NICK SELBY
PANTHEA: What veiled form sits on that ebon throne?
ASIA: The veil has fallen.
PANTHEA: I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian sun,
Ungazed upon and shapeless: neither limb, Nor form, nor outline: yet we feel it is A living Spirit.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1
Is this then a touch? Quivering me to a new identity.
Walt Whitman2 If Jorie Graham’s sequence Swarm (2000) and Susan Howe’s poem-sequence
“Scattering As Behaviour Toward Risk” (from Singularities [1990]) can be read as radical and innovative deconstructions of the very idea of the American poetry book – and this essay argues that they can – then this is largely because they share a fascination with the processes and effects of textual revision. These are poetic sequences on the rebound: they bounce off at sometimes bizarre trajectories from the texts they have (in Graham’s words) “Severely trimmed and cleared”.3In this sense they tell the history of the American poetry book “slant”. For, as we shall see, it is especially in their slanted engagement with Walt Whitman (in the case of Graham) and Emily Dickinson (in the case of Howe) that these sequences seek to disrupt, and thereby question, the “normal” contingencies of American poetic history. Both Graham and Howe discover in these sequences a poetics and graphics of process that lies underneath Whitman’s and Dickinson’s writing of a “typically American” poetry.
The force of the formal inventiveness of these sequences lies precisely in their
1. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, ed. Lawrence John Zillman, Seattle, 1959, 208 (Act II, scene iv).
2. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy, Harmondsworth, 1986, 91 (“Song of Myself”).
3. Jorie Graham, Swarm, New York, 2000, 3. References for subsequent quotations from this collection are given in the text, where page numbers refer to this edition.
Nick Selby 184
unveiling of the powerful play of literary authority that is embedded in Emersonian formulations of America itself as a great poem.4
In fact, the key metaphors of these two sequences, those of swarming and of scattering, might be seen as ones that describe their actions upon prior American poetic texts. Because they work poetically through acts of textual displacement and dispersal, they both give explicit – and disruptive – attention to the way in which America has bound itself to the idea of the poem. Despite being poetic sequences they contest the very idea of poetic sequence. In so doing they set out to challenge the sort of hermeneutic pattern, the telos, upon which American literary history might be seen to be raised. They counter, that is, teleological models of poetic enquiry. Indeed, as this essay will argue, they resist the closed forms and meanings of teleological thought by insisting upon a poetics of error and misreading, of textual swarmings and scatterings. Equally, then, such metaphors describe the dislocated and diasporic imagination that runs throughout America’s trimming and clearing of its cultural wilderness, throughout its imagination of itself as a new, quivering, cultural identity.
Graham’s and Howe’s texts are therefore ones that struggle to find a poetic measure of what is written over by America’s ideological grounding in Enlightenment rationality. Suffused with imagery of light, and enlightenment, these are both texts that see such a struggle as properly Promethean. They continue and develop what Susan Howe has described as Dickinson’s “Promethean ambition”.5 The risky but strategic behaviour of poetic scattering in these sequences animates an attempt by them both to bring back into the light of poetic investigation the unbound pages of the (idea of the) American poetry book.
Such poetic behaviours are undeniably risky, and this essay argues that such risks allow Graham’s and Howe’s texts strategically to deconstruct the book as rational discourse within the American poetic imagination. However, and developing upon this, perhaps such strategies might also allow us to think about the ways in which Graham and Howe are (deliberately or not) working within a distinctly female poetics. For – despite the sort of “bookish flavour” that Peter Quartermain has described in Howe’s work, and that is readily apparent in Graham’s – it would seem that these sequences seek to oppose a masculine theoria with a poetics of touch, of hesitant refusals and unveilings, of textual processes.6These sequences can therefore be seen as embodying just those sorts of poetic strategies that, according to Julia Kristeva, make apparent the way in which “the semiotic – the precondition of the symbolic – is revealed as that which also destroys the symbolic”.7Indeed, Susan Howe has described her poetics of typographical experiment as an attempt to release her texts from “masculine linguistic formations”, that which Kristeva aligns with the
“symbolic”. Marjorie Perloff has properly pointed out that since similar techniques are employed by male poets, such experiments may well be “more generational than
… gendered”, but it seems to me that the risks involved for Howe (and Graham) in their experimental poetic behaviours are high precisely because of their confronting of
4. “America”, Emerson notes, “is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination”, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” (1844), in Emerson’s Essays, ed. Sherman Paul, London, 1980, 224. This is echoed by Whitman in his “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass where he states, “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (Whitman, 741).
5. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, Berkeley, 1985, 18.
6. Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, Cambridge, 1992, 182.
7. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller, New York, 1984, 50.
