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.”