The Taken-Down God

'the many promises of vision'
The Taken-Down God: Selected Poems 1997-2008, Jorie Graham
(196pp, £14.95, Carcanet)
In 1997 the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dream of the Unified Field drew together poems from Jorie Graham's first five collections; subsequently, The Taken-Down God selects from the next five collections: The Errancy; Swarm; Never; Overlord and Sea Change. This new volume complements the first selected poems for it is possible to see Graham approaching, again, the colossal themes of the divine and the material, art and life, but The Taken-Down God also stands independently. Indeed, it is a compelling selection, made by Graham herself, that details the personal and the global concerns that have informed Graham's work in the last decade and a half.
In the past, Graham has described how ninety percent of her time is spent revising the poems she writes; attending to the music and metre of each line. It is no surprise then, that the poems in The Taken-Down God have been chosen and arranged with similar care. The selection feels orchestrated in the sense that the tone and subject matter of each poem echo one another not only between the poems themselves but also between the different collections. This will surely challenge the criticism that readers have often made over the fragmentary nature of Graham's writing.
For example, 'the glance' is introduced as a preoccupation of Graham's in the 1997 collection, The Errancy. In a poem such as 'Thinking' Graham describes a crow and 'my steady glance on him, cindering at the glance-core where / it held him tightest, swelled and sucked'. Here, Graham displays an anxiety regarding how the eye perceives the natural world. Placing 'Thinking' before 'That Greater Than Which is Nothing' highlights 'the many promises of vision' that the latter poem describes. Furthermore, it initiates an exploration of these 'promises' in poems such as 'Woods' and 'Gulls' collected in 2002's Never.
With The Taken-Down God it becomes tempting to suggest points at which Graham expresses particular ideas that direct her later writing; the poems selected from Never seem to indicate such a transition. Importantly, The Taken-Down God has included 'Evolution' with its endnote concerning 'the rate of extinction [that] is estimated at one every nine minutes.' Having explained how this time span 'inhabits' as well as 'structures' Never, it is appropriate that the poems that are included in this selected work concern temporality and environments. By parodying the writer's attempt to achieve a 'finished' representation of the natural world, 'Woods' provides a refreshing ecopoetic stance:
- oh swagger of dwelling in place, in voice -
surely one of us understands the importance.
Understands? Shall I wave a 'finished' copy at you
whispering do you wish to come for lunch.
Nor do I want to dwell on this.
I cannot, actually, dwell on this.
There is no home. One can stand out here
and gesture wildly, yes. One can say 'finished'
and look into the woods, as I do now, here,
but also casting my eye out
to see (although that was yesterday) (in through the alleyways
of trees) the slantings of morninglight [...]
'Gulls' dives ever more deeply into this subject matter and illustrates the 'en plein air' technique that Graham used to write Never. Engaged with 'porting' the natural world rather than reporting it, as Graham described in an interview, the poem becomes obsessively present-tense when considering the birds,
[...] the whole flock rising and running just
as the last film of darkness rises
leaving behind, also rising and falling in
tiny upliftings [...]
As the poem continues it becomes clear that the observer cannot keep up with the observation. As the scene changes with the movement of the sea, the light and the gulls, 'the words' are described 'leaping too, over their own / staying':
So then it's sun in surf-breaking water: incircling, smearing: mind not
knowing if it's still 'wave,' breaking on
itself, small glider, of it it's 'amidst'(red turning feathery)
or rather 'over' (the laciness of foambreak) or just what [...] it is.
The Taken-Down God continues to explore these environmental concerns with poems from the collection that follows; Overlord. Indeed, these environmental concerns have led Graham to approach her early themes regarding the divine and material worlds from a different perspective. 'Please don't let us destroy / Your world. No the world', Graham implores in 'Praying (Attempt of May 9 '03)', and later, in another poem, Graham realises the harmful consequences of'the disappearance of hope' and so declares 'A new illusion must present / itself immediately'. In the light of this it is even more apparent that what is missing in the book is the poem that lends its name to the selected work. It seems like a strange omission as the poem, 'The Taken-Down God', that was originally included in Never would seem central to many of Graham's wonderfully articulated anxieties regarding belief, sight, writing and language.
Yet this is a small problem in view of a selected poems that will appeal to both a reader who is familiar with Graham and who wishes to explore the links between her collections, and a reader who may wish to gain a first impression of Graham's work. As the book concludes with a selection from Sea Change, Graham begins to enact the declaration made earlier, that of 'A new illusion'. In 'Embodies' Graham asks 'what am I to do with my imagination' and later answers (in poems such as 'Root End') that the imagination must envision the future. This attempt to find a way of dealing with environmental change continues to be explored in Graham's most recent Place (2012): a collection that readers will surely turn to after The Taken-Down God in wanting to see the direction in which Graham's work progresses at this uncertain time.
Jorie Graham is an allusive and complex poet. The Taken Down God deals with large themes: political, environmental, philosophical. The poems coax the reader into their labyrinthine embrace. In 'The Guarding Angel of the Little Utopia' the angel poses questions which take us from the concrete to the abstract: 'Shall I arrange these few remaining flowers? / Shall I rearrange these gossamer efficiencies?' Such shifts are characteristic of her work. In 'Prayer' the speaker leans over a railing to 'watch the minnows, thousands, swirl / themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the / way to create current'. Here Graham reflects on the nature of instinct and agency and what it means to be human.
Jorie Graham is an American poet with a wide experience of the world. Her early life alone warrants a biopic. Born in 1950 to a sculptor and a journalist, she was raised in Italy and France. In 1986, she was involved in the student protests in Paris, and went on to study film-making in New York. She then married into the Graham family, publishers of the Washington Post, at the time of the Watergate scandal.
