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The thing intrigues me about Graham is that she should be such a mystical
poet and yet command such popularity. I've admired and appreciated her work
for quite a while now. I always did go for that sort of contemplative
reasoning things out, and Graham seems to underline this by means of her
control over the pacing and placing of the words.
For instance, one of my favourites among her poems is 'Le Manteau de
Pascal', which appears in 'The Errancy'. It's loosely based, the poet's note
reads, on the Magritte painting of Pascal's coat, the one he was buried in,
in the sleeve of which his sister stitched his Proof of the Existence of
God, and it makes use of a few brief quotes from Magritte's notebooks. The
thing that I find moving is the way all this, and the whole idea of 'coat',
is intercut with the section in which Hopkins made, between examining one
branch of an oak-tree and the next, the decision that he would have to
become a Catholic. Different lines of the poem keep recurring in different
orders which throw them into different relief each time, to almost symphonic
effect.
Incidentally, the epigraph to 'The Errancy' is:"Since in a net I seek to
hold the wind" (Wyatt) (Robin please note), which puts her cards flat on the
table at the outset.
best joanna
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
>
> I will say at the outset that since I first read Jorie Graham's poetry,
> I disliked it. I don't know why. You can meet someone and take a
> distaste to them at once and repeated exposures don't go a long way to
> dispelling the first impression. I got a sense of a person who takes
> the simplest concept and pushes it into an atmosphere-free zone
> reminiscent of the Andes.
>
> My opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it: nothing.
>
> First, I confused David Orr with Gregory Orr. Whoops...but not really.
> A poet is as prone to a velvet hatchet murder as anyone else. The way
> he presented Graham would find its equivalent in writing a headline like
> "C. K. Williams, Jew Undercover" or "C. D. Wright, the Hillbilly Who
> Learned to Rede Gud." Well, that's not subtle at all, is it? It's the
> references around Graham that bother me: calling the Iowa Writer's
> Workshop the "death star of MFA programs" (what exactly does that
> *mean*, by the way?), the comment about her students having a habit of
> winning contests she judges (here we go again), and the association with
> Helen Vendler. The latter may indeed be the most powerful critic in
> American poetry in the last 50 years, but this plays right into the
> suggestion I've heard elsewere (no I don't know the names) that Vendler
> coaches Graham on what to write and how to write it, i.e., that she's
> Helen Vendler's Fredo Corleone.
>
> I happened to read the Praying poems when they appeared in APR, and I
> found them surprisingly moving. The flaw I found in Graham that I could
> not get past was either a lack of the demonic or of (God bless the mark)
> common humanity. Well, I am oversimplifying but it's late at night.
> But I found in the Praying poems what Sexton called the awful rowing
> toward God, at ;east people reaching toward their fellows.
>
> So Orr in the end calls her diffuse and foggy. Anyone here who hasn't
> been diffuse and foggy at least once, please stand up. Jorie Graham
> seems to have committed the unforgivable sin of American poets: she
> became successful and a target of envy. I may just go out and buy
> Overlord and make her more so.
>
> ken
>
> Kenneth Wolman http://kenwolman.com http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
> --------------------------------------
> "Poetry is tribal not material....this is where you can remember the good
> times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst,
> else you cannot be healed."--C. D. Wright
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