Review of Jorie Graham's last two books, one of which gathers four previous collections

Read the full review here: “One Must Keep Trying to Make the Unsaid Said: Jorie Graham’s To 2040 and [To] the Last [Be] Human,” in Annulet.

Excerpt:

In “Are We,” a raven arrives. Sort of. “Do you remember/ despair its coming// closer says” (6). I love that the raven does not ask this question, but its coming closer does, signaling that the voices in these poems might come from anywhere. (Indeed, fourteen lines later, the light also speaks.) Graham is a metaphysical poet whose thirst for the real now meets a dystopian future that is empty and somehow not empty: the raven’s arrival prompts the speaker to ask “Is this a real/ encounter I ask. Of the old/ kind. When there were// ravens. No/ says the light. You/ are barely here. The/raven left a// long time ago” (6-7). The speaker argues with the light:

            But is it not

here I ask looking up

through my stanzas.

Did it not reach me

as it came in. Did

it not enter here

at stanza eight—& where

does it go now

when it goes away

again, when I tell you the raven is golden,

when I tell you it lifted &

went, & it went.

                        —To 2040 7

This stunning gesture might be a lonelier version of my favorite moment in “The Bird on My Railing,” from Place, where Graham raises the question of what vestiges of an image are transferred between poet and reader, finally expressing what sounds like a wish (more than fervent curiosity) to see what her reader sees. There is an imperative: “you who are not seeing it with your own/ eyes: look:”—she tries to pin down the light (for the reader, for herself) in the moment she writes, which vanishes in the effort, as assuredly as water slips through cupped hands. “[Y]et go back up/ five lines it is/ still there I can’t/ go back, it’s/ gone,/ but you—/ what is it you are/ seeing” (To the Last, 76).[1] Graham’s self-referential lines, both when locating —or attempting to locate—the raven in “Are We” and the light in “The Bird on My Railing” exploit the tension between the physical world that prompts the poem and the poem’s textuality—she is ever conscious of the made thing the poem is. I find the move delightful when it tries to make sense of the transaction with the reader; it is as if to say, “if I describe, will you, reader, experience?” Despite this formulation as a question, this much I suspect Graham trusts: that poetry works. That words, with all their pitfalls, carry. And in much of the late work, Graham shows us just how seriously she takes this by locating poetry in a post-human world. Thomas Gardner once argued that Graham’s poems “ask whether we can both acknowledge our distance from words and use that distance to think with”.[2] Over two decades later, she still asks this of us. The implicit (yet never naïve) trust she has always placed in language (she once said that what leaks in between attempts with words to seize the thing is the thing)[3] is now vaulted into a remote and impossible future: “Years go/ by. Imagine that. And there is still a speaker. There will always be a speaker” (To the Last 145). Graham’s radical hope (a term she uses often in interviews) is that there will always be a speaker, except for this haunting feeling that, once the ravens are gone, the memory of ravens will fade, and with that, the ability to conjure ravens on the page will also fade.    

[1] Powerful poetry invites commentary: I wrote this section about “Are We” before listening to David Naimon interview Graham on the Between the Covers podcast (August 9, 2023), where they had an extensive conversation about this raven, and I had written the bit about “The Bird on My Railing” before seeing that Walt Hunter wrote of this very poem in The Atlantic earlier this year (“Notice All that Disappears,” April 6, 2023). However, pairing the two and the take on self-referential gestures is mine. The enticement to dialogue inherent in Jorie Graham’s poetry ensures that certain poems will stir multiple readers, and, as if to cement my point about her fascination with her own poetry, she told Naimon that the final words of “Are We” made her drop her pen.

[2] “Jorie Graham’s Incandescence,” 1999. Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry, Ed. Thomas Gardner. 2005.

[3] Qtd. in an interview in Thomas Gardner’s “Jorie Graham’s Incandescence.” [ibid]

Moon poetry deadline extended--again! JUNE 30, 2022

The deadline for international moon-bound poetry (for my anthology) has been extended until June 30! South American poets especially, please submit!

Details about the Lunar Codex project in this previous post!.

