[In the following essay, Longenbach provides an in-depth examination of Graham's first four books of poems, exploring the relationship between language and sensation in these works.]

Jorie Graham published her first book only fifteen years ago, but she has already produced a body of writing that feels like the accumulation of a lifetime. There is not a great deal of work—only four books. But like Yeats, who early in his career cautioned suspicious readers that “it is myself that I remake,” Graham has been driven to turn against her own best discoveries, risking everything that she has achieved. Each of her books is a new beginning; in her most recent and best book, Materialism, each poem feels like an interrogation of the one preceding it. Graham has been unwilling to settle for anything settled, and she sometimes discards achievements that other poets would be willing to nurture for a long time. A different kind of writer would winnow more scrupulously in private, sharing only the distilled residue of her dissatisfaction. But Graham's most self-conscious interrogations of poetry are driven by a kind of seriousness that impresses the most skeptical reader. The more she writes, the more necessary—the more truly elucidating—her public agon seems. Graham's achievement seems big because she is satisfied with so little.

Even individual poems seem poised between the contrary demands of the intimate and the cosmic. The linguistic texture of Graham's poems has always been distinguished by a tension between poetically precise and philosophically expansive kinds of diction, and in Materialism, Graham transformed this tension into a structural principle. Her most recent poems tend to focus on an insignificant action—walking the dog, delivering her daughter's leotard, or picking up a dead butterfly. The poems themselves never seem little, however, for Graham creates (more than uncovers) the infinitely expanding web of psychic energies that makes each small moment possible. The result is a dramatization of what Husserl thought of as the “thickened” present: tracing the contours of a single action in the present, we feel the weighty convergence of the personal and cultural traces that cling to it. As Graham says in one of the poems called “Notes on the Reality of the Self” in Materialism, she wants to “expand / each second, / bloating it up, cell-like, making it real.” In the process, she forges a deeply sensuous poetry out of the slippage between language and sensation that so many American poets have worked to suppress—and she does so without capitulating to the opposite idealism, in which the claims of language supposedly override our desire to know the world intimately.

Graham's dramatization of consciousness can be so rapid and expansive that the insignificant action provoking the poem becomes difficult to find; but simple evidence for the action is always there. In “Recovered from the Storm” (an uncollected poem published after Materialism), the action is simply and unexpectedly delineated in the poem's monosyllabic final line: “I pick up and drag one large limb from the path.” The line is as unassuming as the action it describes, but because of the poem's breathless exfoliation of thought, the line is almost unbearably weighted with connotation.

So this is the wingbeat of the underneathly, ticking—
this iridescent brokenness, this wet stunted nothingness—
busy with its hollows—browsing abstractly with its catastrophic wingtips
the tops of our world, ripping pleatings of molecule,
unjoining the slantings, the slippery wrinklings we don't even grasp the icily free made-nature of yet?
Why are we here in this silly moonlight?
What is the mind meant to tender among splinters?
What was it, exactly, was meant to be shored?
Whose dolled-up sorceries against confusion now?
The children are upstairs, we will keep them tucked in—
as long as we can, as long as you'll let us.
I hear your pitch. How containment is coughing,
under the leafbits, against the asphalt.
How the new piles of kindling are mossily giggling their kerosene cadenza
all 'long the block in the riddled updrafts.
I pick up and drag one large limb from the path.

The achievement of this poem is that its final line—in itself so plain—is almost impossible to paraphrase. Negotiating the syntactical thicket that precedes it, we are made to feel the existential terror that Graham staves off by the necessary and yet poignantly inadequate act of dragging one (just one) fallen limb from the path. On the one hand, that terror feels threateningly domestic, the kind of fear that every parent of small children knows. On the other hand, the terror feels ominously metaphysical. In this poem of tiny consequence, Graham is audacious enough to refer openly to the two greatest modern poets of existential terror. She makes already well-known lines from Eliot (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) and Frost (“a momentary stay against confusion”) ring in our ears again. There is nothing cagey about these gestures toward the moderns. Graham wants us to feel the power of these lines, and she needs to let us know that the lines—however familiar they might be—are a necessary part of her poetic equipment. Her distinctiveness is based not on distinctions but on acts of inclusion, a hunger to align herself with a wide array of contemporaries and precursors.

For Graham, the problem with Eliot, Frost, or Stevens is not that their achievements are overpowering but that their presence in contemporary poetry is not powerful enough. Having come of age at a time when Eliot had as much or as little to do with contemporary writing as Coleridge (Graham was born in 1951), she is young enough to feel that the moderns are separated from her by several generations of equally formidable writers. But these poets tended, says Graham, to narrow the scope of American poetry. However necessary and productive it was for them to endorse a “strictly secular sense of reality (domestic, confessional),” we need to return to the ambitious questions of spiritual and cultural redemption that preoccupied Eliot, Frost, and Stevens: “I think many poets writing today realize we need to recover a high level of ambition, a rage, if you will—the big hunger.”

