This is a continuation of the essay by Jack Anders as posted below. In this section he contrasts the metaphysical and mystical qualities of Graham’s exquisite poem San Sepolcro with one of her more recent works. The distinctions he identifies ring true for me.
Anders then moves his focus more specifically to poems written by James Galvin in response to the end of his 25 year marriage to Graham. He calls up another famous poet pairing, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, to provide an alternate point of view around the subject of loss of a relationship, in this case due to death rather than divorce.
As the focus shifts from Graham’s poetic evolution to the pain of lost love, I’m still on board with Anders’ meandering tour of the poetic landscape, his own middle-ground perhaps. His reference to “two very craft-attentive, experienced poets confronting a loss-void that is so large that their craft and experience starts to sear and crumple as they approach and enter it” is deeply poignant. As he continues, I found parallels with my own artistic struggles on several levels: “Craft and voice get stretched to the breaking point, but because both of them go against the void in such a brave, straight-ahead manner, the results are brave and straight-ahead, regardless of whether the voice makes it through the fire with its form intact, or gets destroyed on the shoals of uncontrolled, formally unharnessed feeling.”
Now let’s compare part of one of Jorie’s more recent poems:
Up, up you go, you must be introduced.
You must learn belonging to (no-one)
Drenched in the white veil (day)
The circle of minutes pushed gleaming onto your finger.
Gaps pocking the brightness where you try to see in.
Missing: corners, fields,
completeness: holes growing in it where the eye looks hardest.
Below, his chest, a sacred weightless place
and the small weight of your open hand on it.
And these legs, look, still yours, after all you’ve done with them.
Explain the six missing seeds.
Explain muzzled.
Explain tongue breaks thin fire in eyes.
Learn what the great garden-(up, up you go)-exteriority, exhales . . .
(from “Underneath (9)”).
Yes, this is very cutting-edge in style. Yes, it is daring. But it feels like some heart of subject matter, connection to the inner and outer worlds, has been lost. It’s like the camera is taking pictures of itself instead of the outside world. I think this kind of deterioration of style might reflect a gradual alienation from the landscape around (and in) this poet. The poem feels too abstract, too gauzy. The parentheticals might in theory be markings of a superior authenticity on the part of the poet, indicating explicitly her second-guesses, her questionings – but is it a pleasure to read? And before you say “that is a vulgar test for a poem, whether it gives pleasure,” remember, I got that test from Wallace Stevens. The poem feels if anything too urban, urbane. It is strung out up in some stratosphere of post-post-everything sophistication. It smells too bookish. At the same time, while it looks at the land, it does so in a contextless way that is too abstract. It gives us glimpses of outer landscape that are only like photos of blank dirt, blank sky. The poems feels at once too close and too far. One might argue that she has somehow become alienated from the middle-ground of her own life, the life around her, and so she is focusing too much on stuff she has read in books, and images seen through books, through the eyes of other authors. There is no solid comfortable middle-focus, no clear scene of her family life, her daily life. She is recording an authentic existential state, no doubt; but is it fun to read? (In the Stevensian sense). My sense is that the collapse of her marriage to Galvin is somehow related to the problems we seem to find in her later poems. It will be interesting to see how her style changes now that she is living back on the east coast, teaching at Harvard.
The breakup was clearly intensely painful to Galvin. Unlike Graham, who may have been, as I speculate, in some way misplaced there, the Iowa and Wyoming region is Galvin’s home ground and where he has lived his whole life. That landscape is without a doubt the right place for him to be and a natural source of subject matter for his own writing. Which means the marriage may well have been more organic, more of a “right” situation, to him, right up to the end even, than it may have been to her—because she may have been more displaced from the landscape. This also means the breakup might have hurt him and shocked him more than it did her. Indeed, to discern from the poems below, she was the active instigator of the rupture. It comes as no surprise that the poetry book, X, he wrote after the breakup, shows searing personal marks of loss and anguish. The effect is like Clint Eastwood in a grizzled cowboy role, when some tragic thing finally touches him too deeply and he finally opens up, softens and breaks down with raw, nonironic emotion:
So out of love with life am I
No future will have me.
. . .
Where once I was not alone, now each
closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like
shadows at dusk,
. . .
You are in love with
someone else
. . .
Now I don’t care what you do.
I’ve seen your worst at its best.
. . .
How many times did you kiss me
Without meaning it?
(from X).
Ouch! This is a remarkably direct breakup-voice. It hearkens back to James Wright in its rawness, its refusal (or constitutional incapability) to become shielded behind irony. It also reminds us of the poems of Donald Hall when he lost his wife Jane Kenyon, not to divorce but to death. The tonality in Galvin’s grief is different, obviously, because the circumstances of the loss are different, but the bluntly direct and simple tenor of his expression is like that of Hall when Hall wrote such lines as:
Back home from the grave,
behind my desk I made
a gallery of Janes.
. . .
Your presence in this house
is almost as enormous
and painful as your absence.
. . .
we lived in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
or animal life only barnacles and lead
colored moss that darkened when months did
(from “Without”).
Whether mourning, reminiscing, or raving, the spectacle is amazing, and similar, in both Hall and Galvin as you watch two very craft-attentive, experienced poets confronting a loss-void that is so large that their craft and experience starts to sear and crumple as they approach and enter it. Craft and voice get stretched to the breaking point, but because both of them go against the void in such a brave, straight-ahead manner, the results are brave and straight-ahead, regardless of whether the voice makes it through the fire with its form intact, or gets destroyed on the shoals of uncontrolled, formally unharnessed feeling. With James Wright, for example, yes, sometimes he goes down in a blaze of sentimentality, mush, gush, maudlinity, howling, etc. But you still respect his bravery. I have the same respect for the efforts of Hall to confront the loss of his wife and of Galvin to confront the end of his long marriage. The risk-taking is inspiring, as they try to write their way through the emotional chaos, even if, as each might say, it is not bravery because they had no choice.
It’s interesting to me the confidence with which Anders dissects Graham’s poem. I think he was somewhat unfair to her. Her images are sophisticated, asking for several readings, more symbolic, and slant than Galvin’s cry in the dark. Yes, his pain seems raw, but to me, her poem is just as “fun” to read. Maybe not as accesible, but as a puzzle, her words are fun to read.
Thanks for sharing this. I admire your intellectual curiosity. you lead me to think about things I’d probably gloss over without articulating.
C, Thank you so much for spending time with this material. I am glad to know I am not the only one who finds the work of these two poets highly contrasting and very moving, each in its own way.
I like what you say about Graham’s poems being like a puzzle, and fun to read. That puts them in a perspective that is helpful for me.
Because I am in a place where I am struggling with the flow of my creative expression, Galvin’s work represents a kind of risk taking and vulnerability that I admire. I have found some solace in reading his work.
I always value your input, especially given your poetic skills.
Assuming her poetry has deteriorated — not really a safe assumption — one might observe there are fewer real stylistic changes than changes in the way a line may appear. Not quite the same thing. Try reading it aloud to yourself — maybe you could discern text from poem better thus.
The parentheses and italics seem girlish and quirky to me, however. Is this pain? Loss? Then it has made her do gratuitous things — and — it disinclines me to judge her.
I don’t assume her poetry as deteriorated–I think Anders speaks more vocerifously to that end than I do. Evaluating poetry is a highly subjective issue (as is evaluating visual art), and I stated that up front in the first of this set of three posts. Her early work is so beautiful and haunting to me, and that is not the direction she has chosen to explore. But with all due respect, all artists have to honor where the journey takes them, regardless.
Thanks for your feedback. I like what you say about the parentheses and italics seeming “girlish and quirky”. Well put.