion (1983), gives an early sample of how her gift could play out at an extended stretch, where her capacity for leaping association would be challenged to sustain a fundamental coherence and keep the stakes from waning. The ekphrasis no doubt owed to her mid-century Roman childhood, during which she tagged along with her sculptor mother to take in the masterworks of the Old World. While the ostensible subject risks seeming arch or ossified, it’s extraordinary how alive and self-directed Graham’s mind is within it. After a philosophically bent engagement with the pictorial scene, she cannily lands on the detail that pulls us dramatically back from the represented to the real: the painter, working on commission, substitutes the face of his plague-dead son for the image of the dead Christ, to rest forever in the chancel of Orvieto’s hilltop cathedral. Graham’s crescendo leans on an anecdote—cribbed from Vasari—in which Signorelli, “heart-broken as he was, had [his son] stripped naked, and with the greatest firmness of soul, without lamenting or shedding a tear, portrayed him, to the end that, whenever he might wish, he might be able by means of the work of his own hands to see that which nature had given him and adverse fortune had snatched away.” The scene pulls together all the threads of Graham’s obsession: the frail and wondrous life of the body, the indefatigable scrutiny of creation, the meaning of earthly experience glanced from the light of the eternal.
So eager is Graham to enter the fleshy mystery that her version of the sketching of the deceased boy might be mistaken for autopsy. But no less does the passage function as tacit ars poetica, capturing Graham’s own ethos and aim. Signorelli—
The poem’s achievement is to transpose the Renaissance painter’s endeavor, however aged and laden with the Christian story, into the great present tense of permanent concern. Such was Graham’s double game, then as now. Beneath her iconoclastic surfaces, she was an agent of continuity. She valued the human, the senses, the soul and above all the mind, where the aforementioned might exist in synthesis (this synthesis being another idealization, one she sometimes called “the true”). Like W. S. Merwin a generation before, her distinct individual practice seemed to conserve a whole definition of the art.
It’s as though her own poems, for all their freshness and invention, were written atop a rich palimpsest—repatriating, in necessarily incomplete ways, the accrued capacities of the human tongue into new and vivid forms. It’s notable, then, that this famous poet of the doomed future began as a poet sifting the noble past for a usable tradition. Her cultural references, even in her twenties, ran classical, high, European. Cameos by Pollock or Rothko counted as concessions to the not-quite present. The repertoire recalls an aspect of Sontag’s sensibility: an adoption of canonical, even conservative preferences that are made to appear nearly radical by dint of how alive they are to a stylish, exuberant speaker. Right out of the gate the poems possessed an authority, an untroubled inheritance of broad swaths of cultural patrimony, an implicit right to fineness. No elevation was off limits, nor the contemplative tendency curtailed for ordinary exigency. The art was blessed to have such a star as this swim into its ken.
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Then comes the comet, The End of Beauty (1987), in which finely wrought verbal objects are abandoned for an audacious expansion. The rudiments remain familiar—Greek and Biblical myth, the names of flowers—but what’s made from them is a new thing under the sun. Graham follows her themes by way of Möbius-like recursions. The sui generis forms frame not only what you’d ordinarily call content, but also the poet’s mind turning that content over, modulating it, seeing what meaning will hold true under the sign of a strenuous endurance. The generative principle, too, has shifted: toward a comprehensive account of the storm rather than its lucid condensation. The aesthetic change registers most obviously in the length of the poems, but also in a number of rhetorical and formal properties. By this point the pages, even from an illegible distance, are identifiably hers: the imperious voice commanding the typographical space, meting out speech and silence according to the new dispensation. You can feel it: a voice learning in real time what it can do, and realizing that what had previously seemed the outward bound of the possible was only convention, a false wall, passable to one who possessed the will. Form no longer makes demands on her; she makes demands on form.