I suspect that there is no post-romantic poet who has not felt this hunger (the elegantly circumscribed world of Richard Wilbur is hardly unambitious), but Graham is right to suggest that a kind of expansiveness, a certain rhetoric of ambition, became difficult for poets after modernism. “We hear the man in manifesto,” said James Merrill, thinking about the vast productions of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams: “these men began by writing small, controllable, we might say from our present vantage ‘unisex’ poems. As time went on, though, through their ambitious reading, their thinking, their critical pronouncements, a kind of vacuum charged with expectation, if not with dread, took shape around them, asking to be filled with grander stuff. As when the bronze is poured in the lost-wax process of casting, what had been human and impressionable in them was becoming its own monument.” It was for this reason that Merrill was so deeply nourished by Elizabeth Bishop, a poet who (as Merrill put it in “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia”) refused “to tip the scale of being human / By adding unearned weight.” In contrast, Graham wants the “big hunger” to bring to American poetry a muscularity, not a flabbiness.

Merrill ultimately rejected the notion, implicit in his pun on manifesto, that “unearned weight” is accumulated only by men (though he was right to suggest that the conscious shirking of high ambition is often associated in American poetry with femininity), Similarly, Merrill's career makes us resist the notion that weight, earned or unearned, is necessarily accumulated more readily by the moderns than by their successors: The Changing Light at Sandover is one of the grandest poems produced by an American poet since The Cantos. Merrill checked the portentousness of his poetic cosmology with a tone that varies from bemused to whimsical, and the moderns were similarly troubled by the specter of unearned weight, even when they indulged their appetites. Almost as soon as The Waste Land was published, Eliot began diminishing the poem as nothing but “rhythmical grumbling.” Yeats was careful to publish “The Second Coming” beside “A Prayer for My Daughter,” tempering his apocalyptic vision of “a rocking cradle” with a glimpse of his own child “half hid / Under this cradle-hood and coverlid.” Lamenting the loss of the “big hunger,” Graham does recognize that Merrill and Ashbery have kept modernist ambition alive: “the hugeness of their project seems so central,” says Graham, “and the aesthetic differences that divide them ultimately so minor.” It consequently seems more appropriate to say that a longing for the “big hunger” coexisted with a fear of “unearned weight” in the poetry of both the moderns and their successors. As “Recovered from the Storm” suggests, Jorie Graham has embraced this tension and made from it a poetry all her own.

In her recent poems, Graham has perfected a style that is, in its own way, as grippingly idiosyncratic as Marianne Moore's. But her development has been swift; as I began by suggesting, Graham has not been shy about exposing her quest (a lesser word will not do) for new ways of dramatizing the mind in motion. In retrospect, her career might be described in the way that Merrill characterized the careers of the moderns: her first two books, though different from each other, contained small, controllable poems while her third book, The End of Beauty, unveiled a far more challenging and ecstatic way of writing. This dramatic development was due mostly to a poet's passage from apprenticeship to an early mastery of her own language, a mastery that allows the poet to attempt more risky effects. But because Graham was precocious (the poems of her apprenticeship are highly crafted), it has been difficult not to read her passage from Erosion to The End of Beauty as an allegory for the play of larger forces. Bonnie Costello has ventured that Erosion, Graham's second book, “is essentially a modernist text, whereas Graham's later work may be characterized as postmodern.” Plausible as this statement is, our sense of what modernism was remains so fluid that Graham herself is able to read her own career in opposite terms. To her, the earlier work in Erosion is similar to the modest productions of poets who came of age in the wake of modernism while The End of Beauty represents her first large-scale attempt to recover the “big hunger”—the formal audaciousness and cultural relevance she associates with modernism.

Graham has become, due in part to the heart-felt endorsements of Helen Vendler, the most prominent American poet born after the Second World War. It is consequently difficult to remember how controversial each of her books has seemed—how sharply she has turned against her own accomplishment and how unsympathetically those turnings have often been received. For Costello, who admires Erosion, The End of Beauty and Region of Unlikeness are deeply problematic. Less thoughtful reviewers have said worse. But the controversy seems to me elucidating because Graham so expertly resists the narratives we usually bring to postmodern poetry while, at the same time, inviting us to consider her poetry in relationship to those narratives.

The most powerful of these narratives is the “breakthrough” to unprecedented formal and ideological freedom that, ever since Lowell's Life Studies, American poets have felt compelled to cultivate or spurn: in the wake of modernism, psychic and political health could be enabled by breaking (or mending) the well-wrought urn. Graham sometimes reinforces the highly idealized logic of the “breakthrough,” especially when she associates aesthetic closure with an ahistorical notion of ideological oppression. But just as often she explodes this logic, rejecting the “breakthrough” narrative's strategic oversimplifications of modernism. If, as Costello has suggested, the recent work takes on the formal strategies currently associated with a garden-variety postmodernism (“darting images without explicit connections; a digressive, decentered approach to thought; the fragmentation of linear plots and arguments”), it is more important to remember, as Costello also points out, that Graham “has a fundamentally different orientation” from Ashbery and his cotillion: for them, poetry is not—as it is for Graham—“a matter of metaphysics, of sustaining the rigor of truth or opening words to ecstatic vision.” As “The Tree of Knowledge” suggests, Graham entertains “the old dream of an underneath,” but she does so without complacency or idealism: she knows that “just appearance turning into further appearance” may as easily become an unexamined certainty as appearance giving way to the real thing.

Such contradictions—real or apparent—are the source of Graham's distinctive power. Especially since the publication of Materialism, it has become clear that Graham's poetry reaches in too many different directions to be accounted for by any linear narrative. Just as Life Studies looks like the crucial turning point only if we ignore the restless, searching quality of Lowell's entire career, The End of Beauty looks like a “breakthrough” only if we ignore the ways in which the book that followed it, Region of Unlikeness, now looks like a retreat to the presuppositions underlying many of Graham's earlier poems. Until recently, this retreat was difficult to see: Region of Unlikeness appears to extend the stylistic extravagance of The End of Beauty, eschewing the controlled shapes of the earlier poems of Erosion. But style is not always linked unequivocally to vision, and one of the great strengths of Graham's poetry is that it weakens links that readers of postmodern poetry almost always take for granted. In other words, Jorie Graham is as frustrating and problematic a poet—I mean this as the highest compliment—as Eliot or Frost.

In “The Sense of an Ending,” the long poem that concludes Erosion and foreshadows the concerns of her later work, Graham recalls her childhood acquaintance with “eyemachines” at a clinic: looking into the machine, each eye would see an “earthy thing, one to / each eye,” and the mind would be “given the task: to bring them / together.” These lines describe the way in which most of the poems from Erosion (and many of the poems from Region of Unlikeness) work: in contrast to recent poems like “Recovered from the Storm,” these poems do not so much enact the processes of consciousness as create, through juxtaposition or implied analogy, a static puzzle that the reader is obliged to solve. In “At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body,” for instance, Graham brings together Signorelli's fresco of the Resurrection of the Bodies in the cathedral of Orvieto with the story of Signorelli's dissection of his son's body. In the fresco, souls clamor to reenter human flesh that Signorelli has rendered perfectly; in the studio, Signorelli dissects cadavers in order to achieve that perfection. But the dissection of his own son suggests that something more than the demands of early modern empiricism was motivating the painter.

It took him days,
                              that deep
caress, cutting,
                              unfastening,
until his mind
                              could climb into
the open flesh and
                              mend itself.

Graham does not need to make any explicit gesture back to the Resurrection of the Body for us to feel its relevance here. Looking at the fresco, she wonders if the souls were really “after” perfection as they hurry into human form; the people in the cathedral, muses Graham, could tell the souls that “there is no / entrance, / only entering.” Similarly, the poem's hushed final lines suggest that the painter himself is “mended” not by seeking spiritual wholeness but by confronting the physical evidence of the most unbearable kind of human suffering.

“At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body” offers one of the most convincing examples of Graham's analogical method in Erosion; in other poems, this method produces poems that overdetermine their endings. “The Age of Reason” is divided into three discrete sections (as the Signorelli poem could have been): part one describes birds who settle on anthills, taking the insects—or sometimes cigarette butts or broken glass—into their bodies before they fly away; part two describes Werner Herzog's film of Büchner's Woyzek, in which the hero stabs his wife, throws the knife in the river, and “goes in” after it much as the knife “goes in” the body; part three attempts a synthesis, depending (as many of the Erosion poems do) on questions that instruct the reader: “How far is true / enough? / How far into the / earth / can vision go and / still be / love?” As in “At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body,” Graham plays with different notions of “entering,” groping for the place at which the mechanisms of violence and of love seem too similar to pull apart. If the poem is like the “eyemachine,” however, it not only presents discrete narratives but conflates them, solving the poem's puzzle before we have a chance to feel its mystery. The poem may look more modest—more apprehensible, more controlled—than much of Graham's later work, but its shape is determined by a hunger for big solutions to big questions.

