From the New World: Poems 1976-2014 by Jorie Graham

In the highest realm of poets and poetry, Jorie Graham and her poems are gorgeous. Even if you don’t understand a single line, you know you’re in the presence of something extraordinary – something worthy of three or more readings to “get” what’s too often apparent in poems from the start. So, when I learned of the latest book, From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, I eagerly awaited my review copy, kindly sent to me by the publisher, Ecco Press.

When the book arrived, however, I froze. Like, who am I to comment on the work of any Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, much less this one! Some time ago, in fact, a friend asked why I keep on reading and re-reading Graham’s work when I was often frustrated by my lack of understanding. I said I felt I could learn something important, which is a good enough reason anytime, but especially during NaPoMo (National Poetry Month.) However, a more precise response to why I read Jorie Graham’s poetry is, “How can I not?”

If you’re a poet who likes to eat, sleep, and breathe poetry, you know what I mean. But then, maybe you don’t, and thus far, I’ve done nothing to entice you, so let’s remedy that!

Mid-way into the first verse of the first poem, “Tennessee June,” for example, you’ll find these exquisite lines:

“…Imagine
your mind wandering without its logic,
your body the sides of a riverbed giving in.
In it, no world can survive
having more than its neighbors;
in it, the pressure to become forever less is the pressure
to take forevermore
to get there….”

If you want to understand the poems of Jorie Graham, those lines might pull you under, but if you want to experience her work with its sensitive insights, acute observations, and highly intelligent thought patterns, try going with the flow of that river and enjoying its depths and possibilities for change. You might even catch a reflection of the poet herself.

But then, the next poem reminds us that we’re all “Strangers” – to one another, to our surroundings, to ourselves. For example:

“The vigor of our way
is separateness,
the infinite finding itself strange
among the many….”

Such lines might be considered flat statements were there not so many curves! But this poem, as typically happens in Graham's work, includes images as fresh as the tulips who “change tense/ too quickly” and as startling as the starlings who “keep trying/ to thread the eyes/ of steeples.”

If you think you’ve heard those lines before, you probably have since this collection consists of several poems selected from each of eleven previously published books before closing with new poems. But, if you’ve never read Graham’s poetry, having poems representative of her work collected in one volume makes an excellent place to start – not only for the sweeping, all-encompassing view but for the life these poems take on when combined and arranged as they have been.

We could talk about that. We could talk about what the poems mean, and if you want such assessments by numerous poets and poetry students, you’ll find explications on the Internet. To relish the taste of Jorie Graham’s poetry, however, I recommend you simply enjoy the play of words, the sound echoes, the complexities of thought, then give yourself over to the experience of each poem.

When I began to do this, I discovered a spirit of wonder, a sense of breathlessness, a stream of consciousness that engaged me with its musicality and lush imagery. I also found connections arising from the disconnected and reorientation from various disorientations lit on by a highly active mind.

Because we’re now well into National Poetry Month and because my review copy has been with me too long without response, I’ll stop here for now with the hope you’ll let me know in the Comments below how you approach the poems of Jorie Graham. Then, when I’ve had time to read and absorb each poem a few more times, I hope we’ll chat again about this major poet and what makes her poetry so memorable and her new book so important to read and recommend as I do now.

©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler, writer and reviewer, has 3 books of poems in print: Living in the Nature Poem published by Hiraeth Press and Beach Songs & Wood Chimes (for children) and Outside Eden, published by Kelsay Books.


From the New World: Poems 1976-2014, Hardcover



…

The Early Poetry of Charles Wright

By the time I discovered the poetry of Charles Wright, his work had received prestigious awards, but not the Pulitzer, which I thoroughly expected him to win, and he did. Since then, I’ve continued to follow but not study his poems beyond my own ponderings. So when I learned of The Early Poetry of Charles Wright: A Companion, 1960-1990 written by English professor Robert D. Denham, I eagerly requested a review copy, which the publisher, McFarland, kindly sent.

As the author said in the Introduction, “Each of Wright’s poems can be read as a discrete work, but each is also part of an expansive quest.”

Sometimes this quest focuses on the poet’s life, sometimes on a fitting form, sometimes on spiritual questioning. In lesser hands, such aims might make for self-absorbed writing that doesn’t connect well with readers, but Wright’s acute powers of observation and fresh phraseology connect with us on an artistic, spiritual, and intellectual level. At times, though, the poet’s subject matter can be elusive and exclusive, so I welcomed Denham’s knowledge of poems I’d enjoyed, admired, but not necessarily understood!

Again in the Introduction, the author explained: “In the present book the notes that accompany most of the poems follow the usual conventions of annotation. They identify Wright’s sources (he is a comparatively allusive poet), along with people, places, things, and events that might not be immediately obvious. They also point to perceived influences, parallels to other poets, biographical details, historical explanation, and other kinds of supplementary and expository information, and they translate the occasional foreign word and phrase, ordinarily Italian.” Yeah!

To take full advantage of Professor Denham’s explications of the poems, you do well to have a copy of Wright’s two trilogies alongside, so you can see what’s going on that you might have missed (as I did) when reading Country Music: Selected Early Poems and The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990.