The core of the book consists in a series of character pairings, many of which, despite their binary basis, Graham calls self-portraits: “Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them [Adam and Eve],” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone,” “Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay [Penelope at Her Loom].” Though the framing offered by these titles remains hard to parse, the schema surely appealed because the “self” it sought was guaranteed to remain in the tension between opposed poles, and the lyric energized by inhabiting that charged field. As for the famous names invoked, this was myth as a kind of mental space more than a story, a variable score for advanced cognition. If what was sketched in this vertiginous verbal cascade was indeed a self, it was one composed of questions and capacities more than biographical experiences or anything approaching what you’d normally call personality. With hindsight, the reference that reveals most is the one to Penelope. Graham will remain at the loom, devoted, tireless, no longer quite expecting resolution. Where another poet would settle for some bauble of perception, some chestnut of epiphany or sense of an ending to seal the act, she stays awake in the space, because she is able to, because the search is not complete, because the engine of desire—even at this newly impersonal pitch—is endless.
This is the juncture in Graham’s career at which the feeling of pace first enters the frame, presaging her later books Fast (2017) and Runaway (2020) and her interest in the technologies of speed and saturation. In the Adam and Eve poem, for example, the numbered sections winnow until dense chunks of language give way to fragments of single sentences. In fact, it’s not clear that the language changes much; it’s rather that the discourse is subject to increasing interruption—almost syncopation—by numbered section breaks, such that her speech keeps spilling past the symbols of closure and conclusion. The effect is core Jorie: we are sped up, breathless, forcing every moment to its crisis—and all of it happening in a way that’s unusually independent of what’s actually being said.
The speed also begs a different rhetoric, a new extension of the voice. The language is untethered, for the first time, from the conscious aspiration to the sonorous or the eloquent. The urgency of her project is incompatible with the old decoration. Any given clause or syntactical unit is passed briskly enough as to never quite rest under the microscope, and so is not built to instruct or amaze in isolation. So central is this feverish accretion that the effect is not really capturable in quotation; many of the lines, pulled from the rush, would not even register as especially poetic. The word orders—plain, paratactic, often abstract—are transmuted into poetry by dint of their speaker’s daunting intention, ionized in the force field of Graham’s voice. If the poet is living in all sorts of risk, threading a thin, vertiginous wire, it hardly matters; she’s not looking down, only ahead to the next few words that will bear her desperation and want as moment tips into moment, line into line. Not since Pound has an American poetic voice seemed a screen for such undiluted force of will. And as with Pound, a challenging grammar is authorized by sheer self-confidence.
If the capacious and encompassing technique that made Graham famous came at a cost, the bill wasn’t yet due, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the shock of possibility The End of Beauty registered. The next couple books were lit, in varying degrees, by the same flame, and a selection of the first five volumes, The Dream of the Unified Field, won the Pulitzer in 1996. Her ascent to the crest of the profession was secure. All relevant prizes, excepting the Nobel, would follow. From her post at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she becomes one of the most influential teachers in an MFA world that had by then more or less emerged into its modern form. She founds no aesthetic school, builds no movement, but many of her students, diverse in style and approach, are among the more interesting poets of the next generation, charting a third way with respect to what was then the field’s governing dichotomy between “official verse culture” and a coldly intellectual and academically captured avant-garde. The students did not, for the most part, want to write like her, but they all cited her catalyzing example. It could seem that Graham had it all: an easy brilliance in conversation, a generous and uncynical bearing, the right kind of face for an author photo. She ennobled poetry, and by extension us as poetry people. She was, as one critic put it, “internally enormous”—the kind of person America isn’t supposed to produce.
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There’s a kind of artist for whom the engine of creation is encumbrance, difficulty, as much the resistance of the materials as their agreeability. The works of such artists tend to accrue not only solutions to the problems of creative production but iterations or voicings of the problems themselves. Such an artist may eventually relinquish the dream of resolution in favor of finding ever more engaging versions of the encumbrance. Language’s half-adequacy, the unsatisfied rapport between sense and abstraction, the habit of every image to both veil and reveal underlying truth—if these seem the favored problems of many great poets it’s because in addition to implicating the phenomenal world, they also implicate poetic labor and form. They lend themselves to embodiment, not just expression.
