BOOK REVIEW

Jorie Graham’s Fast

By N. S. Boone     SEPTEMBER 1, 2017
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Jorie Graham is a poet I will go to, and go back to, not because she is eloquent, not because she has matched an image to my inner experience, and not because she has the skill of a mason to chisel words into precise form. I will go to her because she has perfected another method for poetry—one that pushes forward in thought, that is able to imagine experience without reducing experience to mere image or to linguistic device.

Graham’s method allows for larger scope. Almost any of her poems seems like it could become an epic before it stops (and one often wonders why, or how, her poems stop). Her poems open out on an experience, in the mind, and she has perfected a kind of syntax that stays true to the mind’s weird reasonings, justifications, leaps of imagination, and even its distractions. She has discovered a poetics of phenomenology in which one’s subjective self is mirrored so well that each of the poems can be absorbed as a true experience and not simply a representation of experience.

Graham’s latest collection, Fast, is not a departure from the method she has developed in volumes stretching back more than a decade (e.g. Never, Overlord, Sea Change, Place). A poem such as “Deep Water Trawling” exemplifies why Graham deserves to stay on bookshelves and in anthologies. Here she imagines an experience she has never had and never could have, but nevertheless stays true to the way the mind works, keeping us in the moment of imagining and leaping from one thought to the next. The poem’s opening segment splashes in facts of the industrial fishing technique referenced in the title, while sprinkling in existential thoughts:

[. . .] the nets weighed down with
ballast—raking the bottom looking for nothing—indiscriminate—there is nothing in
particular you want—you just want—you just want to close the
third dimension—to get something which is all—becomes all—once you are
indiscriminate—discards can reach 90% of the catch— [. . .]
[. . .] deepwater fish grow very slowly—very--
so have long life expectancy—late reproductive age—are particularly thus
vulnerable—it comes along the floor over the underwater mountains—scraping the
steep slopes—what is bycatch—hitting the wrong target—the wrong size—not
eaten—for which there is no market—banned—endangered—such as birds--
sometimes just too much—no more space on the boat—millions of tons thrown
back dead or wounded—the scars on the seabed—the mouth the size of a football
field—and if there is no one there is still ghostfishing—nets abandoned in the
sea they continue through centuries to catch—mammals fish shellfish—we die
of exhaustion of suffocation—the synthetic materials last forever

After the environmental horror of the trawling, the speaker is tempted to moralize, as any of us are after witnessing any terror. But Graham allows the poem to slip into questioning, as we see in these lines from later in the poem:

[. . .] I don’t know. It is not a function of knowledge. It is in a special sense
that the world ends. You have to keep living. You have to make it not become
waiting. Nothing is disturbingly visible. Only the outside continues but it
continues. So you have to find the way to make the inside
continue. Your entity is fragile. You are an object you own. At least
you were given it to own. You have to figure out what ownership
is. You thought you knew. You were wrong. It was wrong. There was
wrongness in the mix. It turns out you are a first impression. [. . .]

She isn’t at all Frost, who makes a tight little image or narrative out of deep subjective experience. She allows subjective experience (in this case, imagining the horrors of the experience of deep water trawling as an environmental disaster) to be itself, to present itself in all its distractedness, its wavering. She shows how the self is always needing an anchor, something to ground itself in certainty, in a morality, in an identity, in an ideal—but how those keep slipping from the mind, almost as soon as they come into it.

In this volume, Graham takes on the digital experience—and how could she not? Any poet not stuck in the sentimentalities of the past must deal with digital reality. So she imagines bots (these are real now, by the way, not sci-fi fantasies) and 3-D printing, and the experiences of being so interconnected with machinery that we can’t break from it. Occasionally, all the worry over “bots” seems a bit forced, as in the title poem, “Fast.” But Graham’s method more often rescues her from poems that over-worry their subject matter. (“From Inside the MRI” is Graham at her best, imagining the body-machine-medicine-industrial-economics matrix from within the machine itself.)

A weakness of almost any poet is the temptation to write from one’s own experience with grief. The feeling is so personally powerful that one feels a poem can swing on that emotion alone. And sometimes it can. Graham delves into the personal in this volume with a half-dozen or so poems that present the experience of the dying and death of her parents from her perspective as she cares for them. The poems are saved from preciosity because Graham’s method saves her from personality and forces her into the experiential, so that as I read I can come to believe in the experience (its emotional qualities, yes, but also its intellectual, rational, and imaginative aspects). In other words, her method provides the scope she needs to avoid sentimentality so that any experience she chooses to write about becomes vital.

