SOURCE: "The Mind of the Matter: CAT Scanning a Scat Singer," in Parnassus, Vols. 12-13, Nos. 2, 1, Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter, 1985, pp. 588-601.

[In the review below, Melnyczuk compares Erosion to Graham's earlier writing and finds the poems in Erosion more urgent and arresting.]

Fishing for subjects in her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Jorie Graham casts a wide net. Her catch includes trees, birds, language, paintings, self-portraits, philosophers, wildflowers, recherché facts about the habits of squid and the like. The list is various enough to suggest a genuinely restive and curious sensibility. Better still, the play of the poet's mind over her objets trouvés is refreshingly idiosyncratic. In "Self-Portrait" the speaker faces a window instead of a mirror and describes the self in terms of what it sees:

      After fresh snow I'll go up to the attic and look out.
      My looking is a set of tracks—the first—
      a description of the view
      that cannot mar it.

The poem becomes a meditation on time, a theme that elsewhere elicits some of her best lines:

           The world we live in
      is going to change, to more than disappear.
      This is the light that blinds you by degrees
      that it may always feel like sight.
 
                                   ("Harvest for Bergson")

If the passage doesn't exactly bid the rash gazer wipe his eye, it is because Graham is a stern helmsman who makes sure that most of the time the heart stays below deck.

She also shows signs of an ear subtly attuned to the sounds and native characters of the three languages (French, Italian, English) that shaped her childhood:

       I Was Taught Three
 
       names for the tree facing my window
       almost within reach, elastic
 
       with squirrels, memory banks, homes.
       Castagno took itself to heart, its pods
 
       like urchins clung to where they landed
       claiming every bit of shadow
 
       at the hem. Chassagne, on windier days,
       nervous in taffeta gowns,
 
       whispering, on the verge of being
       anarchic, though well bred.
 
       And then chestnut, whipped pale and clean
       by all the inner reservoirs
 
       called up to do their even share of work.

The characterizations—of the rambunctious, emotional Italian, the elegant, neurasthenic French, and the wholesome, energetic Yankee—are a witty variation on the game of cultural stereotyping. The poem recalls Rimbaud's Vowels: both reveal the poet as an initiate with insight into the mercurial soul of words. This early intimacy with the French language also explains why, in her fondness for abstractions, Graham has more in common with many French poets than with her peers.

Too often, however, the work in this first book leaves this reader annoyed and disappointed. Graham seems to be testing out ways of making poems that will support a content yet to surface. Only rarely does the voice speak from an urgency deep enough to justify breaking that cardinal rule of the Pythagoreans: be silent, or say something better than silence. For all the poems' intelligence, evident in the patterns of recrudescent ideas and words, in the complicated images (see, for example, the creation, through cross-hatching, of a shadow tree in "Still Life"), the tone is monochromatic, the voice regular as rain, impartial as the sky. As is often the case, in her weakness lies her strength. The "coolness" of the voice suggests a poet capable of casting a cold eye where less steely spirits would blush and shudder.

Let me focus my objections. In "Pearls" Graham suggests something of her approach toward speech and poetry:

          To be saved
     is to keep finding new solutions to the problem,
     like scat
 
     singing or improvisation where you're never wrong
     as long as you keep on.

But scat singing is no mere jabberwocky of vowels and consonants strutting about in self-celebration. In mimicking an instrument, the scat singer also resembles a child in the preverbal stage, gleefully spitting out syllables which are anything but meaningless, which convey, sometimes better than could words, the singer's emotions. I remember playing a game with a friend (I believe he said it was used by actors to limber tongue and lips) in which we took passages from well-known poems (Shakespeare's sonnets, say) and replaced the words with nonsense syllables improvised on the spot. We were astonished at how frequently we recognized the originals beneath their disguises. Doubtless intonation and rhythm had something to do with it. But was there more? Was there something in the strength of feeling underlying a great poem, a feeling existing beyond, or below, the surface value of words which could be neither suppressed nor masked—what Aristotle called "the pulse of the blood?" in Hybrids the supporting pylons seem to be more words which have smothered all feeling. Graham certainly has the gestures of a poet: she spins out similes more easily than most poets spell: "Perhaps it is a daughter who practices the piano, practices / slow and overstressed like the train …"; "like the crickets"; "tight at first like crickets and ivories"; "Like taffeta, the song …"; "Like pennies we pushed / into the soil." These from one poem ("Girl at the Piano") thirty-two lines long. Sometimes the images are layered so thickly they overwhelm the poem's occasion. But what do they add up to?

