The Graham Method: an excerpt [by Dante Micheaux]

Jorie Graham is among the best poets writing in English and her poems have changed, both visually and in aspects of content, in a dramatic way—most evident from one collection of poems to the next. Helen Vendler, in a book that studies the changes in style of three different poets, theorizes that if “a poet puts off an old style (to speak for a moment as if this were a deliberate undertaking), he or she perpetrates an act of violence, so to speak, on the self”, (The Breaking of Style, 1), and goes on to apply this notion to Graham’s ever-expanding work. Vendler states in her lecture Jorie Graham: The Moment of Excess that: “When a poem is deprived, in critical discussion, of its material body—which is constituted by its rhythm, its grammar, its lineation, or other such features—it exists only as a mere cluster of ideas, and loses its physical, and therefore its aesthetic, distinctness” (The Breaking of Style, 71). Her specific interest is in Graham’s individual line, which has metamorphosed from being short in early poems to idiosyncratically long in more recent poems (those written before 1994 when Vendler delivers the aforementioned lecture). “When a poet ceases to write short lines,” she posits, “and starts to write long lines, that change is a breaking of style almost more consequential, in its implications, than any other” (The Breaking of Style, 72). Though Vendler subsequently makes some undeniable observations about excess in Graham’s work, her basic supposition on the importance of style is flawed, if only due to the fact that she does not account for the possibility of Graham, at some point in the future, returning to short lines—or creating a composition that depends on both long lines and short lines, as she has in her most recent collection, Sea Change.

     By recycling the examples that Vendler offers in her study and adding a few others, it is clear that what is significant, or most consequential in Jorie Graham’s work is not lineation—long or short. The strength of her composition lies in a highly-evolved, demanding addressee and the process by which she communicates with it, called, for the sake of argument, vocative sublimity. The rhythm, grammar, lineation or other such features are rendered differently by Graham depending on unknown variables to the reader but what shapes those features into a whole, the communication with the addressee that exists on the plane of poetic thinking, is consistent. Vocative sublimity might better be defined as thus: “to be knitted up, chainmail of vocables—link / by link— / till even the air all round you suddenly seems to / shine—really now—there where it means, / or means to mean, because mostly of course it is just talk…” (The Errancy, 75). No better understanding of this process is to be found than, perhaps, those lines that limn the geography of a poetic mind and attempt to fix a dialogue that is at once clear and completely metaphysical. The philosopher, Martin Buber, describes the effect of this kind of dialogue on thought and perception: “When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things…[n]eighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light” (I and Thou, 59). In Graham’s poetry, she is the “I” of Buber’s philosophy and her addressee is the “You”, not as an exercise in egocentrism but in the dynamic of apprentice to omniscient master, always questioning. It would be easy to mistake the object of Graham’s poetry as multiple, as “You” in reality changes, but a prudent position would be to view the object as a singular entity with the ability to be all things at once—much like the relationship between a divinity and the adherents of its cosmology. Her poems seem to state what she has observed and beg notice of what she has observed, the better to question her addressee.