After that, it might be said, her career became more conventional, though no less glamorous. Moving to Iowa, she began teach on America's most prestigious creative-writing programme, and later succeeded Seamus Heaney to a professorship at Harvard.
Graham's celebrity was confirmed when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for The Dream of the United Field, a selection from her first five books. The Taken-Down God selects from her next five, which appeared over the following decade. As such, it serves as a companion volume to her latest collection PLACE, which won the Forward Prize in the UK last year.
Long admired in America for her ambitious interweaving of philosophical and scientific ideas, Graham is also a poet who insists on the importance of first-hand observation of the world. Drafted in artist's sketchpads, her capacious verse attempts to shape and press a sense of the complexity of things upon the reader.
Graham's signature style is one of long, indented lines and dash-ridden sentences. Challenging the eye to follow its jagged paragraphs, this is verse that tries to attend to every second of perception.
One of her signature subjects is birds. Here is a crow launching into flight, captured in phrase-by-phrase detail, as it might have been seen by Gerard Manley Hopkins: 'wing-thrash where he falls at first against the powerline, / then updraft seized, gravity winnowed, the falling raggedly / reversed'.
And here is a grotesque 'mess of geese', which might have frightened Sylvia Plath: 'Groping their armless way, their underneaths greening. / A slow roiling. As of redundancy. Squirming as they sponge / over the short wet grass - bunchy.'
Anything that moves in a Jorie Graham poem is a potential metaphor for a thought process. Thus, the geese are also a 'mess / of conflicting notions' and the poem about the crow is simply titled Thinking.
The problem with always thinking about thinking in poetry is that self-consciousness can be an uncritical muse. Graham's voluble monologues buttonhole us into hearing them out. But the rhetorical questions and quizzical digressions of the lecturer do not always make for compelling verse ('space and time can be subdivided / infinitely many times. But isn't this sad? / By now hasn't a sadness crept in?').
The poems included in The Taken-Down God are at their best when they have a scene squarely before them. In Never (2002), the poet repeatedly walks along the beach, sketching the whole commotion of birds, water and light.
Watching a flock of gulls standing along the shoreline, she notes how they will suddenly run away from a wave, 'leaving behind... / almost a mile of white underfeathers, up-turned, white spines / gliding over the wet / sand, being blown down towards / the unified inrolling awayness of white'.
Running in and out like waves themselves, Graham's free, irregular lines let rip in such descriptions. She is not a carefree poet, though. Anxiety is the dominant emotion of many poems, as they confront the disorder of a world they cannot control.
In her most recent collections, she has begun to write about the threat of climate change. Sea Change (2008) features her longest line yet as she restlessly traces connections between the individual life and the global ecosystem. 'Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms', begins the poem 'Embodies'. It is a worrying instance of seasonal disturbance. But the sentence does not stop for one-and-a-half pages, eventually arriving at the dark thought that humanity has always had an irrational belief in its ability to 'stave off / the future'.
These poems are arresting in their determination to see beyond the comforts of civilisation. The clouds in the sky do not care about us. 'Look out for them', we are warned, 'their armada is not aware of your air-conditioned / office'.
Graham does not offer poetry as a way of transcending environmental crisis. Instead, she uses her searching, associative sentences to think along the fragile chain of being: from the in-/dispensable plankton of the North Atlantic to the 'useless hands' of the writing poet.
Jorie Graham’s ambitious, densely tangled work rewards the effort.
The Taken-Down God is Jorie Graham’s second volume of selected poems, following The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), and includes work from five collections, beginning with The Errancy (1997) and ending with Sea Change (2008). Its judicious selection from these books provides a comprehensive introduction to Graham’s development over the past fifteen years, and in some ways represents a useful way in which to encounter a poet whose work can be uneven – a characteristic that is perhaps inseparable from her salutary desire for continual change. The poems included here testify to a remarkable willingness to experiment with new forms of expression, as suggested by works as varied as the hesitant, Dickinsonian fragmentation of Swarm (2000), which describes ‘the path of thought also now too bright / so that its edges cut’, and the fluent, expansive Sea Change in which Graham introduced her now typical formal arrangement of long lines protruding from a central column of shorter ones, the transitions between which are enacted by enjambment so abrupt it often divides words in two: ‘you are in- / terrupted again and again . . .’. What provides continuity across this period is Graham’s exploratory sensibility; for her, the ‘activity of awakening’ is always more important than the end result. Though her poems are capable of accommodating sizeable concerns (‘the /end of the world’, ‘the politics of time’, for example), much of her most intensely engaging thought occurs when it moves outwards from small, precisely defined subjects. Particularly fruitful are the moments when she applies her attention to language, which she has a remarkable ability to objectify and animate. ‘Other’, the opening poem of Overlord (2005), employs a brief childhood recollection to interrogate the fertile vagueness of the innocuous phrase ‘now now’:
Now now, the adults used to saymeaning pay attention, meaning the thing athand, the crucial thing, has theseslippery sides: this now its one slope, this now itsother. The thing itself, the essential thing, is inbetween. Don’t blink. Don’tmiss it. Pay attention. It’s a bullet.
Like Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infrathin’, which stipulates that the attention of the artist should be focused not on metaphorical points of identification between names, objects, moments in time and so on, but rather on the most minute intervals between them (number twelve of his famous list of examples asks us to recognize as distinct the moment between ‘the detonation noise of a gun / (very close) and the apparition of the bullet / hole in the target’), Graham repeatedly challenges herself to realize an impossible precision in attention and expression, while remaining fully aware of its impossibility. The inability of language to s...