In offering this analysis, I am only repeating what Graham suggests about her own poems when, in “The Sense of an Ending,” she describes a wolf pacing in a cage: “Too much clicks shut in that quick step / revolving on the one hind leg, bringing the other down just as / the swivel ends. … It's beautiful. You can hear / minutes stitching shut.” Looking back to one of the most frequently invoked metaphors in Erosion (stitching), these lines also introduce the most prominent metaphor of The End of Beauty (clicks shut). Throughout both The End of Beauty and Region of Unlikeness (though in very different ways), Graham is appalled by the “click” of closure, having felt that she herself was seduced in Erosion by its beauty, its perfection. But in Region of Unlikeness she is once again seduced by closure even as she sustains her critique of it. The most ambitious poems from this volume (“Fission,” “From the New World,” “The Phase after History”) do not read much like Erosion poems; instead of juxtaposing different stories, Graham fragments and intertwines them, making the poems seem (at first glance) decentered and open-ended. Yet these poems rely on the same kind of analogical thinking that distinguishes “The Age of Reason”: however strenuously they lament the ethical or political repercussions of aesthetic closure, the poems themselves click shut.

In “From the New World” Graham braids together three different narratives: the recent trial of John Demanjuk, known as Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka; the story of a girl who emerged from the gas chamber asking for her mother, only to be raped and sent back in; and the story of Graham's own grandparents, who, after fifty years of marriage, were put into separate nursing homes. When Graham remembers visiting the grandmother who no longer recognized her, the stories begin to line up, making the poem's structure feel more spatial than linear: “I went into the bathroom, locked the door. / Stood in front of the mirrored wall— / not so much to see in, not looking up at all in fact, / but to be held in it as by a gas, / the thing which was me there in its chamber.” Like the “eyemachine,” the poem asks us to superimpose the narratives, equating the closed spaces of the bathroom and the gas chamber. And in both cases, Graham wants to preserve the moment of possibility that the narrative forecloses; each girl is desperate to save her “thin / young body” from its all but certain end. But by drawing such a broad analogy between such bracingly different realms of human experience, the poem itself seems tightly closed: it focuses our attention so sharply on the similarities of the narratives that it seems oddly unconcerned with their differences. Graham goes so far as to say that “the coiling and uncoiling / billions” were there with her in the bathroom: “the about to be held down, bit clean, shaped, / and the others, too, the ones gone back out, the ending / wrapped round them.”

Paraphrasing “What the End Is For,” Helen Vendler exposes the problem with these analogical poems: “The wish of the speculative mind to halt its drift and take visible shape leads not only to marriage but to atomic piles and B-52's.” One wants to know how, precisely, cognitive or aesthetic closure leads to mass destruction. For if what the poem says about narrative closure were true, then it would be easy—just by embracing different formal strategies—to end sexism and stave off nuclear disaster. Writing in defense of the Language poets, Jerome McGann once declared that “narrativity” is an “inherently conservative feature of discourse.” But just because our experience of the world is discursive, shaped by narratives, it does not follow that we can change the world by disrupting specific versions of those narratives. Responding to McGann, Charles Altieri rightly pointed out that “there is no one social form—that hypothesis is pure Platonism, not Marxist materialism.” This logic may explain Graham's repeated condemnations of narrative closure: she is—at least in this regard—a kind of Platonist, a poet who sees the same issue of aesthetic form at the root of all social problems. As Graham herself has admitted with characteristic forth-rightness, “I'm so much at the outer limits of political action” that the poetry's social dimension is “probably a delusion I create for myself in order to get myself off the hook.”

Graham dismantles this delusion as often as she fosters it. In the early wake of modernism, when Robert Lowell called his first book Land of Unlikeness (translating the phrase regio dissimilitudinis), he wanted his strictly controlled poems to imply a corresponding spiritual vision—as the chaotic surfaces of Pound's and Eliot's poems did not seem to do. In contrast, the author of Region of Unlikeness is interesting because the formal and thematic aspects of her poems are often at odds with each other, undermining accepted notions of openness. Graham has offered the counter-intuitive but convincing argument that Whitman is “a very intellectual sensibility writing desperately towards his body to recover it” while Stevens is “a poet so fully in the body, in his senses, and moving towards the conceptual and philosophical in order to complete himself.” By this same logic, the egregiously fragmentary and digressive poet of Region of Unlikeness is preeminently a poet of closure. “We tend to define our poets by that aspect of sensibility they actually most lack and strive towards,” continues Graham, and she herself strives most arduously to embrace poems that do not click shut. This is why her poems—unlike the work of contemporaries who champion open-endedness with more consistently doctrinaire fervor—are so moving and unpredictable. In the closing lines of “Soul Says,” the last poem in Region of Unlikeness, Graham seems desperate to discover a region of “likeness” in which all metaphors are literalized, all stories are the same story: one thing is likened to another thing but also is that thing:

Now then, I said, I go to meet that which I liken to
(even though the wave break and drown me in laughter)
the wave breaking, the wave drowning me in laughter—

