April 27, 2015 Issue

Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet," in this week’s issue, helps me resolve my feelings about the recent revelation that Joseph Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956), heretofore considered a classic fact piece, is partially fiction. Janet Malcolm, in her "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015), defends Mitchell, saying,

Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

I find this unpersuasive. It breaches journalism’s prohibition against messing with the facts.

McGrath's argument is slightly more appealing. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

McGrath focuses on Mitchell’s “doctored” quotes. But it seems to me, based on my reading of Malcolm’s piece, the most objectionable fabrications in “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” are (1) the encounter with Mr. Brock in the St. Luke’s cemetery, and (2) the interview with Mr. Hunter at his house. Malcolm says,

The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm is untroubled by Mitchell’s inventions. She says they are what give his pieces “their electric force.” I don’t see it that way. For me, the essence of Mitchell’s art is his allegiance to fact. I agree with McGrath when he says “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” “gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

Postscript: I enjoy travel pieces. There's an excellent one in this week's issue - D. T. Max's "A Cave with a View." It’s about the Italian hilltop town of Matera, “one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.” Max calls it a “palimpsest in stone.” He walks the Via Madonna delle Virtù, which follows the edge of a thousand-foot cliff (“Rows of vacant caves looked like giant skulls, with the empty doorways as eyes. The limestone walls were pockmarked, rain-streaked, and sun-bleached, and they varied in hue, from gray to yellow, as the light moved across them”). In the company of Materan resident Vito Festa, he tours the Sassi, the pile-up of cave-dwellings in the town’s ancient center [“He showed me the outlines of old cisterns and called up the names of farmers who had cultivated the olive and fig trees that now grew wild. Many of his memories were about struggling to get enough to eat: he pointed to a parapet where he had put down bird traps (‘I never caught any’), and to the roofs where his family had left almonds to dry”]. My take-away from this fine piece is a sense of Matera's “severe beauty” - “like a pile of tarnished gold thrown down by a careless giant.” 

Garner Endorses Adler's Snark

Renata Adler (Photo by Ron Galella)

Dwight Garner, in his "'After the Tall Timber,' Renata Adler's Collected Nonfiction" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 23, 2015), says of Adler’s “House Critic,” “That essay holds up in large part, and I say this as a Kael admirer.” What does that mean? In what way does it “hold up”?

“House Critic,” originally titled "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980), is Adler’s attempted evisceration of Pauline Kael’s great 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down. It’s full of false charges, e.g., “The degree of physical sadism in Mr. Kael’s work is, so far as I know, unique in expository prose,” “She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favourite words,” “She has, in principle, four things she likes.” Its basic approach is the reduction of Kael's work to caricature. To say that it “holds up” is to endorse the nasty, bullying, ridiculing smear tactics of low snark. Garner says he's a Kael admirer. Praising Adler's execrable “House Critic” is a bizarre way of showing it.

Postscript: I'm not alone in finding “House Critic” toxic. David Denby, in his “Pauline Kael: A Great Critic and Her Circle” (included in his 2012 essay collection Do The Movies Have a Future?), calls “House Critic” “a notoriously wrongheaded piece.” Craig Seligman, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), calls it a “poisonous assessment.”

April 20, 2015 Issue

William Finnegan’s reality hunger is voracious. It drives his stories. For example, in his great "Silver or Lead" (The New Yorker, May 31, 2010), he travels to the dangerous Mexican town of Zitácuaro, controlled by the vicious La Familia Michoacana crime syndicate, “to ask the police some questions.” This week, in his excellent "Tears of the Sun," he journeys to the Peruvian pueblo La Rinconada, “the highest-elevation human settlement in the world,” to report on artisanal gold-mining. Not content to just describe the mines (“The dark mouths of mines now hove into view, in all sizes and states of dilapidation. Some were big enough to drive a truck into, with guard shacks and fat electrical cables and compressed-air hoses. Others were smaller than I am, crumbling, trash-strewn. All looked forbidding”), Finnegan, in the company of miner Josmell Ilasca, enters one:

