I
No one can accuse poet Jorie Graham of being hopeful about global climate change. There is not a scintilla, a homeopathic whiff, of optimism–enviro-techno-social-otherwise–in the poetry I’ve read of hers.
Which poses my challenge: Is there some thing, other than loss and dread in her four books of poetry, compiled as [To] The Last [Be] Human, that I can rely on or use in my own responding to the Climate Emergency?
To expect answers from poets is to make an outrageous demand, but that is what I’m doing here.
II
There are, however, easy ways to finesse my challenge. First, Graham provides instances where she could be wrong (“. . .how you/cannot/comprehend the thing you are meant/to be looking/for”). There is also no reason to believe her readers read her as she seems to imagine.
But that kind of by-pass fall shorts of what Graham is doing. It’s her sharp scalpel in getting to the bone and making it wholly matter that is my focus. Graham’s analytic sensibility shines through the poems’ dark prospect, and I want to stay with that sensibility.
III
One from many excerpts reflects this sensibility for me (from the first book, Sea Change):
the last river we know loses its
form, widens as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again, ever,
so that it's not a
dance-step, no, more like an amputation where the step just disappears, midair, although
also the rest of the body is
missing, beware of your past, there is a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the under-
ground is bursting with
sunlight, inquire no further it says. . . (p. 12)
There’s that tumble of words and turns-of-phrase that deepen a rush. Then they bounce off and back from the hard left-side margins and the right-side enjambment. For someone with my background and training, this is resilience-being-performed.
I see hard walls being repelled from and pushed up to, and sometimes through (as in the hyphen-less “dancefloor”). Not as though it were a hope, but rather as a toggling between everywhere necessary and never out of sight/site: a resilience for the climate emergency.
IV
A tic in her sensibility is illuminating: her intermix of macro and micro, general and specific, universal and particular, without an in-between gradient. Two examples toward the end of Sea Change illustrate this (here too breaking into her flow):
. . . .It is an emergency actually, this waking and doing and
cleaning-up afterwards, & then sleep again, & then up you go, the whole 15,000 years of
the inter-
glacial period, & the orders & the getting done &
the getting back in time & the turning it back on, & did you remember, did you pass, did
you lose the address again. . . (p55)
. . .The future. How could it be performed by the mind became the
question—how, this sensation called tomorrow and
tomorrow? Did you look down at
your hands just now? The dead gods
are still being
killed. They don’t appear in
“appearance.” They turn the page for
us. The score does not acknowledge
the turner of
pages. And always the
absent thing, there, up ahead, like a highway ripped open and left hanging, in the
void. . . (p45)
Again—that rush of words, use of margins, turns-of-phrase that cut to a point—but what’s more notable to me is the no-middle between future and mind, gods and hands, the emergency and losing an address.
In contrast, I come from a profession where, when conditions are this complex, we look for the meso-level(s). Patterns and formations emerge for the policy analyst and manager that are not seen at the level of individual cases nor at the level of universalized generalizations. For Graham, the complexity is in that wide-open combinatorics of micro’s and macro’s. Her sensibility makes me want to explore that missing middle further.
Principal source
Jorie Graham (2022). [To] The Last [Be] Human. Introduction by Robert MacFarlane. Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 