Late Style in Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham’s new poem in the London Review of Books (LRB 46.8, 4.25.2024) would seem to be a poem expressing anguish over the situation in Gaza (or maybe it’s Ukraine. Or Sudan. Or Name The War Zone) though it’s so cloaked in her typically murky arabesques it’s difficult to tell. It’s about loss. It’s about suffering. It’s about relief that her beloved is still alive and that, well, she is, too.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/jorie-graham/no-one-today

(Her partner of many years, the poet and artist Peter Sacks is reported to have hurt himself badly while out for a run on Martha’s Vinyard, where they both live part of the year. His plight as well as Graham’s cancer diagnosis were reported in “The New Yorker” in genuflectional prose by Katy Waldman, who doesn’t seem to know much about poetry but does know how to butter up an interview subject).

No one today

of my own died. I
did not die. My
love did not. Is intact. I
checked.

“Is intact. I/checked” are phrases that make one wince. Graham is always pleading for the urgency of her case – her poetry makes “palpable designs” on the reader as Keats famously put it. Is “I/checked” Graham’s attempt at poking fun at her own seriousness? Alice Notley pulls that off effortlessly. Graham, not so much. Readers in search of irony in her work will go a-begging. This is high-wire stuff – Rilkean predicaments for the jet set. But then Rilke was rather jet set, too.

Despite many grace notes and indeed passages of harrowing beauty, the poem is pockmarked with these characteristic asides, designed as annotations of the process of consciousness itself, footnotes, as it were, to emotion or perception, but which in fact come across as pedantic, self-important, clumsy neurotic signposts to her Big Drama. Little effort is expended on creating language that enacts anguish – though she does some nifty stuff with syntax, bending her tight quatrains at acute angles. These broken stanzas carry some real power, though again, she can’t resist editorializing.

No oblivion

was visible

to us, no one
lay waiting to be buried
under the vast
sound then the unending

weight which imitates
eternity
perfectly – where suddenly
we’re down in

the burning
mounds the slippery
pits – how did our room
disappear – & is that a

cry under there, is that a hand

“Is that a hand” – this kind of stuff is embarrassing and yet it’s been Graham’s stock in trade for decades. Her “searing honesty,” if you will. I took issue with this aspect of her work in my review of the otherwise excellent “Overlord, where I wrote of the poem "Posterity": “No one could doubt Graham’s sincerity. But the poem veers dangerously close, as James Wright often did, to a self-valorizing sentimentality in which psychological honesty becomes fetishistic self-flagellation.”

https://www.joriegraham.com/pritchett_2006

These lines come off as someone who' swatched too much CNN. But can we genuinely find fault with a poet for feeling too much? Well, yes, if the feeling results in mawkishness.

The thing about Graham’s work that has always put me off is the way she is always at the center of her poems in such a flagrantly melodramatic way. In this she shares a lot in common with the late Louise Gluck. As Michael Robbins observed in his review of Gluck’s “Collected,” “she’s a major poet with a minor range.”

I much prefer Gustaf Sobin's posture: "There's little room in my poetry for myself," he once told Ed Foster. "I’m there to structure the poem. To get it to fly ... tightening a syllable here, releasing a line there … to get language to lift ... to defy … the weights of the explicit."

Amen.

Still, “No One Today” ends on a poignant note. The pleading has modulated into a dernier cri, a tender, even hauntingly elegiac tone takes hold – last things are being said; next to last things. The short, compressed lines mark a departure from Graham’s recent work, with its bloated long lines threatening to run off the pages in a kind of gaseous all-out Whitmania. These stanzas vibrate with force; the enjambment does the kind of work a long line simply isn't outfitted for:

don’t bend that way

you’ll hurt yourself,

no you can’t
hurt yourself, you are all
gone all
gone
who ran in the

light with me to
the beach last
Saturday … Shall we venture out
I ask – at bedtime

now – tomorrow, &
my sleepy ones say
maybe, if

it is fine,
and I say yes, of

course, if it is fine.

The nod here to Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” is lovely, invoking a mother’s solicitude for her “sleepy ones” – children perhaps, or the beloved – is he truly gone? Or does the poem make some kind of pre-emptive apotropaic gesture against loss? Graham’s earnestness is never less than sincere. But she often seems to swim upstream against it, setting up obstacles where none are needed, undermining the very effect she wants to produce by overloading even her short lines with palpable design. I can’t decide if it’s a feature or a bug. Mannerism afflicts a poet who can no longer write around her own blind spots, who gets too comfortable in her own style. It’s an occupational hazard and it afflicts most of us. Jorie Graham takes tremendous risks, as if daring the reader to cry “hold, enough!” Yet one can’t help but feel that the risk taking would be more impressive if only she stuck the landing a bit more.

But a counter-argument could be advanced that Graham has been writing in what Adorno called “late style” as early as 1987’s “The End of Beauty.”

Late style, according to Adorno, is not ripeness, or completion; not some quintessential distillation of spirit as the purely subjective (idealist) expression of final plenitude. Instead, he says, it is “the sudden flaring up” with which a work of art abandons its own status as art. Late style is the style of ruins, the scorched earth policy of form.

As Shierry Weber Nicholsen explains, “the essential feature of late work [is] the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity, so that as work becomes late it becomes increasingly inorganic.” Late work is not about transcendent summations, but radical discontinuity. As Adorno remarks: “The caesuras, the abrupt breaks that characterize the late Beethoven more than anything are those moments of eruption; the work falls silent when it is abandoned and turns its hollow interior to the outside world.” The mystery, he writes, of the relation between compositional fragments is never resolved, only held in a perpetual field of tension. “What is objective,” he concludes of Beethoven “is the crumbling landscape; the subjective side is the light that alone illuminates it.” “In the history of art,” he concludes with a Teutonic rumble, “late works are the catastrophes.”

And yet – Graham’s work finally militates against such a reading. She holds the fragments in a field of tension, to some extent. But unlike poets such as George Oppen, Michael Palmer, or Nate Mackey, she always come down emphatically on the side of the subjective. Of some kind of closure. The tensions must be resolved -- not undergone, not held in suspension.