Beautiful as these lines are, they could not serve as the conclusion to Materialism. Little of what I've said so far is pertinent to Graham's recent poetry, and neither is it pertinent to most of The End of Beauty, the volume that appeared between Erosion and Region of Unlikeness. Graham once admitted that after publishing Erosion she completed and discarded almost an entire book of poems written in the manner of Erosion: among the poems included in The End of Beauty, “Imperialism” and “What the End Is For” seem like the only remaining evidence of that effort; despite their jittery, disjointed surfaces, they too feel spatial in design (offering stories that we correlate with one another). Other poems in The End of Beauty are written in a startlingly different manner—a more resolutely linear manner that, in retrospect, prepares us for the poems of Materialism. The title of one of them, “Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay,” may serve to describe them all: although the poems move inexorably and ecstatically forward, Graham slows down the movement, breaking the poem into discrete sections, often line by line. While she tends in the poems of Materialism to thicken a single moment of consciousness, Graham imagines in these poems the complexities that lurk between our moments as they pass. In the process, she offers a compelling critique not only of closure but of openness as well.

The End of Beauty contains five poems called “Self-Portrait.” The first of them, “Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them,” unfolds the story of the first human story: by plucking the forbidden fruit and handing it to Adam, Eve turns her back on the static truth of God, initiating a plot from an error.

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the feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument,
a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere,

28

and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error,

29

of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set

30

stripped of position stripped of true function

31

and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection

32

where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing

33

out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day.

These breathless final lines, hurrying forward even as Graham delays the end, suggest that human freedom lies in errancy and digression. And inasmuch as the lines seem to describe the poem's movement, Graham expresses her dissatisfaction with the “complex mechanism” of the analogical poems she wrote in Erosion. But elsewhere in The End of Beauty Graham reveals a deep suspicion of the freedom apparently embodied by this new kind of poem. What seems like the opening of all possibility in “Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them” (which stops before the narrative of heterosexual desire begins) immediately seems like the foreclosure of all possibility in “Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne.” Pursuing Daphne, Apollo is all closure; he wants “to possess her, to nail the erasures,” and all he can offer are the typical lines: “will you forgive me? or say / that you'll love me for / ever and ever.” Daphne, in contrast, is associated with the aleatory movement of a flock of birds: “the shrill cheeps and screeches of the awakening thousands, / hysterical, for miles, in all the directions.” Daphne refuses to “give shape to his hurry by being / its destination,” and since Graham is likewise attempting to undo the end (to forge a poetry that resembles the flock of birds more than the single-minded male), she seems to posit a realm of feminine experience that lies outside of narrative—a “given” world untouched by the “made.” But Graham skewers this idealism in the final lines of the poem: the random bird-calls “marry” in the air, suggesting that the plot of heterosexual desire cannot simply be evaded but must be more resolutely resisted from within.

Part of what makes the sequence of “Self-Portraits” in The End of Beauty so exciting is that they are sternly self-critical: each poem not only turns against the one before it but also turns on itself, collapsing the duality posited by its title. In “Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay (Penelope at Her Loom),” Graham emphasizes more clearly that her own formal strategies of interruption and delay (like Daphne's, like Penelope's) inevitably heighten our desire for closure. Although Odysseus threatens to wrap “himself plot plot and dénouement over the roiling openness,” Penelope unweaves her tapestry, delaying the suitors, only to make them “want her more richly”; though Penelope's strategy is delay, her fingers dart over the weaving “like his hurry darts.” However compromised, Penelope's power over the suitors is not dispelled. In Elizabeth Bishop's “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” the Native American women are “retreating, always retreating” behind the landscape that exists only as a tapestry—an imposed system of European values—for the pursuing men; in “Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay,” Penelope has taken control of the tapestry itself, “beginning always beginning the ending as they go to sleep beneath her.”

Even more tellingly critical of Graham's notion of openness is “Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone,” the last of the five self-portraits. Once in hell, Persephone discovers a world with no shape, no beginning and, therefore, no end. She wonders how she will recognize anything in the future if she loses all sense of the past.

She watched the smoke where it began what it left off
What will I recognize it to have been she thought
smoke smoke her fingers her eyes like static all over it
Surely I can find it the point of departure she put her hand in
The birds the beaks of the birds the song the heard song
She reached in what is it begins at the end she thought
Where is the skin of the minutes will it ever come off
She reached in there was no underneath what was this coiling over her fingers
She reached in she could go no further she was sealed off
It pushed back against her it was hell she could finally lean
It was the given and it was finally given

This and other passages in “Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone” offer some of Graham's most virtuosic writing. She eschews all punctuation, suggesting that the poem itself has reached a condition of openness beyond the conventions of grammar and syntax; however, the passage itself maintains that such a condition would be intolerable, even if it were possible. If we really could step outside of narrative, if we could live without any sense of an ending, attaining some sense of the given, of pure being, we would be in hell. And as Graham describes it, this static world of the given resembles the Eden we left behind in “Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them.” Persephone emerges from hell as gratefully as Eve emerged from Eden, glad to “inhabit a shape,” to “suffer completely this wind.” Between these two poems, Graham has shown how little may be possible within the human world of narrative; but there is no doubt that this woefully constricted world is the only place in which meaningful resistance is possible at all.

In the penultimate poem of The End of Beauty, “Of Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulness,” Graham casts her own lot with Persephone, giving herself over to the Shelleyan wind, to relentless forward motion: “through wind, through winter nights, we'll pass, / steering with crumbs, with words, / making of every hour / a thought.” This positive argument (the finding of freedom within narrative) is far more complicated and interesting than Graham's negative argument (the unequivocal association of narrative closure with oppression). And one way to explain Graham's development would be to say that the spatial poems of Region of Unlikeness extend the negative argument while the linear poems of Materialism extend the positive argument. The final poem in The End of Beauty is “Imperialism,” an analogical poem that, unlike the self-portraits, would not seem out of place in Region. But when Graham recently organized her selected poems, she placed “Of Forced Sightes” at the end of The End of Beauty, suggesting that it, rather than “Imperialism,” prepares us for the more resolutely self-critical poems of Materialism. Another way to explain Graham's development would be to say that in Region of Unlikeness she recovered from modernism even more of the “big hunger” than she had in Erosion; in Materialism, she recovered from The End of Beauty an equally powerful distrust of “unearned weight.”

Just as The End of Beauty contains five “Self-Portrait” poems, Materialism contains five poems called “Notes on the Reality of the Self.” Graham does not return to the freeze-frame structure of the self-portraits, however; like “Recovered from the Storm” (the recent poem with which I began), these “Notes” focus on a deceptively simple action. “I let the dog loose in this stretch,” says Graham midway through the first of the “Notes,” the opening poem in Materialism: the line tells us the poem's entire plot, but our experience of the poem is dominated by Graham's rapidly unfolding drama of consciousness. She watches the river, “each handful of it closing over the next”; leaves are sucked into “the quick throes of another tentative / conclusion”; leaf-matter accrues “round a / pattern, a law”; and the river itself is “Spit forth, licked up, snapped where the force / exceeds the weight, clickings, pockets.” Clickings, pattern, conclusion, closing: this is the vocabulary of oppression in Region of Unlikeness, but here Graham uses the same words to describe the unceasing river of consciousness. Flux is now imagined as a sequence of moments that, however conclusive in themselves, are immediately superseded: “each next right point, inter- / locking, correct, correct again, each rightness snapping loose.” As if picking up where her sequence of self-portraits left off, Graham begins Materialism by discarding any sense of “roiling openness” that is not patterned, shaped, governed by law.

“What is inwardness?” asked Rilke in one of his late poetic fragments: “What if not sky intensified, / flung through with birds and deep / with winds of homecoming?” Graham's notion of selfhood throughout Materialism is similarly external; she dramatizes consciousness by focusing on the movement of the material world outside the self, ultimately suggesting that the self exists only inasmuch as it is composed of material phenomena. As Helen Vendler has pointed out, Graham can no longer compose self-portraits through mythological figures, as she did in The End of Beauty. Once the “instabilities of matter” are assumed by the self, it can no longer assert that kind of “mastery over experience”: the material self, Vendler continues, “is ultimately powerless over fate.” Not only has Graham given up the dream of openness, asserting that all experience is governed by patterns or laws; she also admits that the individual self has very little power to impose or disrupt those laws. In the second of the “Notes on the Reality of the Self,” Graham makes this point by comparing the self to bushes that are affected in various ways by the evening light, the autumn wind, and the sounds of a marching band practicing in the field beyond the poet's yard. The band, “screeching, rolling, patterning, measuring,” is a

scintillant beast the bushes do not know exists
as the wind beats them, beats in them, beats round them,
them in a wind that does not really even now
                                                                                                                                  exist,
in which these knobby reddish limbs that do not sway
                                                                      by so much as an inch
its arctic course
                                                  themselves now sway—

Real only inasmuch as it is motion, the self is composed of a world of whose existence it is unaware: the self is swayed but cannot assert itself in return. Yet the sheer verbal mastery of “Notes on the Reality of the Self” belies the notion of a self completely lacking in agency; other poems in Materialism will grant greater power to consciousness. And though the poems must be read in dialogue with each other, it is crucial that we see Graham diminishing so severely her sense of her own power, especially since the poems of Region of Unlikeness risked the impression of hubris by correlating personal and historical narratives.

