Jorie Graham and American Poetry

While Jorie Graham has claimed that the "central impulse of each new book involves . . . wanting to go into a more moral terrain—a terrain in which one is more accountable, and therefore in which one has to become increasingly naked" ("Interview" 82–83), the arc of her poetic reveals a fundamental crisis concerning self and its attendant claims to agency without which this impulse would wither: "my first person is hidden," Graham tells us in Swarm (2000), "[s]o that I'm writing this in the cold / keeping the parts from finding the whole again" (88–89). At once achingly "naked" and aggressively "hidden," the lyric presence in Graham's poems brings to mind an excellent mid-career interview in which she articulates, with trademark acuity, "the problem of subjectivity" with which today's poets must inevitably contend—the "still operative inheritance of the desire for Romantic fulfillment . . . as it comes into conflict with the distrust of such a desire (the distrust not only of the validity of personal experience but of the very notion of an essential self who might claim to have such an experience)" ("Glorious Thing" 20). In the manner of Yeats and Eliot, Graham's ensuing overview of "the core of what we see happening [in poetry] today" provides the perfect introduction to her own evolving poetic:

Somewhere between the "I" that takes its authority from an apparent act of confessional "sincerity," and the "I" that takes its authority from seeing through to its own socially constructed nature, there is still the "I" that falls in love, falls out of love, gives birth, loses loved ones, inhales when passing by a fragrant rose-bush—the "I" that has no choice but mortality. That "I" . . . is emerging . . . with a new respect for the mystery of personhood, and a more sophisticated understanding of its simultaneously illusory and essential nature.

("Glorious Thing" 20)

At stake in this dialectic between the "illusory" and the "essential" self is the conventional agent of moral law, what Geoffrey Galt Harpham depicts as that "luminous figure, central to ethics, of the self-determining, integrated subject" (23–24). As Harpham goes on to explain, the ethical imperative is catalyzed by the "coimplication of freedom and the law, free agency and obligation," so that the "very idea of an 'ethical' law" is, in fact, "strictly inconsistent with the integrated, self-consistent agent"—that "luminous figure"—"who alone, supposedly, can follow it" (27, 26; emphasis added). Of concern here is the catch–22 of the postmodern subject, Graham's guide to "more moral terrain": on the one hand, "seeing through one's own socially constructed nature" affirms an ultimate surrender of self as it locates identity at the nexus of "external" influences; as such, individuality—that sense of oneself as distinct, essential, and wholly conscious—is the product of, not precedent to, desire, locus of will. In this vein, claiming responsibility for the making of reality is, paradoxically, to subject one's self to the larger network of forces—cultural, familial, sensory—from which it arises. Hence, in her debut collection Graham writes that "the way things work" is first "by admitting / or opening away" (Hybrids [1980] 3). On the other hand, such agency inflates the "luminous" self that it attempts to subvert. Though "seeing through one's own socially constructed nature" eviscerates one's sense of autonomy, it empowers one as both analyst and architect of one's experience of being; to understand that we are hostage to our own ways of seeing is to turn the limited condition of subjectivity into a conduit to truth. Thus while Graham insists throughout Swarm that her "first person is hidden" (88), the urgency of her claim consecrates a presence that is anything but hard to find.

Having begun her career by seizing responsibility for the making of meaning, Graham is now quick to confront the "luminous" presence such authority bestows; it is the interplay, or tension, between [End...