I Wake up Operational

Complex, hesitant language. Jorie Graham, in her 2002 volume, ‘Never’ sits in an Umbrian church, trying to overcome the many layers of contradiction which meet her as a writer: writing what is forbidden, writing that cancels or obliterates the instant it seeks to capture: ‘taking it all down.’ This is a writing space which Graham has inhabited for a long time. Helen Vendler caught it well in ‘Soul Says’ as:

a practice of connecting together moments widely separated in time and space and occurring on disparate mental levels (usually the autobiographical, the historical, and the mythical). Each of these moments is important; each has its own unintelligibility; each demands to be both recorded and comprehended… As she comes to understand why she has intuitively connected them, she can compose a poem juxtaposing and interlacing them. (p. 227)

In her new book ‘Overlord’ she explores this space with obsessive intensity and a surprising degree of self-exposure. Her work aspires to a kind of confessional poetry which enlarges the personal moment into a context of existential dread, the presence of history. With long lines and near-prose rhythms, repeated titles and themed subjects – this book presents itself as a strong sequence, possibly a continuous poem. It is also her most accessible text for years.

The history in question is European. She writes in the North of France where the landscape still remembers the closing conflicts of the second world war - Operation Overlord. She also lives in the edgy historical aftermath of 9/11. Like Ted Hughes’ thrushes, she makes an attempt to ‘overtake the instant’ and drag out what is essential.

The series of poems entitled ‘Praying’ is a significant departure from her previous work, and stands as the core of the book. In these poems Graham attempts to eliminate the distance of reflection. It is a poetry written spontaneously and rapidly in the pre-dawn dark. It is prayer because attention is the first movement of prayer – in this case to an ‘overlord’ who is invoked and denied with equal intensity, an other conjured up by the desperate need for an other.

To this task Graham brings her formidable technique – poetic moves which net the tentative, overflowing, broken nature of lived experience. When this high-risk enterprise fails it can be mawkish or dull, but when successful it creates passages of lyric intensity.

The first poem ‘Other’ is a meditation on ‘now’ – the present moment ‘the thing at hand, the crucial thing…’ In her memory she lies in bed with a childhood ailment, absent from school, visualising the events in the schoolroom, in two places at once. This exercise of her imagination becomes an image for her ‘fall’ from complete engagement with the present – ‘this is what is wrong’ – the realisation that human beings, unlike any other living thing – can be alive yet absent:

This absence, this distance from the very experience the poet seeks to capture, is codified in all kinds of boundaries, separation and otherness – emotional, historical, political and spiritual.

A gunshot breaks her reverie (Dawn Day One – Dec 21 ’03). To wake suddenly is a fall into individuality from a collective sleep, to be beached on a hard shore. The poem is a series of captured images, flashes on the retina, steps across a room, until the poem too stares up ‘from the pool of this page’ to lead the reader into the edgy shared space of the ‘praying’ poems.

In Praying (Attempt of June 8 ’03), time blurs between present time and the landings on Omaha beach. Soldiers waken into toxic zones of death, a beaching, a kind of birth. Difference suddenly hardens into murder. Some people, now defined as other have become enemy. Words try to recapture voices, to integrate, to pull together, a desperation in which recollection becomes prayer. The poem doesn’t venture a full-stop until nearly the end of its third page. The voice interrupts itself with cinematic shifts, half-questions and subordinate clauses which wander through the dark to the Normandy beaches. She writes:

Soldiers are stumbling in heavy mist, dying or remaining alive. And in the dark she not only wonders whether ‘the spirit does or does not die / with the body, that being maybe the only real question left us’ but also the more immediate question – who are we, anyway?

Overlord is full of tentative exploratory movements towards identity and recognition: searching for the records of a ‘fallen’ soldier, or losing count, of the dead, of the night stars, of reality that is too heavy to allow any sleep. These prayers are an attempt to explore and shape experience into some kind of resolution, insofar as any resolution is allowed. The author, as a child, loses count of the stars and all the other things that are uncountable – the dead, the prayers, the days:

These short sentences break and stutter after the long rhetorical flight of the first three pages, but also draft out a kind of manifesto for the use of poetry, its redress, ‘Start. Start putting things back. To still us. Start.’ In case that should seem too reassuring, the previous poem (Dawn Day One) has described how a vivisected monkey bears the retinal impression of a cross it has looked at in its last moments. This, the researcher describes, would have faded

There is a restorative telling, a stilling of the moment – but it costs. In the close attentiveness of Graham’s writing particular words are brought to the foreground, pushing them to bear meanings which are increasingly ambiguous.

In Praying (attempt of June 6 ’03) a pet cat has AIDS and is ‘starting to go wrong’ attempting to cover a mess that isn’t there. In this Graham finds an image of a rootless and unsatisfied guilt which she tries to expiate in writing. She too finds herself every morning:

The voice may capture the moment, but the moment is full of voices, and in writing one voice another is obliterated – not least the voices of the past speaking in the hedgerows. The question is how to attend? The self gazes out at the world, (‘Upon Emergence’) at the edge of a garden ‘paying out my attention.’ As Mark Doty asks: ‘Is that what soul or spirit is, then, the outward-flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world?’[1] The image Graham attends to, the bird feeding in the garden, enters into her consciousness, rides in the blood. But this process detaches, localises, splits. This creation of boundaries and otherness substitutes thinking for presence. Thou becomes It ‘So’ she says ‘this is the source of evil?’ And this mini-Genesis leads rapidly to moral responsibility: the poem itself has started to speak in the earth like Abel’s blood:

The ‘Praying’ poems feel like successive drafts, not of one poem, but of a way of speaking, an exploration into dark personal territory. She has talked about her writing process:

Graham’s fascinating method of writing these poems manifests itself in the free-flowing spoken form: she would wake up in the middle of night and write poetry in the darkness until the first light of day. She shared with the audience her belief that the best poems were lost, as she wrote over lines in the obscurity of early morning.[2]

It seems to be a very physical form of spiritual exercise; crouching in the dark, the tightness of her eyelids creating patterns and wraiths in the darkness, feeling the pressure of the past and the pressure of the future, praying to an absent god. The tone of the poems is high anxiety. She uses a long line which occasionally loops into an extended phrase, breaking the line in unexpected places, as if to keep it running on. She is engaged in an impassioned attempt to speak out the moment, to think it into prayer without detachment, without splitting or covering.

What makes these poems extraordinary is the intersection of present experience, post 9/11 fear, the minutiae of waking, and the present voices of history in the hedgerows and boundaries of France. ‘You can enlarge your soul but to receive what?’ begins Omaha (28). In this reflection on time Eliot’s Four Quartets are never far away: ‘the bubble of the now being emitted from the / blossoming / then.’ – but killing remains a more potent presence than God.

Poems entitled ‘Spoken from the Hedgerows’ edit together voices from the war, using soldiers’ words, testimony from the dead. ‘I do not know who I am, but I am here, I tell you this.’ All kinds of identity are brought into question: American-ness, rightness, humanness. The hedgerows are boundaries, lines of separation, locations of difference. And the poems continue, asserting the impossibility of living without hope, the love of surface and detail, and above all the need to live in uncertainty without the dangerous closures of religion.

There is, finally, resolution of a kind in a poem such as ‘Communion’ describing a religious rite which celebrates engagement with the moment in all its ambiguity –

The book ends where it began – awakening, waking, living with the world, gazing at it, carrying on:

[1] Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. p. 49

[2] MOORE, KRISTINA M ‘Harvard Prof Prays Through Poetry’ The Harvard Crimson, Thursday, February 24, 2005

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505974