Because they also pull together wildly disparate materials, the most ambitious poems of Materialism (“Concerning the Right to Life,” “The Dream of the Unified Field,” “Manifest Destiny”) may resemble the longer poems of Region. Their narratives do not match up analogically, however, but move steadily if inexplicably forward, linked by the arbitrary repetition of particular words. In “Concerning the Right to Life” the words spot and red reappear in otherwise unrelated sections of the poem; in “Manifest Destiny” the word mark accumulates a penumbra of different associations as it reappears in different contexts. “The Dream of the Unified Field” unfolds in an apparently more simple but ultimately more challenging way: although its six sections are similarly linked by the repetition of the words white (referring usually to snow) and black (referring to a leotard, starlings, a crow, and skin color), the poem unfolds with narrative ease, each section extending the story of the one before it: “On my way to bringing you the leotard / you forgot to include in your overnight bag, / the snow started coming down harder.” This narrative action is not as tersely summarized as it is in “Recovered from the Storm” or the various “Notes on the Reality of the Self,” but it is equally crucial to our experience of the poem. After delivering her daughter's leotard, Graham watches a flock of starlings fly through the snow and settle on a tree (which looks like a head that alternately “explodes” and “recollects”), and then hears a single crow within the swarm of smaller birds (“a voice inside a head, filling a head”). At this point, Graham herself is gripped by the overwhelming sense of emptiness: in contrast to the “head” she imagines in the tree, the pocket that held the leotard (her daughter's “dream”) is empty, and so is her own skull.

See, my pocket is empty now. I let my hand
open and shut in there. I do it again. Two now, skull and
                                                                                                                                                      pocket
with their terrified inhabitants.

Hinging on this moment of crisis, “The Dream of the Unified Field” tells the story of how Graham arrived at the understanding of selfhood she more calmly describes throughout the sequence of “Notes on the Reality of the Self.” Feeling that there is nothing inside her, she returns to the window to watch her daughter dancing in the leotard. The scene evokes a memory of the ballet class she took from Madame Sakaroff, a Russian refugee. Changing into her own leotard, she overheard Madame speak with an unnamed visitor: “No one must believe in God again.” Graham watched her teacher face herself in the mirror, approaching it until she touched her reflection, and Graham herself now approaches the window, watching her daughter dance, until she touches the glass. Speaking both to her daughter and to herself as a child, she asks, “what should I know / to save you that I do not know, hands on this windowpane?”

In response to the question, Graham undertakes the almost futile but necessary act of recomposing her self from the material world around her: “The storm: I close my eyes and, / standing in it, try to make it mine. An inside / thing.” The poem breaks from its uncharacteristically placid narrative to one of Graham's most ecstatic flights of consciousness:

wilderness brought deep into my clearing,
out of the ooze of night,
limbed, shouldered, necked, visaged, the white—
now the clouds coming in (don't look up),
now the Age behind the clouds, The Great Heights,
all in there, reclining, eyes closed, huge,
centuries and centuries long and wide,
and underneath, barely attached but attached,
like a runner, my body, my tiny piece of
the century—minutes, houses going by—The Great Heights—
anchored by these footsteps, now and now,
the footstepping—now and now—carrying its vast
white sleeping geography—mapped—
not a lease—possession—

In the smallest sense, Graham is describing the act of writing the poem we are now reading—the act of transforming a sequence of arbitrary observations and associations (snowstorm, leotard, starlings, crow, ballet class) into a logical narrative. In the largest sense, Graham is attempting to achieve the “dream of the unified field,” the dream that all material phenomena might be described by a single paradigm. Graham's indomitable craving for closure reaches epic proportions in these lines: pulling The Great Heights into the vacant space of the self, her hunger has never been bigger.

But it is at exactly this moment that her fear of “unearned weight” also becomes stronger than ever before. The hubris implied by her metaphors (colony, new world, wilderness, mapped, possession) is exposed by a sudden and apparently unprecedented shift from the poem's narrative to lines adapted from the diary of Columbus's first voyage to the New World. Having begun with a domestic chore, (“On my way to bringing you the leotard”), “The Dream of the Unified Field” ends with one of the most primal narratives of western culture.

                                                            After the cross was set up,
three sailors went into the bush (immediately erased
from sight by the fast snow) to see what kinds of
trees. They captured three very black Indian
women—one who was young and pretty.
The Admiral ordered her clothed and returned her to
                                                                                                                                                      her land
courteously. There her people told
that she had not wanted to leave the ship,
but wished to stay on it. The snow was wild.
Inside it, though, you could see
this woman was wearing a little piece of
gold on her nose, which was a sign there was
                                                                                                                                                      gold
on that land—

This passage is linked thematically (though tenuously so) to the rest of the poem; it expresses Graham's fear of allowing her own life—her own emptiness, her own ambition—to overwhelm her daughter's. But in contrast to a poem like “From the New World,” in which Graham nearly conflates personal and historical narratives, “The Dream of the Unified Field” compels us to feel the extraordinary distance the poem has travelled—to interrogate the means by which the poem achieves its leap between different registers of human experience. Because the narrative of “The Dream of the Unified Field” has so far been so apprehensible, we have not needed to pay much attention to Graham's repetitions of the words black and white in order to link the different sections of the poem. When the narrative falls away, that tissue of repetitions becomes crucial: the passage from Columbus's diary (white snow, black skin) is drawn into the poem, fulfilling Graham's dream of a “unified field” even as the passage implicitly criticizes the hubris of the dream.

Graham culls material from two entries from the diary, condensing and altering the language. Most dramatically, she adds the word black to describe the color of the Native American women; most implausibly, she adds the white snowstorm, a meteorological impossibility in the Caribbean. I think Graham wants us to be startled by the utter implausibility of the snow. Although her poem ends in self-critique, a relinquishing of power, Graham cautions us through this blatantly illogical revision of Columbus's diary that she herself remains in control of the poem. If the hubris of the “dream of the unified field” needs to be checked, so does the idealism of the dream of relinquishing all control. As Graham herself has recognized, these complexities, these unresolved tensions, are the driving force behind her poetry: she recently titled her selected volume—The Dream of the Unified Field—after what seems to me her most challenging and beautiful poem.

“What would we really know the meaning of?” asked Emerson: “The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;—how me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature.” Like Stevens before her, Graham makes poetry out of this question, struggling to find the most central knowledge in the most peripheral experience; like Stevens, she not only describes the struggle but makes us feel it in the movement of the poetry. In “The Dream of the Unified Field” the twin exigencies of the “big hunger” and “unearned weight” are made explicit by the poem's startling leap to Columbus, but their dialogue is implicit not only throughout the entire poem but throughout all of Materialism. In recent poems like “Recovered from the Storm” (which feels like a coda to “The Dream of the Unified Field”), Graham no longer needs to disempower herself so dramatically. Through the “vivid performance of the present”—delivering the leotard, picking up one fallen limb from the path—Graham discovers the highest spiritual causes in the suburbs.

When she said that American poets needed to recover the “big hunger” of the modernists, Graham did not specify which postmodern poets were responsible for domesticating modernist ambition. If only because so many poets have learned about the enabling virtues of modesty from Bishop, it would make sense if Graham had Bishop in mind; praising the early installments of The Changing Light at Sandover, Bishop cautioned (with ominous good humor) that the poem was “much too big” to write about on a “morning when I have to start cleaning house.” Graham herself has admitted that Bishop's music does not set her off as Stevens's or Berryman's does, and it's easy to imagine that Bishop would have found Graham's poetry far more unwieldy than Merrill's. But Graham has also emphasized that she feels a deep “temperamental affinity” with Bishop, an affinity that transcends stylistic decorum, and it's arguable that Graham, more than any other poet writing today, has realized Bishop's ideal notion of poetic movement: “not a thought, but a mind thinking” (the phrase Bishop borrowed from the critic Morris Croll). And while it's even easier to imagine that Bishop would have been bemused by the elaborate ambitions of the Language poets, Charles Bernstein has borrowed the same passage from Croll to underwrite his avant-garde project. As Bernstein describes it, his critique of “contemporary expository forms” involves the “attempt to portray not a thought, but a mind thinking.”

This coincidence suggests that style never tells the whole story of American poetry: poets who seem, because of their formal choices, to have little to do with one another may share the deepest goals or ambivalences. Remembering the early years of his career, when the Academic and Beat poets were standing off, John Hollander has said that he “felt that there were guys on my team who weren't on my side, and there were guys on the other team who were on my side.” Hollander is as formidable a stylist as Bernstein, a poet-critic who has invested a great deal of energy in the study of form; but he insists that “what makes a poet is not style alone, but something far deeper.” Although he continues to write in the elaborate forms he embraced as a young poet, Hollander insists that his poetry has changed radically—changed in ways that the “breakthrough” narrative, with its essentialized notions of poetic freedom, cannot describe.

If the narrative has been unaccommodating to poets like Hollander or Wilbur, whose styles have remained fairly consistent throughout their careers, it is even more deceptively unkind to poets like Ashbery or Graham, whose styles have changed dramatically. Graham's turn from the slender, controlled poems of Erosion to the apparently open-ended poems of The End of Beauty looks like one more repetition of the “breakthrough” that several generations of twentieth-century poets have needed to embrace. But Graham's career is exemplary for different reasons. The poems of Region of Unlikeness, so different stylistically from those of Erosion and yet so similar in their thematizations of closure, confound the association of formal and ideological freedom. Like any poet writing at the peak of her powers, Graham is many different poets in one, and within the parameters of her relatively brief career are the range of positions we all too easily condense into the false opposition of a poet like Wilbur and a poet like Ashbery. Consequently, a vision of American poetry that cannot encompass both Wilbur and Ashbery cannot encompass Jorie Graham alone. Neither can it do justice to Wilbur or to Ashbery. “There are no outsiders in these pages,” says Graham in the introduction to her wide-ranging anthology of poetry in English, denying any poet the distinction of standing apart. This is the kind of vision that will carry American poetry beyond postmodernism—whatever it will seem to have been—into the twenty-first century.