In “The Medium,” Graham weaves together many of the themes touched on throughout the book. The poem’s narrative, as one must piece it together, centers on the speaker remembering her father, and how she is tempted to (and eventually does) use a “medium” (whom she pays with her credit card) to contact her father from beyond the grave. It may sound silly, like all the necromancy nonsense surrounding Yeats’s great works, but Graham gets us into this experience obliquely, at first, by charting her waking up in the morning, then seeing the river as she drives across it. The river is then linked to her thoughts on the digital stream of constant information as our modern necessity, like unto water. The river is named the Charles, but Graham also calls it “Lethe—river of unmindfulness—”:

                                              [. . .] the Charles is channeling scribbling erasing
itself while all along chattering self-wounding self-dividing, slowing at bank, at
streamline, at meander, then quick now trying out scribbling again—why not—one must
                                                                                    keep trying
                                                                                    to make
the unsaid said—that is the task of the surface—rivermist rising like ectoplasm off this
downstate slate-weight silhouetted think-tank—sky’s overflowing checkbook,
nonstop signatures filigreed by wintered trees—no debt unpaid—all trans-
mutation’s molecules—silvergrey tulle, vestigial, lacteal, millennial—[colonial]—if
this is prophecy it’s underwater, self-consuming, does not know what to do with
                                                                                    itself
except be carried forward—inexorably—drift into drift—not really anything like
fate—my fear teaches me more I think looking down at the metallic swirls, enameled,
processional, unidirectional, and oh so floral although more archival now as the
                                                                                    crisping dawn-blue
                                                                                    spews itself
                                                                                    onto itself
anew—parts so exact they fit their own exactness--
such that nothing about themselves can escape themselves--
a complete reason reasoned or a completely collective error—oh--
completely has never meant so much to me—as I look down now at the utterly
swallowed self-swallowing river—a constant continual final word—birds
rising from its tongue—first words, final words—crumbling daybreak [. . .]

This is just a taste of the push of Graham’s perspective (to paraphrase from poet Charles Olson, one of Graham’s key influences), of how her method allows for an opening up of the poem into the mind’s tireless push for meaning. Here, though, she is also setting a theme for the latter part of the poem. The river is a medium, as, later, the Internet is a medium. And as mediums they have no being in themselves, but are simply channels whose contents constantly swallow themselves in new content. (And the poet, of course, must also be a medium—uroboros.) So it is not without intellectual heft that we come upon the poet’s contact with a necromancer, who promises to channel the speaker’s dead father.

Patricia-Michele, the medium, speaks (as the speaker’s father) comforting words about his death and where he is now:

I will understand when I come there, should not be afraid, nothing useless is re-
called, the voice which is his which is hers so firm, full of urgent finishings,
orders, find this, protect that, but mostly how sweet the ending was which had
to us appeared so sick the body so invaded left to die full of moaning that would not
stop [. . .]

The poem bounces then from the father’s words to the speaker’s memories of him and her need to find an intellectual bearing:

[. . .] everything awaiting
use, your whispers hoarse wandering through thickets of walls,
the labyrinths of rooms             that were a home—what is it pulverizes you—what is it
pulverizes rooms that made all the sense in the world to us as we walked in and
through eyeing each place we living know—even the secrets are assigned, are
pulverized—all this round where tomorrow there will be candles burning when
they wash you, dress that body, lay it out—the hand meant for tearing
and pointing turned like a shucked shell with no palm to hold a thing again—a
coin would slip through—[ . . .]

Strange and beautiful, yet hardly poetic in any of the traditional senses. It is constant perception, constant awareness of the mind’s movements in each moment. The call is finished (and Graham even gives her sixteen-digit credit card number, and her expiration date—but not her security code!), and she is back to the river out her window:

[. . .] down there below me again the riversurface
stares. It is all even now. It glints and gleams in tidy rows and rolls and dents of
                                                                                   wind. The day is
long. It flirts with nothingness. It always does.

And Graham always does. Her poems always keep track of the fleeting phenomenal moment, but with the constant threat that it all adds up to nothing much—always flirting with nothingness because she never allows there to be a mooring, never a safe place of sure identity, never a safe idea. She’s a real contemporary poet, a real pioneer, a pathmaker. It’s a shame the Norton Anthology of American Literature dropped her out of its latest edition.






N. S. BOONE is an associate professor of English at Harding University, where he teaches general education and American literature courses. His specialty is American poetry, and his publications include articles on Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Rita Dove, and Mark Strand.

Fast. By Jorie Graham. Ecco, 2017.

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