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]