From the Archives: An Introduction of Jorie Graham
I was asked to introduce Jorie Graham at the 92nd Street YMHA in 2017. Here's what I wrote.
Twenty years ago, I was assigned to interview Jorie Graham for the Academy of American Poets magazine, an assignment I had begged for and which I was granted with the admonition that I produce the interview on time, and in regard to Jorie Graham, that I not make a pest of myself. I had been a devoted reader of her poems, and my enthusiasm for the work was known by everyone in the office, but I was also intimidated by the intellect that burned behind the poems. I dutifully prepared my questions for her, and sent them off to Iowa City where she then lived.
About a week later, I received a phone call and when I answered, it was Jorie Graham. She was at a horse show in Wisconsin, and was taking the opportunity to catch up on calls. They were wonderful questions, I was assured by the voice on the other end of the phone, for surely I had meant to prompt the interview’s subject to speak to the zeitgeist, but they were of course, the wrong questions, though they would, in some sense, with some thought, lead us to the right questions.
Naïve as I was those twenty years ago, I do recall knowing I was being schooled, and it would behoove me to pay close attention. Instead of speaking about the temporal concerns my questions gestured toward, Graham was interested in discussing the more arduous work of soul-making. “I shouldn’t worry,” she assured me. She was there to help.
In her most recent book, entitled Fast, Graham’s title draws the reader toward the condition of our time, which is the condition of our attention as it finds itself disembodied, deflected, recreated in what we have come to call “the artificial.” The fastness of the conceptual intellect is juxtaposed against the primacy of bodily knowledge. In these poems, the body knows what it knows, and its appetites, desires, and needs both counteract and house the mind’s attendant desire to render meaning from syntax, and reason. That tension—the intellectual mind seeking to sort, the body’s wish to experience pleasure— are perhaps the central core of Graham’s work from her first to her most recent collection.
The body, as it exists in Graham’s poems is simultaneously discrete and permeable, and a reader will become keenly aware of the world that body occupies. Environmental degradation has reached a point from which we as a species cannot turn back. There is no poet writing today who has captured with the same rigor and urgency what it feels like to understand the state of the world which humans are harming beyond repair, but which still houses the full scope of our ambitions and hopes, fears, history, beauty and love. It is love too that keeps surfacing in Graham’s poems, but this is a mature love that understands loss as love’s constant companion. In Fast, Graham has written a group of poems that consider the death of her father, while others look at a personal struggle with illness. Both groups of poems are as unsentimental as they are unwavering. The body is shown and considered for its culminating truth, which is that it must die. I once heard Graham say that she writes poems so as not be surprised by her own death. That project—a kind of emotional, spiritual and intellectual acknowledgment of mortality--is at the forefront of this collection. I also heard her once describe how every human being alive today is the end point of an unbroken chain of existence that goes back to the very first humans who walked the earth. That is a miracle, but that miracle forces us to ask what we become when we are no longer in a state of becoming. Graham uses her own prodigious intellect to organize an interrogation of the full story of our mortality, as she bears witness to the death of both her parents and documents that experience in this book. These poems are some of the finest you will read on the loss of a parent, as they use emotionality to propel the poem without making the observer’s feelings the primary subject. Here, death is the subject, and Graham’s poems use the careful description of those events to arrive at revelation.
Jorie Graham is among the ranks of the finest poets our culture has produced. The generosity of her poetic enterprise is to let us watch her mind as it thinks, as it contends with the largest and most important questions, as it considers and transforms the tradition of the art, and as she demonstrates what it is to take the experience of living on our beautiful, damaged planet and to transform all of that into poems. What we see when we read her poems is nothing less that the act of soul-making.
Please join me in welcoming Jorie Graham.