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.