For Graham, problems like these had been a wealth. But by mid-career she was hemmed in her own maze. Responses to the usual prompts became convoluted and circuitous. The poems were darting, frenzied, unleavened. There was a misalignment of the limiting principle. The poems had trouble stopping themselves, trouble deciding what did and didn’t belong. Room was made for alternate phrasings, aporias, even the unsayable—all represented by a burgeoning repertoire of dashes, blank space, brackets and parentheticals. Harsher registers entered the fray. At times she actively sought what would interfere in the conventional action of the poem. It’s not that the poetry wasn’t easy, but that it was against ease. She asked the reader to bear the encumbrance with her. She asked her forms to hold rather than resolve it.
I sometimes harbored a fantasy that beneath these distended artifacts lay a poem of beauty bare, a lucent and sinuous statement that, on account of the poet’s commitments or compulsions, couldn’t be allowed into the light unfettered. This hypothetical pure lyric had been overwritten in a thickening palimpsest until the bulging text matched the condition of mind from which it emerged, or the one the poet was fated to equate with the art. Hearing Graham describe her method for a few poems in Overlord (2005), which involved waking in the dark and scribbling unsighted with great speed in a state of half-sleep, I learned that my metaphor hadn’t fallen far from the literal truth. She’d become more invested in the saying than the said. If the books of the middle period were sometimes endured more than enjoyed, readers tended to say so only at a hush. But any ambivalence on the part of the audience was matched by the poems themselves. Graham had always written, as did Stevens, “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” But both form and content kept telling us that nothing suffices. Here was a rare thing indeed: a great poet who actively impeded our ability to experience her work as rewarding.
Then appears—here and there in the early millennium and all at once with the suitably titled Sea Change (2008)—a means of self-rescue. A less elusive object or problem, one rooted not in speculation or the vapor of spirituality but in the outward world. The crisis was no longer mental but material, the stakes inarguable and immediate. The thread was already there: in a quoted headline about the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, in a poem inspired by a statement of the Union of Concerned Scientists; another in which a girl cries over a climate report (“Let her weep … Tell her to tell the others. Let the dream of contagion / set loose its virus”). But by Sea Change the thread is pulled central, where it will govern the weave and become the ground note of her public reception.
I recall a vague lament—even the faintest possible scandal—among a few poet friends that Graham should direct her gift to something so topical. (In her defense, the “topic” is now difficult to avoid.) Could it be that uncomplicated, that the poems were simply about climate change? She had been exemplary in suggesting another kind of “aboutness,” one that, among the language arts, was poetry’s own province. She’d always praised the practical value of unknowing, the suspension of certitudes, the capacity of the poem to accomplish things ungoverned by the author’s intentions. The poem (as she literalized in Overlord) was an act of wayfinding in the dark; the meaning or message was adumbrated, made, earned en route. To engage with and admit responsibility to the great subject of the planet’s fate was, more and more with each book, praised as an act of engagement and responsibility. Graham’s public profile evolved a new dimension: the “serious poet” was now also the exemplary “literary citizen.”
If the individual poems remained acts of discovery, if they still resisted easy paraphrase, we nevertheless knew in advance how they were supposed to make us feel. Many perhaps found comfort in this more closed circuit of meaning. The combination of high-end artifice and prayerful chastening proved an appealing literary product. An insecurity was eased: no matter their struggle with any individual poem, the reader could be assured that they had handled a totem of conscience, a form of presence to an ungraspable disaster.
Graham had found not merely a subject but a remit, a role: “The central impulse of each new book involves my wanting to go into a more moral terrain—a terrain in which one is more accountable.” The role fit because it played to who she already was—it sponsored her existing disposition and apologized for its discontents. What if the dire pitch was all along justified by the hard facts, and verbal ceaselessness the analog of ethical vigilance? What she identified as the “central impulse” of each book, phrased above as a rigorous demand, was in practice also a permission structure. If philosophical lucidity or aesthetic majesty proved unyielding, they are also recast as less than ultimate ends. Her aim was so high, so morally inflected, as to be both more and less than writing an excellent poem. The self-conception was vitalizing and validating; her tireless inner labor now applied, complexly but inescapably, to a public problem of the greatest possible importance, just as that problem entered its decisive phase. Her hermetic art was “alive in the death / of this iteration of / earth.”