Prometheans Unbound: Susan Howe and Jorie Graham 185
a gendered hierarchy of literary value.8Howe’s point is, perhaps, that while a female poet (her model is Dickinson) has a particularly agonistic relationship to male literary formations (the idea of the book), such a relationship is not exclusive to the female writer. Her dismissal of Hélène Cixous’s imperatives about gender and writing (that
“woman must write woman. And man, man”) in her study My Emily Dickinson certainly seems to indicate her sense that men too can, and should, challenge the
“masculine linguistic formations” that their poetics inhabits.9For Graham too – as for Cixous – such a challenge entails a risky reformulation of the relationship between the textual and the bodily.10The first half of this essay, then, will examine the effects of such a reformulation in Swarm. Most especially it will focus on the ways in which Graham’s sequence re-writes, and thus writes against, Whitman’s masculinist romance of the poet, of America, and of the book. And in its second half, this essay will consider Susan Howe’s dramatically typographical re-writing of American literary history – her poetic scattering of the leaves of the American poetry book – as an experimental “reading through” of (in particular) Dickinson.
II
Although Swarm’s broken locutions ask us to attend to a moment-by-moment disruption of apparently masculine linguistic formations such as sequence, narrative and logical relation, they also (like Howe above) deny the imperative tone of Cixous’s assertion that woman must write woman. Instead they seem to trace an undoing of such an assured poetic subjectivity, a questioning of just what such a sense of selfhood and gender might entail. Swarm is, above all else, speculative rather than imperative, and part of its speculative tone is due to the way in which it continually seeks to test how the poet’s sense of the corporeal is a site of disjunctive poetic enquiry. In the poem “from The Reformation Journal (2)”, for example, the poet’s noticing of “a pile of wretched flesh” leads to a series of questions – in successive yet discrete poetic lines – that swarm, like flies in the light of poetic enquiry, around the status of the poem’s first-person voice:
The sunlight very still on everything animate and in- animate
making a sound like it is enough that you exist Is it not?
Is not the desire now to lose all personal will?
Come evil, my first person is hidden. (88)
8. Susan Howe, in The Line in Poetry, eds Robert Frank and Henry Sayre, Urbana, IL, 1988, 209;
Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions, Evanston, IL, 1998, 166.
9. My Emily Dickinson, 12.
10. In her famous essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous describes women’s writing as a struggle to “return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her” by a logocentric patriarchy. See New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, Brighton, 1981, 250.
Nick Selby 186
Here, as both poetic lines and poetic selfhood are picked open, what is at issue is not so much an animating sunlight of reformation, a poetic piecing-together of things, as a breaking-down of that animating light into its constituent elements. Rational enquiry is, in this poem (as throughout the sequence generally), dismantled. This is signalled by the reference to the death of Socrates near the end of the poem, and in the image of the poet’s body becoming, like an unbound book, “unstitched”. The “path of thought”
is “now too bright”, and Graham’s poetic fire feels like a stolen glance at a hidden first person, a “sleeping body”:
And the narration which relates the things
(but they must be true) The path of thought also now too bright So that its edges cut
So that I’m writing this in the cold
keeping the parts from finding the whole again page after page, unstitched, speaking for sand Look I push the book off my desk
Into the flood
“Let him be prepared to give the poison twice or even thrice if necessary”
As when feeling you watch my sleeping body (89).
Graham here risks a poetics in which the book – and all the bodies of knowledge and power it signals – is pushed “into the flood” of white paper between the poetic lines that announce its presence.
Throughout Swarm such a collapsing of poetic subjectivity, and the subsequent questioning of the book’s own lyric authority (that power under which it operates as a poetic sequence), is repeatedly seen to be predicated upon a collapsing of the corporeal into the textual. In Swarm’s opening poem, another one entitled “from The Reformation Journal”, this alignment between body and text turns upon a questioning of what stays incorrupt in such a poetics of abbreviating and scattering. How divisible, it asks, is nature, the body, the book? The imagery in which this questioning is enacted evokes the sequence’s own inter-textual manoeuvering: “have reduced, have trimmed, have cleared, have omitted” (5). Whilst this exposes the sequence in its very first moments to considerable risk, it also establishes the poetic procedure of the sequence as a whole, that of sifting through remains, especially textual ones. Both textual and corporeal bodies (in the shape of – respectively – quotations from Thomas
Prometheans Unbound: Susan Howe and Jorie Graham 187
Traherne and Dickinson, and the address to “my beloved”) are, in the closing lines of this poem, subjected to a poetic act of disinterring in order to establish what remains:
Oh my beloved I’m asking
*
More atoms, more days, the noise of the sparrows, of the universals
*
Yet colder here now than in
*
the atom still there at the bottom of nature
*
that we be founded on infinite smallness
*
“which occasions incorruption or immortality”
*
(incorruption because already as little as it can be) …
“to all except anguish the mind soon adjusts”
*
have reduced, have trimmed, have cleared, have omitted
*
have abbreviations silently expanded
*
to what avail
*
explain asks to be followed explain remains to be seen (5)
On the one hand, what remains to be seen is the rest of the book, the sequence that asks to be followed from here. In this sense Swarm is, from the outset, acutely aware of the hermeneutic patterns of reading that it evokes in order to interrogate.
