Standing on the Shoulders and Questioning the View

Thomas Gardner, in his article “Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty and a Fresh Look at Modernism,” analyzes Graham’s use of liminal space in contrast to modernist poets that came before her.  Inspired by a Graham’s statement in which she claims that the Western view of what the in-between space can actually do has been narrowed by modernist poets, Gardner explores what happens when her poems are placed against those of three well-known modernist poets: Stevens, Frost, and Eliot. With each poem, Gardner emphasizes where the modernist poet moves in both directions in regard to the in-between space and how Graham then opens that space and dwells there. Garner compares Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” to Graham’s “Ravel and Unravel,” Frost’s “Birches” to Graham’s “Vertigo,” and Eliot’s The Waste Land to Graham’s “Pollock and Canvas.” By focusing on these works, Gardner discovers how Graham pulls from modernist poets and applies her interest in the “moment of process,” expanding and challenging the way these poets dealt with the questions that arose in their writing.

                When looking at Stevens’s poem in relation to “Ravel and Unravel,” Gardner suggests that both poets ask similar questions: the speaker encounters a gap and tries to work through his/her response. However, when Graham takes it up years later, she shifts the ending of enraged order and takes it back and slows the poem down to the moment just before the shape if formed, the “moment of process” in which the mind is most fully engaged. Gardner finds a similar occurrence in his comparison of “Birches” to “Vertigo.” However, while “Birches” seems to present a circular movement, Graham freezes the moment and challenges the idea the “earth is the best place for love” by declaring that it “cannot love.” In slowing the moment with frantic questions, Graham concludes that the body, much like the form of poetry, limits the mind, unable to follow its boundless flights. Graham also challenges the idea found in The Waste Land in which Eliot refers to a buried corpse as the death of culture and wonders if some new form will grow to replace it. Graham revisions this idea by claiming it is not “controlling hands” but a shift in view, a removing of hands, that creates a new form.

                Through Garner’s investigation, Graham’s poems take on a new dimension in regards to the poetry movement as well as open up a new way of thinking and of questioning. Instead of accepting the in-between space as prescribed by past poets, Gardner demonstrates how Graham challenges and expands on their way of thinking by focusing on the “moment of process.”

The End of Beauty

Perhaps it is my research regarding Schnackenberg’s use of thresholds that has me tuned to liminal spaces, but in reading Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty, she seemed to be dwelling in the liminal. In the beginning, I noticed her tendency to describe objects or features through a binary of black and white or dark and light; however, as I moved through the volume, she seemed to lean into shadow, into that liminal space of what lies in between and the shifting back and forth between. For example, Graham describes the transition of light to dark across the human form:

            We stood there. Your face went out a long time

            before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said. Nor I,

            you, whatever you still were

            replied. (What the End is For)

As the darkness crosses over “Your face,” the speaker not only describes his or her inability to distinguish the form of the “you” but seems to question whether the lack of light has altered his or her understanding of the “you,” unsure as to if “you” is still the same “you.”  Graham returns to this idea later in “Imperialism,” in which the form is shifted by the play of the light:

            Last night I watched your face in the lamplight fluttering—

We were trying to talk—The kerosene was thinning—

You never had your face but something like cleared light then

soiled light

(roiling)

            and on it all—imprint that would not take—eyeholes, mouth hole. There were moths.

 

Again, Graham seems to be questioning the form of the face and whether it defines the person. She then continues with this idea of liminality:

            There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

            broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

 

In this liminal space, Graham seems to ponder the idea of the created body and the idea of shapes and forms. Much like Teresa of Avila who believed in a passive state in which the mind could reach a state no longer aware of the body,  Graham seems to question the relationship between the mind and the body as well as the body’s inability to go where the mind desire to go. For example, in her poem “Vertigo,” the speaker asks what it is that pulls at one, the emptiness at the beginning of the story:

            The mind trying to fasten

            and fasten, the mind feeling it like a sickness this wanting

            to snag, catch hold, begin, the mind crawling out to the edge of the cliff

            and feeling the body as if for the first time—how it cannot follow, cannot love.

 

At the risk of full disclosure, I found Graham’s work incredible challenging, and I am not sure exactly what made it so difficult. I enjoyed the poetic images that she creates in a single stanza comprised of a single phase. While her poems seems to have a narrative, taking me on a sort of linear journey, her descriptions seemingly trivial images, creating a beautiful image despite her attempts not to.  Despite my general confusion, I was able to pick up patterns, repeating images or concepts.

Playing in Shadow - Anne Carson's Nox

I could focus on the obvious: the fact this this is an unexpected accordion text in a box. But I think that Charisson does a really thorough job of investigating the text, mentioning possibilities that I hadn’t thought of before. For example, when presented from the back, it is a blank book, adding an even deeper sense of loss and nothingness. I did attempt to unfold the entire book but only got halfway through before I ran out of floor. What I was able to unfold did provide a different viewing experience, highlighting the gaps of white space, text, and images.

I was struck and settled by her lines, “It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.”  I felt like I understood some aspect of what she was doing, and how I should approach the work. Burt alludes to this in his article, but I immediately thought of a reliquary, the original holding pieces of her brother, and mass-market version holding a representation of Michael. In reading the shadows of Michael, it seems that there was several deaths to mourn, specifically in regards to Michael. Her mother declares him dead long before his physical death, and Anne alludes to his absence as a form of death in the sense that he has a new name, identity. Again, the brother she knew died long before his physical death.

The closest Anne comes to capturing Michael for me is Section 8. 2 in which Carson references the picture of Michael under the tree house and recalls his desire to hang with the older boys. She describes Michael’s look at invisible as if, even at ten, he is shadow: “No one knew him. He was the one that was old.” In the tree house picture on the previous page, it is difficult to make out his face. They’re too far away from the camera, the stark contrast of light and the shadow blurs his features. The additional pictures that Carson includes enhances the themes of shadow and water.

Burt mentions the poem “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by my Brother,” which illuminated the images of water as well as Michael’s final wish to be cremated and given to the ocean. While Burt points out that the brother may not be a direct representation of Michael, placing the poem next Nox adds a new perspective.  The presentation of shadow and water here reminded me of Heavenly Questions and the concept of thresholds. Carson, through a very different approach, seems to make peace with the inadequacy of language to make sense of death, of the not knowing. However, for the living, it seems to be the only available avenue to comprehend the incomprehensible.

                As I read Anne Winters, I was reminded of Adrienne Rich’s essay in which she says that she uses poetry in order to make sense of things. I can see this idea in Winters’s work, specifically when looking at “The Grass Grower.” The McHale article was also helpful in looking at the narrative that is created in this specific poem as far as investigating ways in which Winters constructs gaps and spaces within the poetic form.  

                The poem itself is divided into two sections, and within the space of the two sections, it is evident that a time lapse has occurred. The speaker begins the narrative in 1979, after integration and only a few years after Jim Crow Laws were abolished, but then flashes back to the speakers first encounter with the grass grower. The overall narrative depicts the evolution of the relationship between “a skinny white kid” and “a black vet” named Joel Harmon. If the collection of poems can be viewed as a cohesive whole with one speaker, it is possible to make the argument that the speaker is Anne herself. However, the first-person narrator remains unnamed and undescribed, aside from the aforementioned epithet.

By applying McHale’s contributions to the poetic narrative, I can see how Winters constructs the narrative from stanza to stanza. In the first stanza Winters creates a snap shot of Joel Harmon, the grass grower, providing a brief but vivid description of the subject. As the reader focuses on this image, the speaker shifts back into memory, imagining him “[as] on that first day.” The reader is propelled forward into the next stanza and back into time through Winters’s enjambed line formation. This technique is used continuously through the two-part poem, guiding the reader not only in and out of time but blurring the lines of the internal and external.

Spaces are created through the varied use of internal thought and the external dialogue that occurs between the speaker and Joel Harmon. Within the dialogue, Winters seems to play with the concept of time as Harmon recounts his experiences and memories to the speaker, creating a third person within the narrative, a personified Jim Crow. Recalling the idea of the initial snapshot, the speaker paints an image as “Line by line you gave me Jim’s portrait, his subtle subsets.” As the speaker explores these experiences, she later declares, “So I’d sensed by then, that Jim, and not you, was the subject.” Harmon is displaced by the fictional image of Jim Crow, the Jim that “made [him] a grass-widow man here in Harlem.

While narrative is significant in this particular poem, Winters also does some interesting and worthwhile things with the concept of language. Joel Harmon is a radio repair man, someone who fixes a source of sound and words yet “simply conducting, in silence [his] life.” Through his dialogue, Winters points to the power of words, equating the words of Jim Crow Laws to the death march of Hitler and Stalin, “liked words.” And I can’t help but connect the idea of Harmon as a repair man of words, sowing the seeds of … I’m not quite sure what.

What does it all mean?

As I read Jean Valentine, I was reminded at times of Merwin, at times of Rich, but then at times there was something that seemed all her own. I have nothing really to stand on in this statement as the collection is the only work of Valentine I have read; however, I can state that she is not a copycat of either but uses her own voice to explore some of the same concepts.  Like Merwin, Valentine is interested in the idea of loss, memory, and the beyond – what lies beyond death. Like Rich, Valentine is interested in the powerless, the helpless, and the act of creating. And like them both, Valentine seems to ponder the place and purpose of the aging poet. However, Valentine does not come across as politically charges at Rich’s work; Valentine seems to be more concerned with the human connection.

 As a newcomer to both Rich and Valentine, I found that Rich could be appreciated and, despite her complexity, could be accessed in a superficial way upon the initial reading. While you may not know the exact event Rich is referencing, I could still enjoy the lyrical sound of her work and the initial feelings it invoked. In some ways, the ambiguity of Rich’s poems was intentional to create a more global connection, to enforce the idea that we are all humans tied to the politics of location. Valentine's work, however, isjust as complex but slightly less approachable. As she referrences various works and people I am not familiar with, I had to put forth extra effort to connect with her work. Perhaps this is a way for her to speak to those that want to know, that are willing to go beyond the questions for answers? Playing with the idea of the supernatural and the dreaming world, Valentine ponders the idea of knowing, the idea of breaking the glass between this world and the next.  For example, in her poem “You ask,” Valentine presents a scenario of someone seemingly from the beyond asking the speaker to coffee: “You ask, / Could we have coffee?  --No, my truth, I’m still on this side.” The speaker then goes on to tell the spirit (friend, lover, family member, whomever) that s/he still sees him/her in the faces of strangers, that s/he continues to miss that person.

However, the poem seems to be more than that. Valentine uses the reference of the beautiful edge by the water in this poem as in others, leading me to the idea of water used in the Bible, but I am not sure what to make of it. She references the story of the woman at the well in her poem “Eurydice who guides,” in which the speaker says, “I met them in the country by the well / and once I drank from them / I never thirst.” In the biblical version, Jesus tells the woman to drink and she will never thirst again; however, Valentine combines this story with the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus (which can also be equated to Lot and his wife. Throughout the work, Valentine seems to draw from images of music, myths and stories from various religions, in an effort to know. This desire seems to culminate in her series to Lucy, in which she explores the idea as the mother of the human species, as the being that knows everything.

Valentine does so much, and her poems seem to interconnect across the sections. I am still not sure of how it all works together, but her work is something I would definitely like to explore further.

When I first read Rich’s “USonian Journals,” I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. First, I wondered if the placement signified something as the rest of the sections seemed for the most part in chronological order. Second, the “USonian Journals” is the only section written in prose poetry. I understood these selections better, but I am not exactly sure why. Perhaps I understood because there were more words? Perhaps I understood better because of its location, and I had experienced some of her work already? While I haven’t come to any concrete conclusions, I do think that reading Longenbach’s chapter on Poem and Prose as well as Rich’s essay “Notes toward a Politics of Location” helped me tremendously in looking at the “USonian Journals” in a thoughtful way. 