The tunnel entrance was twenty feet wide, maybe ten feet high. Ilasaca produced two hard hats and a miner’s lamp from a backpack, and we headed in. “I used to work in here,” he said. “There’s enough oxygen, from old shafts that go to the surface.” He gestured toward the depths of the mountain. As the tunnel narrowed, the air got musty and the darkness, within fifty yards of the entrance, was absolute. Ilasaca was careful to light my way. He showed me mineralized veins in the walls, glittering between rough slabs of black Ordovician slate. When the quijo angled upward, he said, so would the tunnel, and it did. This had all been dug with hand tools and dynamite, he said. “Maybe two metres a day.” Back then, the lamps had been carbide, he said, burning acetylene gas. These nice bright electric headlamps we had, with battery packs that attached to your belt, were relatively new. He stopped to listen to my breathing, which was getting ragged. The tunnel ceiling had been dropping, obliging me to crouch. My thighs were burning from the effort. I was O.K., I said, just altitude weary. More coca, Ilasaca said. I had bought coca leaves that morning, from an old woman on the street in La Rinconada. Everybody here chewed them, I was told, to stave off exhaustion and hunger. I stuffed a wad in my cheek. The leaves were stiff and bitter. Ilasaca also took a wad. The quartz vein in the tunnel wall turned downward, the tunnel followed it, and at a certain depth we found our progress halted by an icy-looking pond. Ilasaca studied the vein, tapping it with his fingertips. I wondered what he saw in its fissures and glints.

“Tears of the Sun” abounds with absorbing facts, but it’s also subjective to the bone. It’s about Finnegan’s experience of La Rinconada – where he sleeps (“My unheated hotel room in La Rinconada overlooked a muddy corner where long-distance minibuses arrived and departed, and all night long the touts shouted, ‘Juliaca! Juliaca! Juliaca!’ ”), what he eats (“We were eating dinner in a tiny, freezing second-floor restaurant in La Rinconada. I was having the Cuban plate—rice and a hot dog and a fried banana—and hot, sweet yerba-maté tea”), what he sees (e.g., female gold miners, known as pallaqueras, wearing “great jumbles of skirts, vests, sweaters, trousers, improvised balaclavas, striped traditional blankets known as llicllas, dust masks, aprons, work gloves”), who he meets [miners, doctors, gold buyers, even an undertaker (“Martín Ccari, an undertaker from across the street, told me that some mine deaths could be blamed on slow response to cave-ins and other accidents”)]. And … it ends beautifully, with Finnegan descending the mountain, returning to sun, warmth, greenery:

I left La Rinconada at dawn, squeezed in the back row of a crowded minibus, bumping down the mountain. The trashed, poisoned mine country gave way slowly to hills with actual grass on them. Then there were small farms, cattle, trees. Sunshine with some warmth to it. People not bundled against the cold. The world was flooding with color. And oxygen. I found it a bit overwhelming.

Superbly vivid, vital, and real – “Tears of the Sun” is terrific. I enjoyed it immensely.

The Bliss of Precision

Rereading John Updike’s wonderful review-essay "Journeyers" (The New Yorker, March 10, 1980; included in his great 1983 collection Hugging the Shore) the other day, I was struck by his observation that there is “a certain bliss of precision in a sentence like ‘Their tents are frog-shaped, constructed of hides and woven mats of goat and camel hair on a stick frame, the large mouth facing east.’ ” I agree. “Bliss of precision” exactly captures the literary quality I most crave. The New Yorker brims with it. Here are ten recent examples:

1. “The octopus cocktail is an agreeably blunt counterpoint, a lilac-colored soup with the consistency of drinkable yogurt, in which purple and blue corn and charred avocado bob alongside tentacled slices on the right side of chewy” (Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Cosme," February 9, 2015).