Guidelines here: http://www.brickstreetpoetry.org/polaris-3-guidelines/

On Still Recognizable Forms

The book is preoccupied with what can be rescued (“Rescue” is the title of the first poem) or preserved, whether that be a natural environment or something as ephemeral as language. The subjects range from a landfill in Kenya to my rural Indiana prairies and barn.

There are ekphrastics based on the photography of Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene project (one of these has the book’s title and is about plastic in the Kenyan landfill). The poem that appeared in Scientific American was inspired by the story of Corey Gray, the LIGO astrophysicist whose mother Sharon Yellowfly, a member of the Siksika Nation, translated the press release about the discovery of gravitational waves into Blackfoot. That poem is also about information loss: layers of glaciers hold intelligence about ancient climates, but as the planet warms, they melt more rapidly, and that information is released. Yellowfly's rendering of news about a gravitational wave that has traveled from the early universe to just now reach us into her native language that has been disappearing (this required the invention of new words—Einstein’s theory of relativity becomes “beautiful plantings”) resonates with climatologists preserving specimens of glaciers for knowledge about ancient climates before it disappears.

Closer to home, there are nights of fireflies lighting up my field seen through the haze of sickness, the task of cleaning out the barn filled with materials beyond repurposing or salvage, and the very uphill battle of reestablishing native warm-season grasses and wildflowers on land that had been agricultural for decades. It is one part of my story that began when my partner and I moved, at age 35, from the Sonoran desert to the Midwest to try a different way of life.

Three ways to order a copy:

You can order a copy through Laurel Review Greentower’s Submittable page: https://thelaurelreview.submittable.com/submit/99890/subscriptions-orders

Or, send a check for $7 (specify my chapbook) to:

GreenTower Press
Department of Language, Literature, and Writing
Northwest Missouri State University
800 University Drive
Maryville, MO 64468

Or, email the press at TLR@nwmissouri.edu and set up a Venmo, PayPal, or whatever you need.

Launching a bottle into the cosmic ocean

Remember the Voyager record? What Carl Sagan described as “launching a bottle into a cosmic ocean”? A time capsule is a chance for humanity to send a letter to itself. Right now, artists around the world have the opportunity to contribute to The Lunar Codex project.

A great piece on our collective art project had these wonderful words by director Samuel Peralta:

“The Lunar Codex, at its heart, is a project to spread hope during this dark time — the years of the COVID-19 pandemic on Earth — both for creative artists and those who love the arts,” Peralta said. “The project attempts to fill the moon with some of the heart of humanity, our art, so that when we look to the sky, the moon is a tangible symbol of hope, of what is possible when you believe. 

“This is one reason we’ve focused on contemporary creative artists,” he said. “There are projects that archive the works of Shakespeare, or Michelangelo, or Beethoven; and rightly so, for they represent the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. This project focuses on the creativity of our generation, those making art through these troubled years, people like you and I.

“Thus, the Lunar Codex is also a message-in-a-bottle to the future, a snapshot of our generation. Our hope is that future travelers who find these time capsules will discover some of the richness of our world today. It speaks to the idea that, despite wars and pandemics and climate upheaval, humankind found time to dream, time to create art.”

The author of this piece in The Altamont Enterprise, Noah Zweifel, was featuring visual art by Westerlo artist Tammy Liu-Haller; her work is one seed among many in a giant collaborative art work assembling creative works of many genres, from literature to film.

I was struck by Zweifel’s take on the Lunar Codex project, imagining it reaching a “future so far off that humanity itself may no longer be around, possibly destroyed by the same relentless intellectual drive that brought us to the moon in the first place, the same that lets us create art and appreciate beauty only to then demand an answer from it.”

That resonates. Whether we are nearing the end or not, I take comfort from the very grounded human acts of growing vegetables, playing music with others, and making art. (Love, above all!) How potentially meaningful it is, though, to transport poems, or paintings, or films, to another realm—a strange nearby world of no atmosphere and a different gravitational pull. Even if no one sees it, we will have made it, and the making matters.

Details about the project can be found in my last blog post, but here’s a taste:

I was asked by my friend Joyce Brinkman, the inaugural Poet Laureate of Indiana and lead editor of the Polaris Anthologies, to curate one of three collections, taken from select regions. These Polaris Anthologies will be part of the payload of the SpaceX/Astrobotic Technologies’ Griffin Lander/NASA VIPER Rover scheduled to be on the South Pole of the moon by the fall of 2023. Our ambition is to represent each country on earth. There will be print versions here on earth, as well! Each anthology has a theme: Africa and Europe have the earthly themes of Rock, Air, and Water. Asia, North and Central America have the theme of Stars, Sun, and Moon. South America, Australia, and Antarctica have the themes of Ice, Wind, and Fire.

The deadline is Feb 15th, 2022. DEADLINE EXTENDED MAY 31!! There’s very little turnaround, so get your submission in fast!

Where to submit:

Polaris Anthology: Rock, Air, and Water (Europe and Africa, edited by Joe Heithaus of DePauw University) submit to polaristrilogy1@gmail.com

Polaris Anthology: Stars, Sun, and Moon (Asia, North and Central America, edited by Joyce Brinkman of Brick Street Poetry) submit to polaristrilogy2@gmail.com

Polaris Anthology: Ice, Wind, and Fire (South America, Australia, and Antarctica, edited by Jessica Reed of Butler University) submit to polaristrilogy3@gmail.com

*I now have a poem going up this summer! So does Purdue’s Donald Platt and my fellow editors Joyce Brinkman and Joe Heithaus.

Call for submissions—poetry to the moon!

DEADLINE EXTENDED! MAY 31, 2022

Call for Submissions: Poetry to the Moon!

As the spring semester of my Physics and the Arts seminar goes into full swing, and my students discuss astronomers like Henrietta Leavitt, Annie Cannon, Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin), Williamina Fleming, Jocelyn Bell (later Bell-Burnell), Vera Rubin, Lisa Randall and many others, I can only imagine what they would have thought about the opportunity to send poetry to the surface of the moon! Yet here I am, editing an anthology of international poetry for The Polaris Collection of the Lunar Codex Project, cosmic time capsules of art, music, & poetry curated by Filipino-Canadian writer & physicist Samuel Peralta.

I was asked by my friend Joyce Brinkman, the inaugural Poet Laureate of Indiana and lead editor of the Polaris Anthologies, to curate one of three collections, taken from select regions. These Polaris Anthologies will be part of the payload of the SpaceX/Astrobotic Technologies’ Griffin Lander/NASA VIPER Rover scheduled to be on the South Pole of the moon by the fall of 2023. Our ambition is to represent each country on earth with a poem that reflects our humanity, where we come from and where we might be going, even if only in spirit.

This is not space colonization, nor is it placing satellites to obscure our view of the heavens for commercial gain. This is the pure romance of the celestial objects. Space for digital art left on the surface of the moon. There will be print versions here on earth, as well!

Each anthology has a theme:

Africa and Europe have the earthly themes of Rock, Air, and Water.

Asia, North and Central America have the theme of Stars, Sun, and Moon.

South America, Australia, and Antarctica have the themes of Ice, Wind, and Fire.

DEADLINE EXTENDED! MAY 31, 2022

So, poets, write! The deadline is Feb 15th, 2022. [DEADLINE EXTENDED! MAY 31, 2022] There’s very little turnaround, so get your submission in fast!

Where to submit (official submission guidelines below):

Polaris Anthology: Rock, Air, and Water (Europe and Africa) submit to polaristrilogy1@gmail.com

Polaris Anthology: Stars, Sun, and Moon (Asia, North and Central America) submit to polaristrilogy2@gmail.com

Polaris Anthology: Ice, Wind, and Fire (South America, Australia, and Antarctica) submit to polaristrilogy3@gmail.com

More information:

The first of the three Polaris Anthologies will be edited by poet and professor Joe Heithaus of DePauw University and will seek work from Africa and Europe with the earthly themes of Rock, Air, and Water. The second anthology edited by Joyce Brinkman will include work from Asia, North and Central America with the theme of Stars, Sun, and Moon. The third anthology edited by poet and science writer Jessica Reed of Butler University will seek work from South America, Australia, and Antarctica with the themes of Ice, Wind, and Fire.