Longenbach reverences several examples of poets who turned to prose writing when the poetic lines wouldn’t present themselves. In his example of Yeats, Longenbach suggests that “whenever he wrote out a prose version of what he imagined a poem might be, the poem became itself not because of the logical sense of the prose but because a snatch of language in the prose ignited, leading sonically to other words, creating patterns of sound while simultaneously disrupted them” (103-4).  While Rich kept the prose form in the “USonian Jouranls,” I can see her using them as a way of putting ideas into words and then developing those ideas into individual poems. The idea of a journal in itself suggests that these prose poems were originally thoughts on a page, solidifying a moment in time into words on a page, a moment Rich could then explore. Additionally, the dates associated with the “Journals” spans two years or so, before and after Septemember 11, 2001.

If, in fact, Rich began the “Usonian Journals” in the same fashion as Yeats, I can see where images in the “USonian Journals” inspired separate poems. Hints of the “Journals” can be found in “This Evening Let’s,” in which the speaker wished to avoid the topic of country but to focus on the individual, to focus on the just the two of them at that particular moment, in that particular place. This poem seems to echo—as well as counter— lunch with K., in which K. categories their various coworkers and discusses Victorian prose in terms of the industrial revolution. Similarly, I saw residual ideas from “Address,” in which Rich depicts the “mixed metaphor of food,” the blending of replacing Thanksgiving with Christmas. In “USonian Journals,” the speaker ruminates over “how quickly things and people get replaced. Thanksgiving is replaced by Christmas before it has even arrived. The husband is replaced by the speaker when the wife mistakes the speaker’s car for her own.

In addition to Longenbach, Rich’s “Notes toward a Political of Location,” help illuminate the ideas that Rich is hashing out in the “Journals.” Rich says that she needs “to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create” (64). This investigation of a moment seems to be depicted in the “Journals,” in which violence occurs outside of the restaurant, and she documents her movements. The speaker goes on to take that moment than ruminate on how she would like to show what’s happening, not just the bad stuff but to “see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter.”

In her desire to slow things down, to record a moment in order to know, Rich seems to struggle with the medium of language, aware of its ability “to ostracize,” “to dissociate,” to “torture,” but also aware of its ability to create a “territory shared,” a commonality that could unite.  

Upon Discovering Adrienne Rich

            In reading Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins, I immediately picked up the political implications—of varying subjects and degrees—within each of the poems that I have thus far read. Like Merwin, her poems seem to have lyrical quality, one in which you can appreciate the sound of the poem, the images that she evokes without knowing the exact event she references, although a specific event may not serve as the primary focus of every poem. In some poems she references specific events, such as the voting scandal in Tallahassee, FL. In others, she seems to be, like Merwin, seeking answers to impossible questions; however, the questions seem to be different for Rich.

            For Rich, the questions seem to revolve around making sense of the world in which she finds herself and, in the process, drawing political attention to the oppressed, the marginalized. While Merwin investigates memory and distance in his book of poems, Rich seems to use distance in an effort to separate herself from the culture of the location in which she happened to find herself, to don the persona of those marginalized in order to see the world as they do. However, Rich is also marginalized as a Jewish lesbian growing up in the midst of great political turmoil. She realizes that she cannot completely separate herself from the internalized values, moral, etc. with which certain outside forces instilled. Her parents, her location, her education have all influenced her place in the world and how she is expected to view it.  

            In her efforts to take on different perspectives, Rich diminishes the larger implications of global politics and brings the focus back to the individual, advocating personal relationships and the individual over governmental politics. While Merwin’s use of “I” in his poems left me with the impression of a single speaker, Rich’s “I” appears to be more complicated, taking on different personas at various times as she attempts to distance herself from her individual identity to investigate the perspective of others. Despite such a global focus, her poems strike me as intimate, not overtly attacking corporate greed, government power and oppression but in raw whispers. Instead, she focuses on people—their responses and how the poet speaker wishes to be viewed by them. At times, however, the poems seem to express the thoughts of a frustrated speaker in the inability of Man, specifically Americans, to step out of their habits and sense of entitlement to use their voices, to view the world not as a set of stereotypes but as a community of individuals with individual histories, to invest in people instead of things.

            While Merwin’s poetry provided me with a sense of universal connectedness through personal images, Rich seems to be tearing down the universal in order to focus on the individual, creating in me the overall idea that we are all humans and have the same capacity to experience the same emotions but that we are all still individuals that perceive the world in individual ways.