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We arrive, finally, at the present (a present, for Graham, made largely of the impending future). The horizon has dimmed (what other direction would history travel?). Graham has combined with the global (war, wildfire, whatever MSNBC is covering) the local: cancer, the mourning of her dead mother, the serious injury of a husband. She has a new book, To 2040, published last year, and the four before it have been collected in a single volume, [To] The Last [Be] Human. Her late period is now clearly in view. The work’s insistence on its own lateness is of course unmissable, almost its very message, its every constituent word weighed against our vanishing. So opens the first poem in To 2040, “Are We”:
It’s a good poem and the one that early reviewers have been most inclined to quote, invariably invoking the ready-made package of responsibility and engagement, as though these lines could only issue from a vivisection of the terrible now. The presentist framing is abetted at every turn: Robert Macfarlane’s introductory essay to [To] The Last [Be] Human lists the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere in the first and last years the anthology spans, and in passing claims the totality of world-historical strife from 2002-2020 for the poems—the era’s more auspicious developments, obviously, don’t cathect. The timeliness of lyric, however, often involves a sleight of hand. Except for its nervy, staccato enjambments, “Are We” wouldn’t be so out of place in Merwin’s The Lice (1967), another book that responded to then-present calamity by regressing toward the primal mind and conjuring a barer, more oblique landscape than reportage could possibly require. Yet Merwin learned The Lice’s indelible voice not from the news or activist fashion but by translating the oldest things he could find.
In resisting aspects of Graham’s self-conception and certain wagers of her craft, this essay may scan as “negative.” Such is the moment’s timid and ingratiating critical culture—nowhere worse than in poetry. I watched reviews of To 2040 come in and waited for them to tell a different story about the work than Graham herself might tell. A low bar, but I never saw it cleared. Reading these pieces, one feels Graham’s actual poems recede in favor of an amalgamated object: a mix of the poet’s stated aims, the attractions of her person and accomplishment, the recent pathos of her biography and, chiefly, the gravity of the issues to which she’s applied her gift. She is, as the Guardian had it, “weather vane, sentinel, about-to-be lost soul. What makes her work required reading is her readiness to go where angels fear to write, to do the terrifying work of visualising the future.” What reviewers now seem to value is less the art than the human example interpolated therein. We know we cannot feel what must be felt, cannot summon a subjective experience equal to our occasion. We would like to imagine that someone can, a figure of emotional surrogacy or vicarious conscience. (So it is that international media and world leaders have found symbolic use for an autistic teenager holding lonely vigil, equipped only with the force of her attention and the depth of her feeling. The market in climate affect must be understood accordingly.) The poems be what they may: they can be projected on all the same.
In making a fetish of this extraliterary role, these readings miss, among other things, the work’s ambivalent self-recognitions. If, like Graham, you spend decades showing up to the empty page bent on being searching and honest, you’ll end up seeing yourself, and at least a part of you will know, better than any critic, the equivocal nature of the thing you’ve made. Let’s sample the new book at its most symptomatic: “If I am a messenger, what is // my message. I fear / it is fruitless. It is un-/yielding.” So fears the reader. The book’s overburdened title poem closes on the same note: “What was it, u must remember, what was yr message, what were you meant to / pass on?” Who, if not she, shall answer this? Her vision now lives alongside the specter of its exhaustion. “I do not want // to bear witness / anymore I say. It is / impossible. There is no / story.” Whether she likes it or not, whether there is or isn’t a story, the witness will most certainly continue. Ongoingness, for Graham, is what it means to live in a mind. Few poetic projects have to such an extent cast their lot with the present-tense action of verbal cognition, cognition independent of use or yield, operating under a ferocious injunction not to flag (“Don’t stop / I hear my mind hiss, / don’t stop for // anything”). But the mind’s firehose is an ambivalent aid to artmaking, and in at least the following respect the movements of the waking mind are akin to dream: you can’t assume the interest they hold for others in advance. To commit to thought unleavened by other modes of presence, unchecked by other values, unwilling to release its favored objects, is already to swim near a few DSM categories.
