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My readings of modern and postmodern stances toward apocalypse would be incomplete without some effort to test them in the work of at least one more recent poet. Jorie Graham’s oeuvre provides a particularly appropriate laboratory for such an experiment, even though her differences from Stevens, as this chapter shall demonstrate, cannot be constructed within a straightforward distinction between modernism and postmodernism. Graham belongs to a postmodern generation; her work is unmistakably marked by the logic of postmodernism and poststructuralism; she has an explicit and overriding concern with the role of eschatological and apocalyptic thinking in the construction of aesthetic objects and historical narratives, as well as in everyday life and contemporary politics. Like Stevens, Graham takes an antiapocalyptic stance, but her work betrays a different kind of self-consciousness about its possible complicity with apocalyptic discourse, as well as a different understanding of the aesthetic and political implications of any lingering investment in the End. And conveniently enough—at least for my purposes—Graham does not just openly acknowledge her admiration for Stevens’s oeuvre, but quotes from or alludes to “Martial Cadenza,” “Dutch Graves in Bucks County,” “Credences of Summer,” “Things of August,” and “The Auroras of Autumn.” Graham appropriates material from poems in which Stevens engages with apocalyptic discourse. I will suggest in particular that Stevens’s resistance to apocalyptic rhetoric is, for Graham, still deeply entangled in the discourse of the End, as well as in an aesthetics of “closure” that Graham considers complicit with that discourse. Most of this chapter will be devoted to Graham’s  collection, The Errancy. However, Graham’s quotations from Stevens need to be understood in relation to that volume’s concern with a particular kind of cultural exhaustion or collapse, with Graham’s own sense that she is writing at and about the end of one era of the imagination; the discussion of Stevens’s presence in that volume will, chapter six Past Apocalypse, Past Stevens Jorie Graham’s The Errancy therefore, be preceded by an account of that collapse and its relationship to Graham’s own historical situation. Both of these aims, however, necessitate a still more general starting point, namely, a more general account of Graham’s engagement with the discourse of the End. Graham’s engagement with that discourse is anything but straightforward . Critics have been quick to point out not just the anticlosural element in Graham’s work, but the tension between closural and anticlosural desires. And a concern with endings is often enough marked in Graham’s titles: “The Sense of an Ending,” The End of Beauty, “What the End Is For,” “Eschatological Prayer,” “Manifest Destiny,” “The Phase after History.” These titles indicate a concern not just with aesthetic closure but with a broader notion of ends, telos, as well as with eschatology and apocalypse (Graham, “Interview” ) and, in particular, with the relationship between eschatology and an aesthetics of closure. According to Graham, such an aesthetics has not just dominated Western art but is synonymous with it. Graham herself acknowledges the presence of all these forces in her work, and, in an interview with Thomas Gardner, articulates her understanding of the link between apocalypse and aesthetic closure: Well, the way the sentence operates became connected, for me, with notions like ending-dependence and eschatological thinking. With ideas like manifest destiny, westward expansion. Imperialisms of all kinds. I began to notice how the forms our Western sensibility creates are, for the most part, ending-dependent, and that such notions of form—however unconsciously—give birth to historical strategies like the Christian one: the need for the con- flagration at the end that takes what appear like random events along the way and turns them into stages . . . when we start realizing that by our historical thinking we have created a situation whereby we are only able to know ourselves by a conclusion which would render meaningful the storyline along the way—it becomes frightening. . . . It forced me to recognize the little wind in myself which I think blows through many people living today—that secret sense of “well, let’s get it over with so that we might know what the story was, what it was for”—apocalypse as the ultimate commodification. (Graham, “Interview” ) A resistance to “narrative” and “closure” is of more than merely aesthetic significance to Graham, and she hopes that poetry like hers Going after Apocalypse  [18.227.228.95] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 04:11...

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