This project is hosted through Brick Street Poetry. Deadline Feb 15th, 2022. DEADLINE EXTENDED! MAY 31, 2022

Link to the Lunar Codex Project, three cosmic time capsules of art, music, and poetry curated by Filipino-Canadian writer and poet Samuel Peralta, who is featured here in a CNN article about the first edition of the Codex Project.

Again, the deadline for these anthologies is MAY 31, 2022

OFFICIAL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

The Polaris Trilogy 1 for Africa and Europe: Rock, Air, and Water

This is a Brick Street Poetry Inc. call, only for European and African poets, to submit poems for Volume One of our Polaris Trilogy Anthology. The three volumes of The Polaris Trilogy will be launching in a time capsule aboard the Space X flight scheduled to depart for the South Pole of the Earth’s Moon in 2023.

The window for submitting is short so act quickly. This is a unique opportunity. There is no cost to submit. Please read the guidelines thoroughly. If they are not followed exactly your entry may be discarded.

Guidelines

1. Send only new, unpublished work. By submitting you are declaring that your submission was written by you.

2. Preferred length is no more than one page. We will only rarely accept a poem that is more than one page long.

3. All work should be in 12 point Times New Roman and attached as a Microsoft doc. or docx.

4. You can send only one poem inspired by one or more of the three categories: Rock, Air, and Water. Please include the category name(s) in your submission and in the subject line of your email. For example, if you are sending one inspired by Rock and Air then type Rock and Air in the subject line.

5. How you approach these subjects is up to you. Your poem may be literal, metaphorical, magical, comical, etc. as long as it incorporates the subject in some way. Poems might be formal—traditional or innovative—or in free verse. We encourage forms representative of native cultures.

6. We are happy to receive poems that are not written in English, but you must include an English translation with your submission.

7. You must include your home address in your submission. Please put it both in your email and at the beginning of your poem. An aim of this anthology is to present a global picture of poetry today. We will not be reading blind submissions. Quality is paramount but location is also a determining factor in acceptance.

8. Send your submission to polaristrilogy1@gmail.com

9. Submit by 11:59 pm EST, February 15, 2022 MAY 31

10. Do not expect to hear from us unless your poem is accepted and don’t expect to hear soon. This is a worldwide project, and it could take all of 2022 before we will have final decisions made.

The Polaris Trilogy 2 for Asia, North and Central America: Stars, Sun, Moon

This is a Brick Street Poetry Inc. call, only for Asian, and North and Central American poets, to submit poems for Volume Two of our Polaris Trilogy Anthology. The three volumes of The Polaris Trilogy will be launching in a time capsule aboard the Space X flight scheduled to depart for the South Pole of Earth’s Moon in 2023.

The window for submitting is short so act quickly. This is a unique opportunity. There is no cost to submit. Please read the guidelines thoroughly. If they are not followed exactly your entry may be discarded.

Guidelines

1. Send only new, unpublished work. By submitting you are declaring that your submission was written by you.

2. Preferred length is no more than one page. We will only rarely accept a poem that is more than one page long.

3. All work should be in 12 point Times New Roman and attached as a Microsoft doc. or docx.

4. You can send only one poem inspired by one or more of the three categories: The categories are Stars, Sun, Moon. Please include the category name(s) in your submission and in the subject line of your email. For example, if you are sending one inspired by Stars and Moon then type Stars and Moon in the subject line.

5. How you approach these subjects is up to you. Your poem may be literal, metaphorical, magical, comical, etc. as long as it incorporates the subject in some way. Poems might be formal—traditional or innovative—or in free verse. We encourage forms representative of native cultures.

6. We are happy to receive poems that are not written in English, but you must include an English translation with your submission.

7. You must include your home address in your submission. Please put it both in your email and at the beginning of your poem. An aim of this anthology is to present a global picture of poetry today. We will not be reading blind submissions. Quality is paramount but location is also a determining factor in acceptance.

8. Send your submission to polaristrilogy2@gmail.com

9. Submit by 11:59 pm EST, February 15, 2022. MAY 31

10. Do not expect to hear from us unless your poem is accepted and don’t expect to hear soon. This is a worldwide project, and it could take all of 2022 before we will have final decisions made.

The Polaris Trilogy 3 for South America, Australia, and Antarctica: Ice, Wind, and Fire

(Psst! This one is mine!)