In her later poems, screens increasingly appear. VR, autocorrect, chatbots and drones cameo as objects of vague threat and spiritual dislocation. Yet one thing the tech that both attracts and appalls Graham has taught us is that attention can be made to serve distraction’s own ends. Reading Graham’s recent work, not only does one notice the incursion of onlineness as occasional subject, but as a suite of mental habits: the ever-replenishing logic of the feed, the fugues of diligent despair, the particular flavor of affectual theater that arises less from actual life than from living near select discourses. How else would you arrive at the remarkably partial picture of the moment as basically the marriage of tech and climate change? We get the following from a beautifully written if rather besotted profile: “It is on her phone, against the advice of her oncologist, her husband, her daughter, that Jorie Graham reads the news: Ukraine, flooding, famine. ‘She can’t help it,’ a friend said.” Form follows content: it’s doomscroll all the way down. From “Cage”:
—it’s yr cage, it’s leaking everywhere, lacking
everything—the shape of poverty is time, the form of time is
poverty, we
starve, you’ve no idea how fast we
starve.
How fast the notion of unstinting witness sponsors a kind of disaster tourism of the imagination. It’s as though The Road were being put forth as nonfiction or something near it. This is a tenured Harvard professor, as materially secure as an American poet can be, able to pass the COVID lockdown from the comfort of Martha’s Vineyard. Why the wish or inclination to claim such deprivation as this book is riddled with? Because, Graham might say, it’s nearly here, no matter where you live. She’s made a physic bet on the near future, coming due as soon as the year chosen for her title. But perhaps the imaginative lure of bare life emerges not only from the need to picture what’s to come but from the need to deny or flee what’s already here: abundance, decadence, sclerosis, teleological collapse. Which is only to say what should be obvious but is in fact notably absent from the conversation: that on the other side of the realities the project bravely faces are those it is unprepared to see. Who speaks from these poems but a privileged, post-belief subject stuck in the empire’s gentle senescence, at once wanting and fearing the return of absolute stakes, snared by a narrative both authentic and diversionary? The poems do not entirely resist this self-awareness. From “Time Frame”:
It plays interestingly against activist certitude to admit this braid of science and soothsaying, expert consensus and doom-casting. We should take the hint and consider the way the climate story folds into an older end-times imaginary and its enduring attractions, one of which is the desire to inhabit—and, for the poet, to speak at—history’s crescendo. Another of which is simply the promise of rest, an end to the tension of this interminable threshold. It’s counterintuitive but hardly a contradiction to fathom concern for the planet coexisting with the phantasmagoric pull—as old as culture itself—toward the one condition that would cauterize the drives, close the search and end the poem.
I’ve begun to adumbrate these poems as the kind of thing Graham’s audience can’t stop insisting they are: political or pseudo-political objects. If you’re a prophet, it matters only that your eschatological vision be correct. If your aim is the reorganization of power to better existing conditions (politics), then it matters that your vision be useful. You need a theory of the case and the role of your action within it—or you need to admit that you’re doing something else. I hoped not to have to say as much. Usefulness is not a criterion congenial to either poets or critics, and debates about poetry as a form of political practice are uniquely tedious, shot through with projection and cope. Start having one and you’re soon fated to play either the naïve believer, letting wishes override verifiable results, or the complacent dandy, denying others their just comforts and suggesting, perhaps, that you can afford to leave things as they are. It feels unnatural to reduce Graham’s inimitable rhetorical practice to the strenuous and literal measures of political application, but it’s no longer possible to approach her work without wending a hedge of epithet and insinuation aimed, with utter confidence, in that direction.
Let’s take the insinuation seriously. If the poems are necessary and good by extraliterary measures, a series of corollary questions might follow: To what supra-personal program are they allied? If politics implies contestation, to what persons or interests is that program opposed, and why have the opponents been granted the unusual benefit of being unidentified? To what extent is feeling personally implicated in civilization-scale malady a political good? To what extent does this writing share in the contemporary preference among segments of the educated and professional classes for responding to social iniquity by varieties of inner work and affective labor over and above material change? If Graham’s project is brave on the level of social statement, where has she diverged from the views common to this class? Where in her corpus has her formal daring been equaled by a risk of analysis or position? If the world is ending, why is morality, in particular, the highest end? What news, as it regards moral attainment, does Graham bring?