The first poem in the book heralds the poet's resurrection from the grave of youthful solipsism and declares her faith in the pungent accuracy of the world outside her consciousness:

       The way things work
       is that we finally believe
       they are there,
       common and able
       to illustrate themselves.

The pragmatic optimism reminds one of Whitman. She takes pains to reaffirm the credo:

      A miracle
      would seem to be
      what builds itself
      in spite of us—white cells gone mad or syllables be
      coming thought
                    ("Lourdes: Syllables for a Friend")

Such avowals bring with them duties. These include composing with an awareness that words are not fungible.

In this regard Hybrids' weaknesses are partly the product of the prevailing intellectual climate. The generation of writers currently enshrined in the Academy came of age under the shadow of Auden's strange lines about poetry making nothing happen. It was a pithy restatement of the symbolist creed (sonnets are made of words, Dégas, not ideas; later: no ideas but in things, etc.), one which Yeats, whose death Auden elegizes, had long since disowned. Auden himself wrote that "insofar as poetry, or any other of the arts can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." (Try squaring that with Nietzsche.) Surely telling the truth is not nothing. Recently another monolith has risen in the desert and it bears this inscription:

       What is poetry which does not save
       Nations or people?
       A connivance with official lies,
       A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
       Readings for sophomore girls.
 
                                            ("Dedication")

Although the words belong to Milosz, I may as well have chosen lines by Pablo Neruda or Adrienne Rich or any writer who still believes poetry is capable of nourishing more than the lives and careers of specialists. Poetry may not always be called on to save nations; but it may fairly be expected to do as much for individual souls. These doubts arise when Graham writes lines like the following:

     Indeed the tulips
     change tense
     too quickly
 
                                         ("Strangers")

and:

     Every morning and every dusk like black leaves
     the starlings cross,
     a regular syntax on wings.
 
                                          ("Syntax")

and:

     The bird is an alphabet.
 
                           ("A Feather for Voltaire")

The lines sound nice enough—it is passably pretty to pretend tulips and birds behave according to the laws of grammar—but they add nothing to our understanding of either birds, tulips, or language. Language may well be the world's double, its soul, but the equation is not reversible. Transformations which take place at the level of words alone, without reference to internal changes in the poet's psyche, or external shifts in the world, do injustice to both the visible and invisible universe. At its worst, figurative language is merely ornamental. Used properly it can delight us by disclosing a similarity between such disparate elements as two lovers and a compass; and/or indirectly underscore a poet's attitude toward his subject, as when Donne declares his lover is "all states to him." When Herbert compares a sweet and virtuous soul to seasoned timber, we come away feeling we've gotten more than fictions and false hair for our money.

Graham in her deepest self must be aware of the dangers of treating language like a lever on a slot machine. In "On Why I Would Betray You," she writes:

     Because this is the way our world goes under:
     white lies, the snow,
     each flake a single instance of
     nostalgia. Before you know it
     everything you've said
     is true.

The premise is that "I" can rewrite the world, revise the past (and, by implication, the present and future) according to my desires. But poetry exists in order to assert the opposite.

Graham's book, to its credit, has helped revive a generation's interest in the poetic uses of abstractions:

     To have experienced joy
     as the mere lifting of hunger
     is not to have known it
     less.
 
                              ("Over and Over Stitch")

And:

     For some of us the only way of knowing we are
     here at all. going
     across and going down,
     exquisitely temporal though at no point believable;
     fragile; tragic.
 
                                                        ("Mirror")

Not long ago such bald statements would have been attacked as hallmarks of bad writing: the poet was telling instead of showing. But fashions change: as John Crowe Ransom put it. "Because of the foolishness of idealists, are ideas to be taboo for the adult mind?" I mentioned earlier I suspect it's Graham's French side that's behind her fluency with abstractions. Paul Auster points out in an introduction to his superb anthology, The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry, that literary French, "the language of essences," has periodically pollinated English verse ever since Chaucer translated Le Roman de la Rose. It is good to see the tradition continuing.

If Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts seems like apprentice work, then few first volumes proceed with such confidence:

     The way things work
     is that eventually
     something catches.

That "eventually" comes with Erosion. In the new book, the poet's net is less finely woven than in the first; as a result, some things slip through. But that is exactly what Graham intends, because here she is after bigger fish.

Erosion is brilliantly wrought: the individual poems work together like the citizens of a harmonious and self-contained little republic. The book yields most when read as one long poem, by turns an argument and a meditation, on appearance and reality, and on the self exploring the volatile boundaries between them. Graham's talent has grown in every way. Her voice has deepened, matured. Her images have progressed from the idiosyncratic to the urgent. She's capable now of arresting music: "So here you are, queen of the chiaroscuro, black girl, / black girl, / backstitching on us …" (The long e's play against the short vowels like light and shadow; the consonants and consonant clusters q, ch, hi, ck echo resonantly in the one word backstitching.) And the questions she takes on would not have embarrassed the masters (Plato, Keats, Berryman, Masaccio) whose work she invokes. In her vision, which contains more than a few gnostic elements, the world is perceived as a wound: "I think the world is a desperate / element. It would have us / calm it / / receive it." It is up to the self to heal that wound: "The self, too / / is an act of / rescue…." Graham would like to declare this world, even with its "architecture of grief," equal to Eden, but the desire is undermined by the many grim verities she forces herself to confront: idealism struggles with realism, and the victory is poetry's.

From the very first poem we find ourselves in the presence of a skilled cicerone—haunted, breathless, intense—with an eye (and ear) for the dramatic:

     In this blue light
     I can take you there,
     snow having made me
     a world of bone
     seen through to.
 
                                      ("San Sepolcro")

The tone implies she can tell us things nobody else could. The lines about the snow are puzzling in the way that Eliot can often be ("Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree."). As we read on, the idea of "seeing through" gathers resonance: the poet has indeed "broken through" and this book is in a sense her transcript of the experience. Gone are the facile similes that clotted the earlier work with their facsimile insights. There's a new sensuality to her descriptions: "There's milk on the air, / ice on the lemonskins." It's a delectable atmosphere, pristine and innocent. Part of its strangeness is simply a matter of weather: we don't associate snow with Italy. We're still obliged to scramble to keep up with the characteristic Graham fidgetiness, her refusal to look at any one thing for very long. She is far more interested in chronicling the leaps of her own consciousness. But this time the voice is rich and multivalent enough to hold us.

The landscape suggests itself as a metaphor for the mind:

"How clean the mind is, / holy grave." She moves to a painting of the pregnant Virgin:

        It is this girl
     by Piero
     della Francesca, unbuttoning
          her blue dress,
      her mantle of weather,
          to go into
 
      labor. Come, we can go in.
          It is before
      the birth of god.

At birth we enter the world, and we repeat and renew that entrance with every breath. So also, through contemplation, do we enter a work of art, and a book. Faulkner remarked that life is tragic because we can admire a sunset only in retrospect: while looking at it, we're likely to be worrying about an unpaid phone bill. We understand the meaning, appreciate the power of the landscape we've walked through, only in memory. In its closing lines, as each breath unbuttons us in time, bringing us closer to death and birth, the duet of images builds to a crescendo, when suddenly Graham changes figures and we are again in the company of an improvisatory musician, who this time knows her trade.

"San Sepolcro" opens at dawn; by the end, however, linear time has collapsed. The poem reminds me of paintings by certain contemporaries in which figures of Osiris and Daphne about against lawns mowers and barca loungers, as if to document that the "acceleration of history" has indeed created a time machine: all periods are contemporaneous, and all is always now. When Graham writes: "It is before / the birth of god," possibly we're to infer the poet's vision is pagan. On the other hand, the poem's title, "Holy Grave," evokes the cave in which Christ's body was laid after the crucifixion. Analogy, Octavio Paz observed, is the lifeblood of poetry and survives both paganism and Christianity.

