Swarm: Poems

Jorie Graham, in our blandly supersensible age, has somehow reconjured Mallarme's "night made of absence and questioning." I haven't been this enchanted or mystified -- one and the same emotion, really -- by a book of poetry since Nightwood. How is it possible that an American wrote this, and a TEACHER? You'd expect there to be some lingering trace of workshopped inanity, of the tenured smugness Franny railed against, but there isn't. Not a whiff. She must be something of a Machiavel to have landed her job, because Swarm is a full-bore assault on the idea of poetry being teachable. I think the trouble people have with this book is the same reason why it delights me -- that it's written by an American. If a Czech or a Polak had written this, the author would be hailed as a genius. But somehow we expect less from ourselves. "How many syllables Is your nation?" Graham asks at one point, and gets a monosyllabic grunt in reply. Americans are expected to be sensible, but not intelligent; perceptive, but not well-read; energetic, but not exhausting. Graham, the defiant one, is the second of all these categories. She makes no secret of having learned her craft from books -- though life is always her well of inspiration -- and that she expects the reader to rise to the challenge by maybe even reading some of them. The cheek! This presumptuous woman may even expect us to have some knowledge of foreign languages, helping us to develop a more flexible, childlike receptivity to new combinations and juxtapositions of words ( my German must sound to the members of that poor nation something like a Jorie Graham poem. ) To ask us to take on such a burden merely to get some pleasure out of 110 pages of poetry... This is not done. Give us more autobiographical mini-narratives about New Jersey marriages on the rocks. The irony is that Swarm is the most epochal volume of poetry written in this country since Leaves of Grass. Graham, like Joyce, like every great artist, is an exile, even if she still remains within our borders. There's no way to analyze it in the depth it deserves here, but Graham's influences include, among seemingly everything else that's ever been written, the negative space of Mallarme, the cut-up technique of Burroughs, and the primitivism of Dickinson. It's a celebration of form, but not over content -- Graham knows, is seemingly alone in knowing these days, that perfect form creates its own content. It will take work to decipher, but then anything of value does. The benighted reaction to this book is the final proof of her grim formulation: "This much is certain. / Dream has no friends."

Sure, it's extraordinary. The reason it is extraordinary is quite simple, and to do with her epigraph at the start of 'The Errancy', which is that line from Wyatt, about seeking to catch the wind in a net. Here she pushes her whimsicality, her quite irritating unpindownableness to a new limit, and succeeds quite unexpectedly. It is an achievement, after all, to be unexpected more than once. She has done it, and remains credible: this spiny, out-of-focus poet, who somehow manages to make it mean something, so close to where others fall down. A GREAT BOOK.

It's fascinating I think that Jorie Graham's initial reviews for Swarm were rather scathing. Recently though they've warmed up to her and the book, and it is clear now critics widely consider the work an extraordinary glimpse at this master's mind and style. It's a lot different from Graham's usual, but then again Graham has made a name for herself and her interest in changing styles from book to book. I suggest sticking with it and giving it time! If you love Graham you'll love Swarm!

Nobody but Jorie Graham could write poetry this intense, structural, abstract, and do it successfully. The first aspect of this poetry that one notices is that Jorie Graham has left the standard line/narrative/physical world format almost completely behind, writing a lot of one-line stanzas, and leaving large space between words for the reader to fill. It doesn't look like standard poetry (well, maybe a poem or two do). The second aspect of the poetry in this book is that she's taken words so far from solid ground and scattered them into the stratosphere. In this book you will not find any images like salmon swimming upstream...you will find a minimalism of words where possible, attaching to concepts, not anything sensory that's so easy to hold onto. In Swarm, you're more likely to find lines like "Where definition first comes upon us empire" or "Explain inseparable explain common". At first you will not understand the connections between these words, but they are there, and they are vast. From the first poem to to the last and still reflectng back on it, I've always hoped this book would be remembered in the annals of poetry as the revolutionary book that it is. Jorie Graham is the poet to start a new poetic era. Read this book, you'll find her "planting a wildfire in your head". And after seeing how people either seem to love this book or hate it according to the reviews here, Swarm is controversial if nothing else.

Swarm is an extraordinarily moving and brilliant new book of poems by Jorie Graham. "To all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts," she quotes from Emily Dickinson. These meditations on presence, silence, and loss may seem abstract at first, but in fact are about experiences common to us all. Try reading the poems aloud--they will teach you how to read them. And the subtle and intricate layering of meaning will become more and more apparent to you.