The political framing of Graham, which includes her own, is, whatever else, an anxiety symptom arising out of an insecurity in weighing countervailing values against incontestable exigency. In our time it is a form of honor, a port against the storm of ambivalence, applied frictionlessly because political experience itself has come to mean pain and piety attaching to varieties of information consumption. It is, like many of her poems, an exercise in wakeful agitation. It is to hear and feel the bad news. Because it so avidly bears that news and its spiritual aftershocks, her late work is praised as “necessary.” Yet the historically necessary poem is not just the one that responds to its moment, but the one that is produced by it. And there’s something to be learned by placing this essay’s more local act of criticism within a larger historical story, one consisting not just in parts of carbon or iOS updates but in the long denouement of the twentieth century and the fate of the nation (and the generation within it) that rode from its crest to its anxious present.
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Let’s try to figure, node by node, a path leading from the particulars of a life back to the grand sweep. A girl who would become a poet is born into the heart of the baby boom to Americans living in Rome. Her father is a foreign correspondent, her mother a sculptor from humble roots who works tirelessly to carve a career just below the lights of her generation. Jorie Pepper speaks Italian and French before learning English. She receives from her mother an enviable art education in the form of their field trips and a living example of what the vocation requires. Her father is no less interesting. A military intelligence officer deployed in the Italian campaign, he returns to the country as a graduate student studying the Renaissance and before long is filing reports for Edward R. Murrow’s CBS. He eventually heads Newsweek’s Rome bureau, a role in which he has audiences with the Pope and profiles world leaders. To those of us hailing from one American non-place or another, born to parents more dully employed, the scenario is impossibly attractive—an ideal scene of poetic development.
The generational math is neat. She’s eighteen, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. It’s 1968. After her expulsion for protesting she lands in New York, where she hears Eliot’s siren song through the open door of an NYU classroom. The calling is instant, irrevocable. Soon after she marries the son of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. The family is generationally wealthy and intimately networked in D.C. These are the years of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and if there’s a new fault line between institutional power and civic conscience, Kay Graham has a foot on either side. Jorie’s first marriage doesn’t work, and anyway this outward story of proximity can no longer be privileged above the one happening in the poems. The professional ascent will take care of itself (Iowa, then Harvard, in an endowed chair first held by John Quincy Adams). There will be significant events in the conventional register (remarriage, divorce, miscarriage, the birth of a child, cancer) but the real action and agency is henceforth on the page.
Nevertheless, let’s scrape the last two paragraphs for proper nouns. What do these names, taken together, mean? Coincidence, accomplishment, class position, the ideational cortex of the postwar West? We might emphasize that to be born in Rome in 1950 is to be born nearer to the seat of American power than to be born in Duluth. We might note that having a father in military intelligence and a vanguard artist mother belonging to a blockbuster generation is to implicate the “free world” project in both its cultural and covert flanks. We might say that to be of the Paris ’68 cohort would be to know the boomer idealisms at their most emergent and pure, especially the dream of a revolution in consciousness, from which world-renovating good might flow. If our protagonist were a poet, we might say that to arrive at Iowa in the 1970s would be to witness a boom of another kind: the expansion of the modern creative writing program. The place of poetry in society is newly settled: in higher educational institutions most directly, but more broadly in the cultural institutions of the ruling class—the latter category encompassing both private foundations and state arts endowments. The coin is prestige, honoraria, sinecure, rather than mere mammon. But if the discipline of the market hardly applied, it didn’t mean the space of these institutions was without a disciplinary aspect.
Why say any or all of this? Just to open the aperture and suggest a gestalt, however distant, against which an individual sense of civilizational coherence and degeneration might form. Just to sketch a sentimental education and give shape to the world that seals a radiant and productive solitude. Just to mark an as-yet-unrealized aspect of Graham’s eventual reception, a shade of meaning her work will one day obtain when her poems take their rightful place alongside Lowell’s in the literature of the crisis of the blue-state Brahmin. Just to say that if the poems are late Anthropocene, they are also late empire.
Late empire, not as a strict prediction of sovereign collapse but as a kind of psychosocial condition, is famously captured in C. P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” The poem is useful here less because it advances my argument than because it provides a place where Graham’s vision can join my soft dissent in a kind of synthesis. Cavafy’s poem conjures both civilizational peril and the sclerotic state of the society contemplating it.
