As soon as I bought Jorie Graham's new poetry collection entitled "PLACE", I leafed through the book looking for a quick entry point. A poem that would stand out from the rest, a quick gratification reference, a turning of a phrase that would drag me in, chain my eye to the page.
From one poem to the other I drifted, looking for familiarity in presentation, looking for hooks in the titles, the phrasing, the opening lines. I soon realised that I would have to dig deeper to unearth the treasure chest. I found myself skipping pages, unable to penetrate the strange form, syntax and ideas contained in the poems. No less than five or six times did I put the book down and returned, only to be denied access once again. Then, one fine morning, the "sound and vision" of the poem "End" progressively revealed itself and there I was balancing the shifting emphasis from fragment to fragment and back. It all came together and the last words of the poem, I feel, really leave an indelible mark on the reader. What can that be other than the sign of great poetry in the making?
In a very interesting interview by Thomas Gardner for the magazine "the Paris review", Jorie Graham is asked if she feels she is asking too much from the reader... This is what she says:
"...I do worry considerably about a reader’s patience—how much mental or emotional space they have in their life in this crushingly full world to give to the reading of a poem. Many of today’s readers prefer fast poems with stated conclusions, partly because they can fit them into their day. Who can blame them? They have precious little time. They want the Cliff Notes to the overwhelmingly huge novel. Of course, it is poetry’s job to try to provide the very opposite—to recomplicate the oversimplified thing. This doesn’t require going on at length—lord knows some of the more complex acts of human awareness occur in Basho. At any rate, it’s not hard to see where the shortened attention span has gotten us, the desire for speed, for the quick rush or take or fix . . .
INTERVIEWER
Some of that is the impact of technology.
GRAHAM
Yes, don’t you think? For example, when you have a split tv screen giving you main news (images), secondary news in text (often war facts), weather, stock reports, and even an “update” in the corner, on sports, how is a person—let alone one in a democracy and therefore responsible for clear-headed choice—supposed to feel any of the information she’s gathering? One is reduced to simply scanning the information for its factual content. The emotive content, unless reported to one or rhetorically painted onto it, is gone from the experience. It seems almost in the way. And yet it’s in the overtones of the facts, in the emotive overtones, that much of the real information lies. None of this can be separated out from contemporary poetics. The “multitasking” asked of us by the CNN screen is precisely geared to dissociating our sensibilities. It forces us to “not feel” in the very act of “collecting information.” But what value does information unstained by emotive content have, except a fundamental genius for manipulating dissociated human souls? Why, you can frighten them to the point of inhumanity. You can get them to close their eyes and let you commit murder in their name..."
End
(November 21, 2010)
End of autumn. Deep fog. There are chains in it, and sounds of
hinges. No that was
birds. A bird and a
gate. There are
swingings of the gate that sound like stringed
instruments from
some other
culture. Also a
hammering which is held
in the fog
and held. Or it is continuing to
hammer. I hear the blows.
Each is distant so it seems it should not repeat. It repeats. What is being hammered
in. Fog all over the
field. The sounds of
boots
on soil in groups those
thuds but then it is
cattle I
think. The sound of the hinge the swinging chain it won’t
go away. But it is just the farmer at work. He must be putting out
feed. Fog. Play at
freedom now it says, look, all is
blank. Come to the
front, it is
your stage it
says, the sound of the clinking of links of
chain, I think it is someone making the chain – that is the hammering – the thuds – making
their own chain. But no, it is the gate and the herd is let in again, then
out. I can hear
the mouths eating, dozens maybe hundreds, and the breathing in and out as they
chew. And the
chain, for now I am alive I think into the hammering
thudding clinking swinging of metal hinge – of hinge – and also think maybe this is
winter now – first day of. Fog and a not knowing of. Of what. What is inner
experience I think being
shut out. I look. A gate swings again and a rustling
nearby. All is
nearby and invisible. The clinking a chinking of someone making nails. The sounds of a crowd
meaning to be silent, all their breathing. Having been told not to move and to be
silent. Then having been told to
move and be
silent. The crowd is in there. All the breaths they are trying
to hold in, make
inaudible. And scraping as of metal on metal, and dragging as of a heavy thing. But it is a field
out there. My neighbour has his herd on it. When I walk away from the
window it’s a violin I
hear over the
chewing out of tune torn string but once it made
music it might still make
music if I become a new way of
listening, in which
above all,
nothing, I know nothing, now there are moans
out there such as a man accused and tossed away by his fellow beings, an aloneless, and
listen, it is blank but in it is an
appeal, a ruined one, reduced, listen: in
there this
animal
dying slowly
in eternity its
trap.
