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SPEAKER:
This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets Podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Jorie Graham. Jorie Graham was born in 1950 in New York City. When she was an infant, her family moved to Europe. Her father worked as the Rome bureau chief for Newsweek, and he'd often travel to cover wars in faraway places. Her mother was a sculptor who would take the young Jorie on walks to look at the fountains, domes, and frescoes. Graham was well educated in Europe. She attended the Casa dei Bambini, Maria Montessori’s very first school, and got her baccalaureate at the Lycee Chateaubriand in Rome. In 1967, she went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. When the students rioted in '68, Graham joined them and got expelled. Graham decided to return to the US and enrolled in NYU's film school. It was there that she discovered poetry. "I got lost one day," Graham remembers. "I was wandering the corridors at NYU, and then I heard these words float out of a doorway. 'I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.' It was like something being played in a key my soul recognized." Graham immediately joined the class. It was taught by poet and critic ML Rosenthal, who gave Graham her introduction to a life of poetry. Graham went on to earn her masters from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and would teach there for many years. As a poet Graham has stayed true to her origins. The shape and flow of her poetry is influenced by modernists like Elliott, Yeats, and Stevens. The content of her poetry shows the influence of her early years, especially her father's profession. Graham has said that she sees herself as a reporter and her writing as a kind of news. Graham has published over 15 volumes of poetry and has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for 'The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems'. Since 1999, she has held the position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. She is the first woman to be appointed to the position, which dates back to John Quincy Adams. Her job there and in poetry is to make sure "I'm in life as opposed to merely understanding it." According to the critic Richard Eder, the feeling translates to the page. In reading her poetry he said, "Even as the brain struggles the neck hairs lift." The following poems were recorded in 1995 and 1998 at the Library of Congress.

(RECORDING PLAYS)

JORIE GRAHAM: First I'm going to read a poem that I wrote when I was 26 years old. It refers to two paintings by Gustav Klimt. One of them of a beech forest and the other one found in his studio unfinished, where he had died unexpectedly, found in fact after robbers broke into the studio and found his body. The words Buchenwald mean beech forest in German, although obviously they also refer to the name of a concentration camp.

Although what glitters
on the trees,
row after perfect row,
is merely
the injustice
of the world,

the chips on the bark of each
beech tree
catching the light, the sum
of these delays
is the beautiful, the human
beautiful,

body of flaws.
The dead
would give anything
I’m sure,
to step again onto
the leafrot,

into the avenue of mottled shadows,
the speckled
broken skins. The dead
in their sheer
open parenthesis, what they
wouldn’t give

for something to lean on
that won’t
give way. I think I
would weep
for the moral nature
of this world,

for right and wrong like pools
of shadow
and light you can step in
and out of
crossing this yellow beech forest,
this buchen-wald,

one autumn afternoon, late
in the twentieth
century, in hollow light,
in gaseous light. . . .
To receive the light
and return it

and stand in rows, anonymous,
is a sweet secret
even the air wishes
it could unlock.
See how it pokes at them
in little hooks,

the blue air, the yellow trees.
Why be afraid?
They say when Klimt
died suddenly
a painting, still
incomplete,

was found in his studio,
a woman’s body
open at its point of
entry,
rendered in graphic,
pornographic,

detail—something like
a scream
between her legs. Slowly,
feathery,
he had begun to paint
a delicate

garment (his trademark)
over this mouth
of her body. The mouth
of her face
is genteel, bored, feigning a need
for sleep. The fabric

defines the surface,
the story,
so we are drawn to it,
its blues
and yellows glittering
like a stand

of beech trees late
one afternoon
in Germany, in fall.
It is called
Buchenwald, it is
1890. In

the finished painting
the argument
has something to do
with pleasure.

It's a little sonnet, 'Act III, Sc. 2'.

Look she said this is not the distance
we wanted to stay at—We wanted to get
close, very close. But what
is the way in again? And is it

too late? She could hear the actions
rushing past—but they are on
another track. And in the silence,
or whatever it is that follows,

there was still the buzzing: motes, spores,
aftereffects and whatnot recalled the morning after.
Then the thickness you can’t get past called waiting.

Then the you, whoever you are, peering down to see if it’s
done yet.
Then just the look on things being looked-at.
Then just the look of things being seen.

'The Visible World'.

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
breaks
into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . .
Frames of reference moving . . .
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
opportunities
taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I
break it apart without
crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled
airy loambits,
and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot
in . . .
Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.
Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now
as on this patch
of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out
of
sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what
would it
take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will
insist on
making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this
shovelful
and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single
clots
in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-
hinge it
from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can
eventually
abstract it. Do you wish to?
Disentangled, it grows very very clear.
Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay
hardens and then yields, crumbs.
I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed
hallucination,
mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-
locking,
will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous
veil of
echoes and muddy nostalgias will
be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me
how large I
am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press
their slowest
electricity. . . . What speed is it at?
What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now
and just begins
to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the
dark oaks,
are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for
a moment
on them alone in the small wood.
White hands in the black-green glade,
opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots
of the moss
apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white
in these greens—
make your revolution in the invisible temple,
make your temple in the invisible
revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming
for this instant longer
like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall
whispering oaks . . .
Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse
has not four
legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence
because there is no time”—and since
at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands
serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated
fates
—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—
my hands are living in myriad manifestations
of light. . . .
“All forms of imitation are to be despised.”
“All subjects previously used must be discarded.”
“At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .
Oh enslavement, will you take these hands
and hold them in
for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny
golden hands
pushed, up to the wrists,
into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light
and airy star—
I put the seed in. The beam moves on.

I'll end on this, 'Underneath (13)', part of a series titled 'Underneath'.

needed explanation

because of the mystic nature of the theory

and our reliance on collective belief

I could not visualize the end

the tools that paved the way broke

the body the foundation the exact copy of the real

our surfaces were covered

our surfaces are all covered

actual hands appear but then there is writing

in the cave we were deeply impressed

as in addicted to results

oh and dedication training the idea of loss of life

in our work we call this emotion

how a poem enters into the world

there is nothing wrong with the instrument

as here I would raise my voice but

the human being and the world cannot be equated

aside from the question of whether or not we are alone

and other approaches to nothingness

(the term “subject”)(the term “only”)

also opinion and annihilation

(the body’s minutest sensation of time)

(the world, it is true, has not yet been destroyed)

intensification void

we are amazed

uselessness is the last form love takes

so liquid till the forgone conclusion

here we are, the forgone conclusion

so many messages transmitted they will never acquire meaning

do you remember my love my archive

touch me (here)

give birth to a single idea

touch where it does not lead to war

show me exact spot

climb the stairs

lie on the bed

have faith

nerves wearing only moonlight lie down

lie still patrol yr cage

be a phenomenon

at the bottom below the word

intention, lick past it

rip years

find the burning matter

love allows it (I think)

push past the freedom (smoke)

push past intelligence (smoke)

whelm sprawl

(favorite city) (god’s tiny voices)

hand over mouth

let light arrive

let the past strike us and go

drift undo

if it please the dawn

lean down

say hurt undo

in your mouth be pleased

where does it say

where does it say

this is the mother tongue

there is in my mouth a ladder

climb down

presence of world

impassable gap

pass

I am beside myself

you are inside me as history

We exist Meet me.

Thank you." (APPLAUSE)

(RECORDING ENDS)

SPEAKER:
That was Jorie Graham recorded in 1995 and 1998 at the Library of Congress and used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. You have been listening to the Essential American Poets Podcast, produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Jorie Graham and other essential American poets and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org