This is a Brick Street Poetry Inc. call, only for S. American, Australian, and Antarctica poets, to submit poems for Volume Three of our Polaris Trilogy Anthology. The three volumes of The Polaris Trilogy will be launching in a time capsule aboard the Space X flight scheduled to depart for the South Pole of Earth’s Moon in 2023.

The window for submitting is short so act quickly. This is a unique opportunity. There is no cost to submit. Please read the guidelines thoroughly. If they are not followed exactly your entry will be discarded.

Guidelines

1. Send only new, unpublished work. By submitting you are declaring that your submission was written by you.

2. Preferred length is no more than one page. We will only rarely accept a poem that is more than one page long.

3. All work should be in 12 point Times New Roman and attached as a Microsoft doc. or docx.

4. You can send only one poem inspired by one or more of the three categories: The categories are Ice, Wind, and Fire. Please include the category name(s) in your submission and in the subject line of your email. For example, if you are sending one inspired by Ice and Fire then Ice and Fire go in the subject line.

5. How you approach these subjects is up to you. Your poem may be literal, metaphorical, magical, comical, etc. as long as it incorporates the subject in some way. Poems might be formal—traditional or innovative—or in free verse. We encourage forms representative of native cultures.

6. We are happy to receive poems that are not written in English, but you must include an English translation with your submission.

7. You must include your home address in your submission. Please put it both in your email and at the beginning of your poem. An aim of this anthology is to present a global picture of poetry today. We will not be reading blind submissions. Quality is paramount, but location is also a determining factor in acceptance.

8. Send your submission to polaristrilogy3@gmail.com

9. Submit by 11:59 pm EST, February 15, 2022 DEADLINE EXTENDED! MAY 31, 2022

10. Do not expect to hear from us unless your poem is accepted and don’t expect to hear soon. This is a worldwide project, and it could take all of 2022 before we will have final decisions made.

Reviewing Rae Armantrout's Conjure

I recently reviewed Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Conjure, nominated for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, in Jacket2. It was delightful to re-read her so closely, as I have always been a great admirer of her poetry in general, and in particular, her use of physics in her poetry. She is fiercely inquisitive and philosophical.

Here’s an excerpt (really an excerpt—it’s a longish review!):

How can anyone engage with language in an essential way now? The numbness brought on by the language of politics and advertising — one that the Language writers of the 1970s and ’80s sought to quell — has been compounded by global capitalism, a ravaged planet, social media, and the rest of the internet’s anesthetizing algorithms. And yet it’s as if Rae Armantrout moves through the world in just this essential way, experiencing language in its most elemental, and often absurd, form: “Would you like the ability / to add a location / to your tweets?”[1] She seems to refuse the heuristics the rest of us adopt, those mental shortcuts that subtly grant permission to all manner of cyber-commerce we’re immersed in — or at least, she’s bearing witness: “My screen claims / I have ‘new memories.’”[2] But even as she engages with an evolving language increasingly polluted with techno- and social jargon and dystopian culture, even as her poems are populated with photobombing and zombies, Armantrout never shies from having something hefty to talk about. She has earned her reputation as an outstanding Language writer whose work attests to a singular mind taking on subjects of formidable substance.

Armantrout is a philosopher’s poet, and her new collection, Conjure, is a paragon of her bare language in search of bare truths (often by way of physics) dotted with her signature irreverence. […]

Physics is a discipline of subtle concepts rife with potential for distortion, but Armantrout never cheats. While we’re all bound to be unsettled by certain aspects of relativity and quantum mechanics, she does not settle for the lazy takeaways that a casual outsider might run with. She takes physics seriously as a method of inquiry, even as she maintains her skepticism and sense of humor. When she interrogates the language of physics, the outcome can be a playful seesaw of claim and doubt. Here is palpable frustration in part one of “Natural Histories”:

Since the irrational
“because I said so”
start,

they’d had their differences:

color that isn’t really
color, spin
that isn’t spin

because attitude’s
best
when it has no content.

