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>From: Henry <[log in to unmask]> >Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and > poetics <[log in to unmask]> >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: HG my name JG my game >Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 10:26:41 EDT > >I'm sorry if I offend with my reductive sociology of Jorie Graham. I >suppose my comments could be reduced to: badmouthing. This is the >twilight of list discussion, where assertions are blurted without >evidence, a form of gossip. > >Here are a few poems of hers I found on the web: > >www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmlD=59 > >www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/00_01/graham.html > >www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/96_97/grapal.html > >After looking at these poems, I still think there's a tendency to >bombast, which intrudes in the gap between some initial, >specific imagery (minnows, an Italian painting, water flowing, etc) >and the wide, grandiose emotive-spiritual gestures the images >are meant to trigger. This rather huge gap between a particular image >and a big abstract statement is smoothed over by her emphatically >flowing syntax, but in my opinion it's not a very solid bond. My problem with Jorie Graham is that there is no tight fit of sound compensates for the loose fit of sense. Some of Auden and all of William Logan's poetry is incomprehensible to me, but the rich music, the sharply delineated scenes, the paraphrasable content of individual lines or stanzas, make them nonetheless compelling. But here's William Logan on Graham: "Graham imagines herself a visionary (poets writing this badly almost always have high-minded reasons)—otherwise it would be difficult to explain the self-drama, the absence of humor (humor would make her vulnerable), the way the poems gassily expand to fill available space. There’s a rare glimmer of the lyric poet she once was (“where the raven suddenly wetly and rawly/ roughens the low vacillations of various windsweeping/ hushings”), but Graham has lost her sense of embarrassment and humility. Reading her hither-thither intellectualizing, I remembered Gloria Swanson’s lines in Sunset Boulevard—“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” In these numbed, overemphatic, philosophic poems, every gesture will be stared at, though it means almost nothing. Dante planned no better punishment for ambition." http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jun00/logan.htm [scroll down] _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp