Jorie Graham, Superstar (OUCH!)

Jorie Graham, Superstar
By DAVID ORR

Published: April 24, 2005

IN the cloistered world of American poetry, the revolutions are never televised -- which can make them awfully hard to distinguish from coups d'état. For the average reader, nothing is likely to demonstrate this peculiar phenomenon so much as the delicate, secretive, enigmatic process through which a contemporary poetic reputation is consummated (or if you prefer, ''attained''). One day, the poetry fan is dozing under a tree with Elizabeth Bishop's ''Collected Poems'' on his lap; the next thing he knows, the road signs have been changed, the post office is now a Banana Republic, and the name of a new Major Poet has been quietly etched into the stones of Parnassus -- or at any rate, into the syllabuses of a thousand M.F.A. programs.

If the current state of affairs is any guide, there's a good chance the name writ therein will be ''Jorie Graham.'' Graham is a burnished idol of the poetry world, having at 54 already pulled off the trifecta of American verse: (1) a major prize (the Pulitzer); (2) a longtime faculty position at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Death Star of the modern M.F.A. system; and (3) an appointment at one of the Ivies (in this case Harvard, where Graham now occupies a seat previously held by the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney). She's gotten breathless, full-profile attention from The New Yorker, been given a ''genius grant'' by the MacArthur Foundation and received several ardent reviews -- including one-third of a book -- from her Harvard colleague Helen Vendler, widely considered to be the most influential poetry critic of the past half-century. Graham would seem to be, as they say, ''made.''

But what kind of making goes into being ''made''? While the items on Graham's resume are impressive, they weren't bestowed by Apollo; they were handed out by regular old human beings, often working in regular old committees. And committees of poets and critics, like committees of pretty much everyone else, are usually less inclined to go for broke than split the difference. At present, American poetry is a fractured discipline -- part profession, part gaggle of coteries, part contest hustle. Its mind may dwell in the vale of soul-making, but its common sense is aiming for the Lorna Snootbat Second Book Prize. Above all, as primarily an academic art, poetry is subject to the same insecurities riddling the humanities in general, in particular the fear of being insufficiently ''serious'' or ''useful.''

In this uncertain atmosphere, Graham is a uniter, not a divider. For one thing, she's nice. In interviews, Graham comes off as kindhearted and eager to praise -- the sort of person you'd want as a colleague or mentor. She has friendly words for avant-gardists like Susan Howe; friendly words for formalists like Anthony Hecht; and friendly words for her tribe of former students (''I love all of them,'' she says, and it must be true, because they show up with remarkable frequency as winners of the many contests she judges). Moreover, as Shelley might say, if Graham fell upon the thorns of life, she'd blurb. A typical Graham book plug is so rhapsodic and inscrutable (one blurbee has ''an ear so finely tuned it cannot but register all the finest, filamentary truths the eye discerns'') that it practically yodels Poooeeetrrry! Which doesn't mean she's insincere. As Graham puts it, ''There are very few poets whose work doesn't, someplace in its enterprise, stun me.'' Poooeeetrrry!

So Graham appeals because she doesn't look for trouble in a field that's already troubled enough. And of course, it helps to have the blessings of the major institutional powers of the poetry world. Nor does it hurt -- anywhere -- to have good looks, sophistication and elite connections (profiles of Graham inevitably involve ''E! True Hollywood'' sentences like this one from Harvard Magazine: ''The poet's youth was almost impossibly glamorous and romantic''). But more than anything else, Graham has succeeded because of the kind of poetry she writes.

Graham's work combines two qualities not generally found together -- first, it's often sumptuously ''poetic'' (''in a scintillant fold the fabric of the daylight bending''); second, it's ostentatiously thinky (typical titles: ''Notes on the Reality of the Self,'' ''What Is Called Thinking,'' ''Relativity: A Quartet''). The former quality appeals to lovers of operatic lyricism; the latter quality not only pleases certain parts of poetry's largely academic audience, but it soothes the art form's nagging status anxiety (anything involving this much Heidegger must be important). When Graham writes well, her rich, quirky phrasing complements her penchant for abstraction. ''I Watched a Snake,'' for instance, is filled with airy poeticisms like ''a mending / of the visible / by the invisible,'' but it's also a pretty good poem about looking at a snake.

Still, there's always been something strangely bleary in Graham's writing -- as if she's just noticed something interesting and motioned the reader over, only to stand in his light, blocking his view with her own viewing. This tendency has become more pronounced as Graham has grown older; in recent books, she achieves an arty vagueness that has to be (barely) seen to be believed (from ''Swarm'': ''Explain requited / Explain indeed the blood of your lives I will require / explain the strange weight of meanwhile''). Curiously, this soft spot in Graham's art probably works to her political advantage. She began by writing tight, short-lined free verse; now she writes sprawling, long-lined free verse; along the way, she's tried out about 15 different styles. Whatever you do as a poet, it'd be hard to say that Graham absolutely rejects it.

In her new collection, OVERLORD: Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins, $22.95), Graham takes a gamble and tackles a straight subject. The book is largely a meditation on the current political atmosphere as filtered through World War II; the poet's general sense is that we're in big trouble. ''Overlord'' has some interesting poems, most notably the handful that closely track the experiences of veterans, and the collection as a whole is comprehensible, lyrical and obviously heartfelt. But it's also sadly diffuse. Consider the beginning of ''Praying (Attempt of April 19 '04)'': ''If I could shout but I must not shout. / The girl standing in my doorway yesterday weeping. / In her right hand an updated report on global warming.'' Well, at least it's an updated report; you'd hate to see her ''weeping'' (instead of plain old ''crying'') over last Tuesday's version. The poem continues in this hopped-up manner until finally plunging into Harvard Yard street preachin': ''Let the dream of contagion / set loose its virus. Don't let her turn away. / I, here, today, am letting her cry out the figures, the scenarios, / am letting her wave her downloaded pages / into this normal office-air between us.'' Putting aside the redundancies (''contagion'' and ''virus''?), the infelicities (''downloaded pages''?) and the cartoon setup (whoever ''the girl'' is, she sure needs to toughen up before she goes to camp), putting all of this aside -- what are these lines about? Generalized angst? Adobe Acrobat?

The point isn't that Graham's a bad poet -- she's not -- but rather that the fogginess that has been a chronic problem in her work becomes especially inhibiting in ''Overlord'' because, well, there's just no leeway for muddling. Graham is trying to write here in response to actual events in a full lyric voice and in a public manner. It's a worthy project. But this isn't the kind of challenge that can be bowled over with rhetoric, analyzed into submission or conquered with good intentions. In the achingly clichéd ''Posterity,'' for instance, Graham attempts to feed a homeless man chicken out of an aluminum wrapper while calling on ''Buber, Kafka, Dr. Robinson -- you, hunger specialists'' (but what about Colonel Sanders?) -- and somehow she burns the guy's hands. Unfortunately, that sententious, well-meaning blunder is ''Overlord'' in a nutshell; or rather, some tinfoil.

So have we gotten a little ahead of ourselves in appointing our Major Poets? If we think such writers should embody their times, then maybe not: the haze at the center of Graham's work neatly reflects the current confusion and fragmentation of American poetry. But if we think a Major Poet is meant to be more than this, then maybe we should be arguing over these matters more often -- and more publicly. Because if the books the poetry world leaves in the laps of its slumbering audience are compromises rather than necessities, isn't it likely that readers will wake only to rub their eyes, thumb a few pages, sigh and go right back to sleep again?