2. But, if you’ve paid any attention to the hype, the entire endeavor might be a very delicious excuse for dessert: a corn-husk meringue with its own hashtag, possessed of an intensely milky taste from the mousse of mascarpone, cream, and corn purée that spills out like lava from its core (Amelia Lester, "Tabels For Two: Cosme," February 9, 2015).

3. “One evening in Chinatown, a young woman in a Nirvana T-shirt took a break from mixing Hawaiian punches—a juggling act involving eight kinds of liquor, pineapple juice, and grenadine—to pull out a giant laser disk, grab a mic, and perform ‘Santeria,’ by Sublime” (Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Winnie's," February 9, 2015).

4. “Instead, the music of Gallery 621 is largely one of color: the red of Paul’s tunic, in the Ribera, emerges from a dark background like a tone from silence” (Alex Ross, "Eyes and Ears," February 9, 2015).

5. “Inside the shed, I tried on a watch, and its stainless-steel chain bracelet, guided by magnets, fell into place with the click of someone stacking nickels” (Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015).

6. “The table previously covered with a flat cloth was now uncovered: it was a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap, like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane” (Ian Parker, "The Shape of Things to Come," February 23 & March 2, 2015).

7. “The most astounding is ‘Robe with Mythic Bird’ (1700-40), from an unknown tribe of the Eastern Plains: a tanned buffalo hide pigmented with a spiky abstraction, probably of a thunderbird, in red and black, which rivals the most exciting modern art” (Peter Schjeldahl, "Moving Pictures," March 16, 2015).

8. “Beadwork, metal cones, and cotton and silk cloth figure in a headdress from the Eastern Plains, circa 1780, along with local stuffs including bison horns, deer and horse hair, and porcupine quills” (Peter Schjeldahl, "Moving Pictures," March 16, 2015).

9. “There was a Boston mule made from textured velvet in crimson or gold, inspired by a Persian-lamb coat that Haslbeck had discovered in a flea market. An Arizona sandal had a rose-gold leather foot bed and an upper made from pinkish-peach tweed threaded with iridescent silver. It looked as if it had been cut from the sleeve of a Chanel jacket. Another Arizona sandal, in black leather, had been lined in sapphire-blue shearling” (Rebecca Mead, "Sole Cycle," March 23, 2015).

10. “Driving outside Oklahoma City one evening last November, I ended up stopped in traffic next to an electronic billboard that displayed, in rotation, an advertisement for one per cent cash back at the Thunderbird Casino, an advertisement for a Cash N Gold pawnshop, a three-day weather forecast, and an announcement of a 3.0 earthquake, in Noble County” (Rivka Galchen, "Weather Underground," April 13, 2015)

Credit: The above artwork is by Andrea Kalfas; it appears in the February 9, 2015 New Yorker as an illustration for Emma Allen’s “Bar Tab: Winnie’s.”

April 13, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is a toss-up between Rivka Galchen’s "Weather Underground" and Dan Chiasson’s "Out of This World." Last year, Galchen’s short piece "Medical Meals" (The New Yorker, November 3, 2014) impressed me immensely. And her review-essay "What kind of funny is he?" (London Review of Books, December 4, 2014), on Reiner Stach’s massive Kafka biography, is excellent. Now, in “Weather Underground,” she tries her hand at a fact piece – writing’s ultimate test, in my opinion – and succeeds brilliantly. It’s about man-made earthquakes in Oklahoma. It brims with the kind of vivid, participant-observer specificity I relish, e.g.,

Driving outside Oklahoma City one evening last November, I ended up stopped in traffic next to an electronic billboard that displayed, in rotation, an advertisement for one per cent cash back at the Thunderbird Casino, an advertisement for a Cash N Gold pawnshop, a three-day weather forecast, and an announcement of a 3.0 earthquake, in Noble County. Driving by the next evening, I saw that the display was the same, except that the earthquake was a 3.4, near Pawnee.

Galchen has Ian Frazier’s eye for human actuality. Here, for example, is her description of a conference on induced seismicity led by Oklahoma Geological Survey’s Austin Holland:

On the first day of the conference, a few dozen people were gathered in a small room at the Sheraton: mostly scientists, but also oil and gas representatives, insurance representatives, and civil engineers. A bus tour of a local disposal well was cancelled, owing to icy roads. “I’ll give you the dog and pony show that I was going to give on the bus, and then I’ll answer questions and we’ll have a few beers,” Holland said.

That Holland quotation is inspired! Galchen’s piece abounds with piquant details. My favorite is the “milk bottle filled with what looked like gravel” on geology professor Todd Halihan’s desk. “ ‘That’s from the Arbuckle,’ he said, a geological formation under Oklahoma.” My second favorite is the observation that Oklahoma’s constitution “includes a legal definition of kerosene.” I could go on and on quoting from this deliciously written piece. Suffice it to say here that it’s enormously enjoyable.

Dan Chiasson’s "Out of This World," a review of Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill: Life and Art, is also a source of tremendous reading pleasure. Chiasson is a master of descriptive analysis. For example, he says of Merrill,

His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an “Atari dragonfly” on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker. Hammer, the chair of Yale’s English department, is first and foremost a gifted poetry critic, which means that he knows how to tell a story, without hype, about how poems are made, and he appreciates the irony of an art that made ski trips and wallpaper central to American literature.

How I love that “transfigured commonplace”! The passage gets at the reason I treasure Merrill’s poems – his ingenious incorporation of everyday experience into his wonderful, rippling assemblages, e.g., the carwash in his great "Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia" (The New Yorker, October 23, 1989) (“Suds glide, slow protozoa, down the pane”). Chiasson is on a roll this year: first his marvelous "Beautiful Lies" (The New Yorker, March 30, 2015), on Jorie Graham’s From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, and now his dazzling “Out of This World.” I devour everything he writes and yearn for more.

April 6, 2015 Issue

Book reviews are, for me, the ultimate brain candy. I devour them. There’s a dandy in this week’s issue – Alice Gregory’s "Dear Diary, I Hate You," a review of Sarah Manguso’s memoir Ongoingness. It has all the elements of a satisfying review – description (“We get Manguso, at fourteen, looking through a telescope for a comet, failing to see it, and not caring; Manguso, in 1992, writing mostly about hating her mother; Manguso, in college, discovering that a boyfriend has read her diary, including some dismaying reflections on his sexual performance; Manguso, in her late thirties, drinking raspberry-leaf tea in an attempt to trigger early labor, hoping that her husband can be present for both the birth of his son and, an ocean away, the death of his mother”), analysis (“The great feat of the book is that it succeeds in not feeling abstract, even though it frequently eschews specificity”), quotation (“I stayed partly contained in the moment until that night, when I wrote down everything that had happened and everything I remembered thinking while it happened and everything I thought while recording what I remembered had happened…”). Gregory’s absorbing piece whets my appetite for Manguso’s book. It also makes me hungry for more of Gregory’s reviews.  

Malcolm Praises Mitchell's Fabrication

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015), a review of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, delivers disconcerting news. Malcolm reports that Kunkel’s research reveals that Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956), heretofore considered a classic fact piece, is partially fiction. She says,

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

What is even more disconcerting is that Malcolm praises Mitchell’s fabrication. She says,

Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

This significantly departs from Malcolm’s position in her great The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), in which she says,

The writer of nonfiction is under contract to the reader to limit himself to events that actually occurred and to characters who have counterparts in real life, and he may not embellish the truth about these events or these characters.

That, to me, is journalism’s fundamental principle. John McPhee, in his "Editors & Publisher" (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012), puts it this way:

It is sometimes said that the line between fiction and nonfiction has become blurred. Not in this eye, among beholders. The difference between the two is distinct.

I agree. Regrettably, Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” appears to have crossed the line, carrying Malcolm with it.   

Moralistic Mendelson - Part II

I want to consider some comments about William Maxwell that Edward Mendelson makes in his “Magus: William Maxwell,” included in his new essay collection Moral Agents. Maxwell was a longtime New Yorker fiction editor and author of, among other works, the novella So Long, See You Tomorrow, which originally appeared in The New Yorker (October 1 & 8, 1979). In his essay, Mendelson says,

“Saintly” is a word that recurs in everything written about Maxwell and his work. But in the same way that his friends ignored the primitive, amoral magic that governs the realistic-looking world of his fiction, they ignored his contempt for any ethical understanding of life – any way of thinking in which actions have consequences, and events are the outcome of human choice, not of arbitrary, impersonal forces.

That first sentence isn’t true. There’s at least one piece on Maxwell’s work in which “saintly” doesn’t occur, namely, John Updike’s great review-essay, "Imperishable Maxwell" (The New Yorker, September 8, 2008; in Updike’s Higher Gossip, 2011).

Mendelson appears intent on setting Maxwell up as a “saint” in order to show he really wasn’t. His talk of Maxwell’s “contempt for any ethical understanding of life – any way of thinking in which actions have consequences, and events are the outcome of human choice, not of arbitrary, impersonal forces” is low snark. Maxwell was a moralist to the core. It’s just that his morality, unlike Mendelson’s, wasn’t judgmental. Alec Wilkinson, in his My Mentor (2002), says,

His friends often felt that no matter what they did, he was unlikely to view their behavior judgmentally. It is not that he was without opinions concerning right conduct, or that his moral standards were elastic; it is that once he regarded someone as a friend, he was likely to consider his or her actions sympathetically, as a response to the complications of life or as understandable within the context. He was aware that people don’t always act in their best interests, and often make choices that appear to work against them. [My emphasis]

What irks Mendelson is Maxwell’s lack of plot. He says, “All of Maxwell’s novels have a story but no plot.” He defines plot as “the means by which fiction portrays the consequences of actions.” He further says,

Maxwell succumbed to an error common among writers who organize their work for the finest possible rhythms and textures: the error of thinking of plot as mechanical and therefore trivial. As he explained to John Updike: “Plot, shmot.”

But I think Mendelson misinterprets what Maxwell meant by “plot.” Maxwell took his plots from life. As Alec Wilkinson says in My Mentor,

Somewhat subversively, he [Maxwell] believed that the patterns of ordinary life, acutely observed, provide more drama and structure and emotional resonance than purely imagined events are likely to.

I agree. Most novels’ plots seem artificial – “cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and ‘conflict,’ ” James Wood calls them ("Reality Testing," The New Yorker, October 31, 2011). It’s why I find Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow so appealing. It reads like a painstaking attempt to be as true to life as possible. Where there is fabrication, it’s admitted. At one point in the story, Maxwell says,

If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.

Tastes differ, and Mendelson is welcome to his dogged quest for “moral content.” As for me, I’m with Maxwell: “Looked at broadly, what happened always has meaning, pattern, form, and authenticity. One can classify, analyze, arrange in the order of importance, and judge any or all of these things, or one can simply stand back and view the whole with wonder” (from the Author’s Note of Maxwell's superb 1989 essay collection The Outermost Dream).

Rothko's Harvard Murals

Mark Rothko's Harvard Murals, Holyoke Center, 1964

A special shout-out to Louis Menand for his terrific "Watching Them Turn Off the Rothkos" (“Cultural Comment,” newyorker.com, April 1, 2015), on the restoration of Mark Rothko’s Harvard murals, “Panel One,” “Panel Two,” and “Panel Three,” originally installed, in 1964, in the penthouse of Harvard University’s Holyoke Center, now hanging in the Harvard Art Museums, and revivified through the use of what’s known as “compensating illumination.” Menand explains:

Five digital projectors have been programmed to light the canvases so that the original colors reappear. At four o’clock every day, the projectors are turned off one by one, and the colors revert to (mostly) muddy blacks and grays. You can still see the bones of the murals, the formal architecture—Rothko’s floating blocks, made to resemble portals in these pieces—but the glow is gone. As one observer put it, when the lights go off, comedy turns into tragedy.