Cézanne and Rothko were the two painters invoked in Hybrids. Here Graham has reached back for tutelary spirits to the early Renaissance masters della Francesca, his student Luca Signorelli, and Masaccio. Yeats exalted Byzantium for its successful fusion of art, religion, and the demands of dailiness—the integration earned the citizens that "unity of being" Yeats so coveted. The Renaissance serves as a similar touchstone for Graham: the self shuts its eyes on the purely interior vision, surrendering the Middle Ages' absorption in the supernatural, and opens them with new wonder on the natural world. But "unity of being" for Graham involves a far greater tolerance for the fluid transactions between the world and the self than Yeats could have accepted: her mask is considerably more porous. And her work reminds one less of Rothko or della Francesca than of Turner, where edges between elements blur. All is in flux: the self is swallowed by mist, fishermen wading into a river are seen as "trying to slip in / and pass / / for the natural world." The lines themselves race and hover like dragonflies. The self, so uncertainly present in the earlier book ("when will the self become a permanent mirage?"), remains an undefined element:

     We live up here
       by blurring the boundaries, calling it love, the present moment, or the beautiful.
 
     We live a harsh fecundity, it seems to me, the symbol
         tripping much too freely
       over everything
       it signifies.

Here our carelessness with words and the definitions by which we understand ourselves and the world disturbs the poet, while elsewhere Graham delights in the discovery that the self cannot be pinned and anatomized:

      I know it's better, whole, outside, the world—whole
      trees, whole groves—but I
      love it in here where it blurs and nothing starts or ends, but all is
      waving, and colorless,
      and voiceless….

The passage limns the pleasures of the contemplative, who is not in retreat from reality but rather rapt in a different one. At times this inwardness allows her to see the outside world as though no one had ever looked at it before; her images remain even when the lines themselves (the curse of free verse!) do not: the waterstrider devouring the bee, the bird letting ants crawl over its body, a piano thrashing about on the hook of a baton, Luca Signorelli conducting an autopsy on his dead son. These are a long way from the grammar of flowers.

The effects Graham achieves with her free verse, however, can be masterly. In "Updraft" the pneumatic drive of the aspirates "who … hush … heady … hum" enforces the feeling of the wind breathing through New York City, and the fluctuations in the length of the lines evoke something of the city's relentless unpredictability, its impersonality and hallucinatory whirl:

     You who are not different,
     let the hush and click of the heady leaves, the avenues
         announcing rain
     and the hum of the neon
     and the miraculous ropings of spittle and dead
        leaves and urine
                and new rain
                        in the gutters
           stick to You.

Graham also knows how to refuse the more standard gambits of the age. "Patience" promises to be a poem of nostalgia. Graham begins by sketching a morning from childhood which might have been transformed into a Norman Rockwell painting. All the elements seem to agree: a young girl and a woman (Maria) are ironing a shirt for the girl's father. An open door admits "a perfect shaft / of light," there's a smell of wisteria, and the comforting sound of someone raking gravel. The moment appears ordained for canonization by memory into one of those chapels of respite to which we can retreat from the chaos of the present. "Tell me / where that room is now, / that stubborn / fragrant bloom?" Graham asks. But the question, perhaps because it is a cliche, becomes a key unlocking the door of deeper memory. She recalls that Maria, so beat "even the sweetness of / wisteria / hurts," was crying while ironing—she had just lost her son—and the girl, far from helping, was fumbling around "the ugly twistings of / the wicker / hamper…." A pretty fiction has crumbled like a house of sand. But by reclaiming depth, the moment has gained durability.

The republic is not quite a Utopia. Every poet deploys a vocabulary of favorite words and images and metaphysical preferences. Graham, for better or worse, seems to be hooked on sewing imagery. It's everywhere: a boy catches "his lost stitch of breath"; an exhumed saint is said to be "backstitching" on us; for a wolf pacing a cage "minutes stitch shut"; lovers are dispatched as "lost stitches." Finally the reader grows suspicious. Poetry relies on the multiple meanings and secret relations between words, and one wouldn't want to pin Graham down. Of course the world is a wound which needs to be sutured. We know that. But is the poet really looking and thinking and feeling when she sees this community of invisible seamstresses hemming the skirts of the world, or is she merely repeating phrases which have worked for her before?

