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.
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