Menand says that the restoration story gets people hooked “because it raises ancient and endlessly fascinating philosophy-of-art questions. In this respect, the restored murals are really a new work, a work of conceptual art. To look at them is to have thoughts about the nature of art.”

Well, maybe. Could it also be that to look at them is to experience the exhilaration and pleasure of reading red on maroon, purple-black on purple, and maroon on pink? Menand is a tad too thinky. But he’s onto a great subject.  

March 30, 2015 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that immediately caught my eye is Dan Chiasson’s "Beautiful Lies," a review of Jorie Graham’s From the New World: Poems 1976-2014. Three years ago, in The New York Review of Books, Chiasson wrote a brilliant review of Graham’s Place that was, for me, a turning point in my appreciation of Graham’s poetry. In the piece, titled “The Actual Hawk, the Real Tree” (September 27, 2012), Chiasson describes Graham’s poems as “a provisional and rapid way of describing experience as it unfolds.” He provides examples, notably "Sundown," which I’d read when it appeared in the April 19, 2010 New Yorker, but didn’t really “get” until I read his explication:

“Sundown” is a poem about the arrival of joy where one had reserved a place for dismay. That horse and rider is part angel, part emergency; it is up to Graham to figure it out, a hard task to perform in the real-time rush as it overtakes you.

That “real-time rush as it overtakes you” is excellent. It speaks to me. Yes, that is exactly what’s happening in “Sundown”:

                                            and I had just

                              turned to

                              answer and the answer to my

answer flooded from the front with the late sun he/they

                              were driving into—gleaming—

                              wet chest and upraised knees and

light-struck hooves and thrust-out even breathing of the great

                              beast—from just behind me,

                              passing me—the rider looking straight

                              ahead and yet

smiling without looking at me as I smiled as we

                              both smiled for the young

                              animal, my feet in the

breaking wave-edge, his hooves returning, as they begin to pass

                              by,

                              to the edge of the furling

                              break, each tossed-up flake of

                              ocean offered into the reddish

luminosity—sparks—as they made their way,

                              boring through to clear out

                              life, a place where no one

                              again is suddenly

killed—regardless of the “cause”—no one—just this

                              galloping forward with

                              force through the low waves

Chiasson writes,

If another poet – Moore or Frost, for example – had written “Sundown,” the stream of sensory information would have been broken by a maxim or an adage or a moral: something, anything to represent the kind of counterpressure our intellects make when confronted with a surplus of sensation. Graham’s forms of counterpressure are subtler, more provisional, more subject to the pressures they paradoxically contest – and, if what one wants from a poem is paraphraseable content, less satisfying. Her deep distrust of statement makes Graham search for alternate forms of interruption; it is as though this sensibility were too immersed in the current of ongoing sensation to be able to retreat, even for a moment, from it.

Too immersed in the current of ongoing sensation to be able to retreat, even for a moment, from it – this is tremendously vital, subtle, original criticism. I devour it. “The Actual Hawk, the Real Tree” brims with it. And so does “Beautiful Lies,” in this week’s New Yorker. In it, Chiasson refers to Graham’s “meticulous frame-by-frame inspection of reality.” Of the extraordinary way she uses line and space, he says,

In a poem, the representation of space depends to an unusual degree on the management of actual space on the page. The poems in “From the New World” are exceptionally responsive to their placement on the page. Though Graham reads the work aloud beautifully, I think of her as a poet best appreciated through silent reading of the printed word. Graham’s free-verse poems draw and redraw their borders in space, adjusting as new sensation enters from the fringe. Whitman’s “noiseless patient spider” comes to mind: “It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself” onto the blank page, a “vacant vast surrounding.” In Graham, an industrious “scirocco,” “working / the invisible,” gives it form; a poet is a creature who thatches her lines across emptiness, driven to “go over and over / what it already knows.”

Chiasson’s reviews expand my appreciation of Graham’s work and, in so doing, show how criticism can be a breathtaking art in itself.