The Eros poems in Erosion ("Kimono," "I Watched a Snake," "Salmon") are eccentric but only partly satisfying. Their virtues include a kind of Mediterranean sanity toward sensuality that reminds us Graham's home is near the birthplace of the Troubadors. In the best of these the speaker is in her garden brushing her hair. She knows a small boy is watching her from behind an evergreen. Each time she moves, the landscape printed on the kimono alters slightly so that "reeds are suddenly / ravines." Its beautifully sexy conclusion not only resolves the narrative, but also reminds us we've glimpsed an initiation ritual older than and every bit as mysterious as Eleusis. The poem falters twice for me. Once when the first-person speaker modestly refers to herself as "the style of the world"—itself an attractive locution, which ought to be used again, with more discretion. In the second instance, a downpour of particularly dreary adjectives (Graham is abundantly adjectival)—"green scrim," "open door," "small spirit," "new ice," "gentle limbs"—almost drowns the seventh stanza.

"We live," wrote Emerson, "amid surfaces and the true art of life is to skate well on them." But Graham's obsession is with penetrating below them, in reaching after essences and sounding depths. Like Rilke she is an archeoiogist of the buried life. Variations on the theme of "breaking through" recur in poem after poem: "come, we can go in"; "trying to slip in"; "weak enough to enter"; "how far is true enough?". What are we to make of all this? What is the poet's intended destination?

At the heart of Erosion lies an experience which must be called mystical or visionary: it is the center from which all the lines radiate. Whatever else it might mean to the poet, it has made it impossible for her to rest at ease amid appearances:

     Finally I heard
         into music,
     that is, heard past
         the surface tension …
 
                       ("In What Manner the Body Is United with the Soule")

In good democratic fashion Graham immediately qualifies her claim: "Not that I heard / very deep." She wishes to remain a woman addressing other women and men. Now the mystic's experience often carries certain restrictions. What Pascal calls "the prudence of God" proscribes direct communication of the revelation, and this partly accounts for Graham's lateral approach to her subjects. In a poem unabashedly titled "In What Manner the Body Is United with the Soule" Graham gives us an image meant to satisfy expectations raised by the title. We watch a waterstrider devour a bee which it shares with the insect's reflection in the water ("the back-swimmer"). Although the analogy is deliberately ambiguous (paraphrasing a Graham poem is like trying to whittle a sprawling rhododendron into chopsticks), she seems to suggest that body and soul (the waterstrider and its double) intersect in their reliance on the quotidian, on the outside world that nourishes both: the gold bee. Elsewhere, probing appearances, the poet asks:

     How far is true
       enough?
     How far into the
        earth
     can vision go and
        still be
 
     love?
                             ("The Age of Reason")

How far (into ourselves, into others, into the objects around us) can we gaze before matter and identity dissolve and we find ourselves peering into the empty spaces between molecules? How long before a glimpse of the abyss changes love into terror? It doesn't matter, the poem concludes: our desire would not shrink by an inch or an ounce. To extend for a moment the analogy with physics, Martin Gardner writing in the New York Review of Books described a recently discovered cache of subatomic particles and suggested that space might not be as permeable as we thought. In her meditation over the exhumed (and, we assume, severely decomposed) body of Santa Chiara, Graham speculates on the endless divisibility of matter: "As if this were always / what flesh is a declension of: more flesh".

But the burden of infinite desire bears a darker aspect. Unreasonable in its demands, like Saul Bellow's Henderson "the Rain King" who keeps hearing a voice crying I WANT! I WANT!, it seems not to care how it is placated. At times it seems the echo of curiosity gone mad, its refrain the promise of incrementally acuter insights into reality. When Graham describes Luca Signorelli, in an access of Renaissance zeal, dissecting his own son, we draw a relationship between his action and the voice inquiring where soul and body meet and the voice urging a young man to murder his girlfriend: "our / desire hissing Tell me / your parts / that I may understand your body." Signorelli's operation, however, appears successful:

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

We are left to decide for ourselves whether he has reached that peace which passeth understanding or lapsed into the lassitude that follows mental and physical exhaustion. In the book's last poem Graham offers lines that sound like a synthesis and a conclusion; "Because the body must open / for its world / so that we know there is a wall / beyond which we can't go." By insisting on the need for staking out the boundaries human reason should not expect to cross, Graham has not allied herself with Emerson. Appearances share a world with "true being" but the two have not merged. Her position is rather closer to that of Plato's durable explorer who on returning to the cave must readjust to a society in which the blind man is king while still keeping faith with the vision vouchsafed him. One way of achieving this is by writing poems, as Jorie Graham does, in which images of the world remain "afloat in solution / unsolved."