In summarizing Country Music, for example, the author provides a chart to point out the “Condensed form; process of squeezing down; the pilgrimage moves upward.” Also on the chart, we see that Hard Freight deals with the past in a “book of disparate individual lyrics” with “...narrative structure,” while Bloodlines focuses on the present in a “book of sequences” with both imagistic and narrative tone and structure. Addressing the future, China Trace has “movement toward a spiritual hope” in a “forty-six part poem beginning in childhood and ending in the constellation of fixed stars.”

The World of the Ten Thousand Things follows a past, present, and future timeline, too, in each of the books with The Southern Cross focusing on large concepts in the past. The Other Side of the River brings narrative-based poems into today, while Zone Journals and Xionia are concerned with what’s to come.

To give us further grounding, Professor Denham includes quotes from Wright himself. For example, in discussing “The New Poem” from the first trilogy, Wright defined that poem as “a reaction… to the idea that everything in the sixties was going to be different and make our lives different and was going to change everything.”

In “Spider Crystal Ascension,” Wright wanted to “compress the language and the thought to such a point that it stops being small and starts to enlarge…. Which is to say, rather than writing a lot to get larger and larger, you write less and less.”

References to poets, painters, and even post cards occur in the second trilogy. For example, in “Composition in Grey and Pink,” Denham says, “The instruction that Wright gave himself for this poem was to produce a watercolor in words.” How did that go?

"The souls of the day’s dead fly up like birds, big sister,
The sky shutters and casts loose.
And faster than stars the body goes to the earth.

Heat hangs like a mist from the trees.
Butterflies pump through the banked fires of late afternoon.
The rose continues its sure rise to the self."

In my opinion, that watercolor in words went amazingly well.

For “October,” Wright just wanted to write a seasonal poem, and for “Driving through Tennessee,” we learn that “Wright’s instruction to himself was ‘to write a poem that was basically commentary’.”

"In the moonlight’s fall, and Jesus returning, and Stephen Martyr
and St. Paul of the Sword…

– I am their music"

Besides the mood music and gorgeous lines, what interests and surprises me is how Wright sets goals and guidelines for his frequent experiments with poetry! If the average poet were to say, "I'm gonna write a commentary in a poem," the lines would most likely come out as stiff as brocade with none of the beauty. Besides, who even thinks of writing a poem just to see if you can get a verb on every line as Wright does in “California Spring”?

Are you starting to think what I'm thinking? Not only is this a writer of absolutely beautiful poetry but a poet who lives in the poem.

His poem “Ars Poetica” says it well:

"I like it because I’m better here than I am there,

Surrounded by fetishes and figures of speech:
Dog’s tooth and whale’s tooth, my father’s shoe, the dead weight
Of winter, the inarticulation of joy . . .

The spirits are everywhere.

and once I have called them down from the sky, and spinning and
dancing in the palm of my hand,
What will it satisfy?
I’ll still have

The voices rising out of the ground,
The fallen star my blood feeds,
this business I waste my heart on.

And nothing stops that."


Oh, thank God, Charles. Thank God.


© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer, has authored many traditionally published books in all genres, including poetry.


The Early Poems of Charles Wright, paperback


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Poets and poems to celebrate during National Poetry Month

Poets often ask each other about their favorite poets or poems, so here’s a list of personal Favs with hotlinks to poems for studying or just reading to enjoy. Feel free to add your favorites in the Comments section below.

Mary Oliver – The insightful and observant nature poetry of this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet drew me back into reading and writing poetry after years of writing almost everything except poems!

Charles Wright – Another Pulitzer Prize winner who weaves amazing metaphors and insight into exquisite free verse, this contemporary poet initially interested me because he was born in my native state of Tennessee, but his work appeals to a wide, global audience.

Donald Justice – This 20th Century Pulitzer poet had a home tie to Florida, where I’ve lived for years, but I especially enjoyed the insight into people and relationships often shown in his traditional poetry and free verse.

Pablo Neruda – Surrealist poetry, political poems, and odes of joy distinguish the Nobel Prize-winning poems of this 20th century poet, originally named Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, from Chile.

Billy Collins – A winner of numerous prestigious prizes, this former U.S. Poet Laureate has won a non-poetry-reading public with skillfully written humorous poetry, noted for asking such questions as why the farmer’s wife cut off mice-tails with a carving knife.

Maya Angelou – Loved by the general public, this former nightclub singer, actress, activist, and highly versatile poet has also written song lyrics, picture books for children, a Pulitzer-nominated screenplay, and a poem for President Clinton’s 1993 Inaugural.

Jorie Graham – The brilliant, insightful poems of this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet may require multiple readings if you approach her poems, as I first did, from a mind-brain that goes for comprehension, but if you read her poems aloud as an experience, you’ll feel the poetry and perhaps keep coming back for more.

Richard Wilbur – A veteran of WWII, this veteran poet has won more than one Pulitzer and pretty much every major award for poetry. More amazing, though, has been his ongoing dedication to writing traditional metered poetry during the ongoing reign of free verse.

Mary Ann Hoberman – Children’s Poet Laureate writes books for kids and lively poems with humor and bounce.



(c) 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler