Region of Unlikeliness

by Jorie Graham

Book description to come.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 1991

About the author

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

It had been a few years since I had read Jorie Graham; I didn’t remember her poems being so initially satisfying, and so ultimately disappointing in two ways. Although they are masterful at conveying a deep level of cognitive resonance to some kind of truth or harmony about our universe through a highly perceptive language—that is, one directed toward and composed of direct sensate experience—after a few poems, I became weary of her prosody of repetition, anticipating multiple repetition of key lines and phrases, with almost total accuracy, as well as baffled by her often weak endings. Witness the following portions of “Holy Shroud,” for example, which repeat words within a few lines, ad nauseum (italics mine):

It’s never not this way, the clear promise

drifting without perishing into the empty lots
where they live,
the stubblefields beyond the mall,
wafting and almost perishing
into the other stenches desolation and cold
keep crisp,

Then a mere four lines later,

—drifting, a prayer that matter
is praying, not really ever
perishing.

It’s not that this technique is used only occasionally, but that it is used multiple times in virtually every poem in Region of Unlikeness is what becomes so predictably bland. The ending to this poem is not horrible, but neither does it even approach the virtuosic:

—When they held it up to us
we saw nothing, we saw the delay, we saw

the minutes on it, spots here and there,
we tried to see something, little by little we could almost see,
almost nothing was visible,
already something other than nothing
was visible in the almost. (italics Graham’s)

In addition to the repeated nothing, if you count the three “we saw[s]” of the second line, the “little by little,” the almost of “almost see,” “almost nothing” and the final almost and “something[s],” the lines reduce to something that is almost nothing. This enactment could be tolerated, if it were the only one of its kind, but it’s not.

That is not to say that the language is not musical (in this poem, as well as in all the others), nor that novelty is not present (it is within many phrases and lines). How could one not appreciate the following opening lines of “Fission?”

The real electric lights light upon the full-sized
screen
on which the greater-than-life-size girl appears,
almost nude on the lawn—sprinklers on—
voice-over her mother calling her name out—loud—
camera angle giving her lowered lids their full
expanse—a desert—as they rise

out of the shabby annihilation,
out of the possibility of never-having-been-seen,
and rise,
till the glance is let loose into the auditorium,
and the man who has just stopped in his tracks
looks down
for the first

time. Tick tock. It’s the birth of the mercantile
dream (he looks down). It’s the birth of
the dream called
new world (looks down).

Graham manages throughout this poem, and throughout her work, to involve the reader actively, by braiding together the reader’s perceptions with the actual poem, thereby creating an interactive work of art that is truly remarkable. Lines like “Meanwhile the wind bends the grasses flat then up again, like that,/and at the picnic someone’s laugh breaks off the mouth/and comes to this” (20-23 from “Picnic”), strengthen our own internal images, our connections to them, and thus to the poem.

Her poems are always conscious of three dimensions: the assumed reality inside the poem, the actual artifact of the poem and the reading audience. The awareness of these three actors is always near the surface, if not openly dealt with in the poem, as in the following from “Fission” (strophes six and seven):

a man comes running down the aisle
asking for our attention—
Ladies and Gentlemen.
I watch the houselights lap against the other light—the tunnel
Of image-making dots licking the white sheet awake—
a man, a girl, her desperate mother—daisies growing in the
corner—

I watch the light from our real place
suck the arm of screen-building light into itself
until the gesture of the magic forearm frays,
and the story up there grays, pales—them almost lepers now,

Even with their flaws, the poems from Region of Unlikeness are valuable, and have much to teach us. I just wouldn’t want a steady diet of them, for the reasons already outlined.