Ask a physicist
what “charge” is;

he’ll say your question
makes no sense. (25)

The conceptually misleading labels we have for quarks may fall into some definite category for functional linguists, but they are vexing terms nevertheless: What point-like thing “spins”? On what axis? Certainly “color” is impossible in this realm. And for quarks we have the hybrid animal “color charge.” Even if one accepts that these properties have more to do with physicists’ calculations than any recognizable features, one feels there ought to be an answer — other than a number — for what these properties are. What makes one property different from the other, for instance? We want an answer in plain English, and it is simply not available. And, setting aside quarks’ “color charge,” this bothersome language problem pervades the entire invisible world of physics: even the familiar positive and negative electric charges, a physicist might tell you, are merely labels, and could have been called “silver” and “tiny” instead (and everything would have turned out the same way). But one with a probing mind is still apt to ask, “So they’re merely labels, but for what?” To refer to electric charge — positive and negative — is a convenient way to describe certain interactions, but it’s harder to define one except in terms of the other. As to the properties of quarks, they also ultimately amount to ways to describe interactions, and it would seem that at least a few equations and diagrams and years of formal study are required to answer these questions properly (that is, to a physicist’s satisfaction, but would that answer satisfy the poet?). There always seems to be some language evasion in physics, even when the language begins with precision (even Newton, who provided so much clarity defining mass mathematically, called it “a quantity of stuff”). In the end, Armantrout’s physicists offer us a “because I said so” ontology, one she might accept — at least provisionally — as she says a few lines up: “attitude’s / best / when it has no content.” Which feels right. And very Cheshire cat.

Read the full review online here!

Physics and Dance at Butler

I have taught science meets art classes in many formats, from one-day to three-week workshops, from Stanford to Phoenix to Indianapolis to Beijing to Saudi Arabia. But not until Susan Neville gave me the opportunity to stretch this out into a year-long college seminar at Butler University have I been able to fully explore a myriad form of arts (while drilling down specifically to physics as our primary science).  

We have read plays aloud together and written about whether female physicists need a love interest (they do not!) to anchor their stories. We have created graphic novel excerpts about physicists and great discoveries in physics—they have used everything from construction paper to glued-on cotton balls with the absolute freedom and creativity of young children, then pivoted to writing scholarly academic papers on physics and graphic novels. I learn so much from my students each year and am inspired by them.

But not until a scheduling coincidence filled one of my classes with dance majors have I been able to learn from a group of dancers about the possibilities of choreography and physics. I usually show videos and have them read an article about a physics dance, then they write a reader response. But this year, I gave them the opportunity (it was only fair to let the non-dance majors do this as well) to write down their choreography of a dance concept from something they learned about physics this year. I am ecstatic about the results, floored by their creativity, and excited to share that, on top of the wonderful results from the dance majors, one unexpected “black hole dance” was created by a football player! Next year, I hope to return to my old Tuesday/Thursday schedule (lots of commuting from rural Indiana to Butler) and I might not be with the dancers again, but either way, this assignment stays.

The Honey Extractor

My parents scraping excess wax off frames

Here in rural Indiana, we raise chickens for eggs, and we trade our eggs for delicious amber honey from my parents’ bees (we live next door to my parents).

Honey extractor

Technology can be good: my parents recently got a honey extractor that works as a centrifuge on the wax frames. Before, the process of extracting honey involved scraping the honey and wax off the frames (then straining the honey from the wax, which could be used to make candles, etc.), which meant the bees had to spend the rest of the fall rebuilding the combs on their frames for their winter hibernation. Now, we get the honey (even multiple harvests), and the bees’ homes remain intact! Everybody wins. In past harsh winters, we always held our breath to see if the bees made it. Even though Dad usually left them with 50 pounds of their own honey, he used to bring them sugar water in the early spring. Now, without frames to reconstruct, the bees have time to build up more of their own honey reserves for winter hibernation, so they can be nice and fat when it’s cold out.

Frames loaded into extractor. Dad has several hives, so they filled it to the brim.

A bonus in 2019: Mom and Dad put their front acres in a pollinator habitat, which meant the honeybees were feeding off different flora than usual. They didn’t know if there would be an issue with competing pollinators, but it seems okay.

Here’s some video of the thing at work. And in case you’re curious, I interview my parents about how they know what honey comes from what flowers. It all makes sense.

My parents discuss what honey comes from what flowers