Who among us hasn’t lamented as much? But the problem with the senators here isn’t they’re complacent, insufficiently aware or bought off by competing interests. Rather, their imagination of the coming threat has become overdeveloped; it no longer spurs action but induces a kind of monomania, the products of which are limited to gesture, affect and speech. The period of politics has elapsed for a fated spectatorship. Those in ostensible power have retreated into rituals of self-decoration and a kind of declensionist reverie, waiting for an outside force to intercede in their paralysis. The barbarians have become, as the poem famously concludes, “a kind of solution” to their anemia.
The poem is perceptive for its schema of center and margin, as well as its sense of the social use of what we might call a negative metanarrative. Given her tableau of birds and trees and the isolation and extremity of her voice, we inevitably imagine Graham’s missives issuing from beyond the city walls, where the veritable wild things are. She’s praised as a late prophet; perhaps it’s partly true. But a prophet hath no honor in her hometown, and Graham hath every honor there is. If she can hardly be said to be one of the senators, her instincts nevertheless share in the spiritual condition of the high institutional class, and the voice emanates from some adjacent sanctum, from a perch of noble office: her title as Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory recalls a role quite literally descended from the world of Cavafy’s poem.
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There’s a split identification at the heart of contemporary poetry. Nearly every individual poet understands herself—and not for no reason—to be marginal, outside, wounded by social power rather than wielding it; the voice of one crying out in some wilderness or another. Where this self-conception is most explicit, it tends to align, at least rhetorically, with radically emancipatory ends. But poetry itself, as a social and economic formation, is almost wholly yoked to elite institutions, its patronage downstream of either oligarchy or the state. Yet we often reflexively believe the legitimacy and authenticity of a poet lies in one’s distance from exactly this social base.
While Graham owes no special responsibility to this contradiction, emphasizing this unseen inside-ness, this sense in which her poems give us (like Lowell’s) the mind of the ruling class in extremis helps correct a misconception as to the true social role of her poetic program. The typology is remote to us now, but there’s no lack of precedent for taking prophecy, moral instruction and even visionary speech into the institutions. The role is that not of the activist but of the high cleric: on the side of good, but from a vaulted perch; answerable not to ordinary exigency, but to the highest end.
Yet by the cruel contingency of history, she’s a cleric who can’t in good conscience offer a redemptive or consoling program. And so there exists a cleavage between her ostensible psychic supposition (more dire means more true) and our response to it. Listen to the interviews—on stage, on podcasts or YouTube—and you’ll hear one interlocutor after another enlivened, thick with awe, almost agape. Even as she takes the pessimistic line and asks that we not shrink from imagining its terminus, she returns us to the mystery, to our inner scope. She undoes our habitual and defensive narrowing. This is her program’s curious double identity: she’s an evangelical bearing the charism of tongues, here to waken us to the good news—only she knows none. We seem to receive it all the same.
What the later Eliot did with a religious and rightward inflection—combine aesthetic vanguardism, astringent moral instruction and institutional authority—Graham attempts for the secular progressive. And perhaps Eliot, with whom her vocation began, also offers a lesson near the vocation’s end: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” We might add to this maxim its inverse. If we must wait without hope, we must also wait without hopelessness. For our despair has the wrong object, and our fear, passing as it does through so many local distortions and needs, is never quite fear of the right thing. It fills a void that ought to remain open. Something waits to be born there. Not the aesthetic ennoblement of the mind of the age but instead its vital alternative, its counterclaim, its successor.
As I wrote this essay in New York City last summer, the skyline began to fill with smoke. Outside it smelled like a campfire. Allegedly the fire was in Canada; I would’ve guessed it was the next street over. “Nobody gets / what they want. … What you get is to be changed,” Graham wrote in one of her greatest poems. What’s coming will change us, and not only for the worse. Nothing is ever only one thing. All things that are, are lights. It’s a hard wisdom, and perhaps no one but a fool or poet would follow it.
Art credit: Fiona Finnegan. Crystal gazing, the burning house, 2023. Oil on linen on wood, 32 x 40 cm. Moonbow, 2023. Oil on linen on wood, 40 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.