Explanation, Graham seems to imply, is bound in with the very idea of sequence.
Turn the page, the poem demands: the book that follows will provide the explanation that you find so frustratingly absent on the page in front of you. On the other hand, though, the sequence’s playful intertextuality means that it becomes a site of lyric deferral, one of editorial processes in which the book becomes, so to speak, unbound in front of us. Graham’s announcement at the start of this poem – “I have reduced all to lower case. / I have crossed out passages. / I have severely trimmed and cleared”
(3) – is a declaration of the principle of textual scattering that underpins the sequence.
What, in effect, this presents us with are loose leaves, textual and bodily “remains”.
Turn the page back again, the poem demands: the explanation is buried in the scattered remains turned up here. Indeed, much of the poetic pressure of the sequence lies in its interrupted sequentiality, in our physical act of turning back pages to locate phrases, themes, images repeated (or “trimmed and cleared”) from earlier in the book.
This procedure demands an involvement in the text that most of Swarm’s reviewers have, seemingly, been unwilling to give. The belligerent opacity of lines such as those above led to outright dismissals of Graham’s high-risk poetic strategies.
Lolita Lark’s fervent (and critically unformulated) attack on Swarm describes reading it as though “discovering a world filled with conspiracies of nonsense”; William
Nick Selby 188
Logan sees nothing more than “words hurled scrappily onto the page”; and although Ciaran Carson acknowledges that the book does seem to have “a theme, or an attitude ... of dislocation, of dismantling meaning” this, for him, ends up in “disappointing the reader rather than fulfilling any readerly expectation”.11These reviews all refuse to read Swarm as a sequence, and therefore see unevenness, obscurity, and difficulty as localized to a particular poem, rather than thematized throughout the book as a whole.
They refuse, that is, to take seriously the risky vulnerability of the sequence.12They fail to acknowledge the way in which such poetic risks are central to Graham’s challenge to conventional ways of reading. She has noted, in an interview with Thomas Gardner, that poems with “a resistant or partially occluded surface compel us to read with a different part of our sensibility ... [they] frustrate frontal vision long enough to compel the awakening of the rest of the reading sensibility – intuition, the body”.13By allowing her to engage a poetics of the body, then, such risks also allow her to write against what she describes as the “ending-dependence”, the teleological imperative, that lies underneath western Enlightenment rationality.14
Swarm is undoubtedly an uneven, and at times forbiddingly dense, text. However, its dislocations and scrappiness animate not simply Graham’s efforts to write a sequence that seriously questions the very structures of teleological and sequential thinking, but one that also thereby seems to deliver a poetics that speaks from a position “underneath” such structures. Just under half the poems in Swarm are entitled
“Underneath”, and these poems all suggest voices seeking the light from a position buried underground. Whether this be a compound figure of Persephone and Eurydice returning from the underworld in “Underneath (Upland)” who says “light swinging in the right hand of this me the follower / trying to overhear the low secret though not too hard / light touching everything / grace and slenderness of its touching” (17); or the punning Sybil, burning pages of the book, who says “Look you have to lift the match to it again / because this syllable is still intact” in “Underneath (Sybilline)”
(25); or even Eurydice, again, returning into the light of the book “held up in the sun by your hands of dirt / which look from this distance like hands of fire / gripping their page yet not consuming it” in “Underneath (Eurydice)” (74); these figures are the textual and mythological remains that can be seen haunting the sequence. They are, of course, all women abused or deserted by men. Their poetic return into the light signals the return of the (lyric) repressed into the male realm of the (American poetry) book.
11. Lolita Lark, “Review of Swarm”, in The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, XXI/3 (Summer 2000), at www.ralphmag.org/AA/jorie-graham.html; William Logan,
“The Way of All Flesh”, in The New Criterion On Line, XVIII (September 1999-June 2000), at
<www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/jun00/logan.htm>; Ciaran Carson, “A Lot of Buzzing Around the Bush”, in Poetry London, XXXVIII (Spring 2001), at <www.poetrylondon.co.uk/issue38.html>.
12. It should be noted, though, that Andrew Osborn’s positive review of Swarm for the Boston Review pays particular attention to the risks Graham takes in this sequence, and describes it as her “most vulnerable book to date”(Andrew Osborn, “Review of Swarm”, in Boston Review, XXV/1 [February/March 2000], at <bostonreview.mit.edu/BR25.1/osborn.html>).
13. Thomas Gardner, “An Interview with Jorie Graham”, in Denver Quarterly, XXVI/4 (Spring 1992), 99; reprinted in Thomas Gardner, Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry, Lincoln and London, 1999, 232-33.
14. See Gardner, “Interview”, 84 (Unlikeness, 218). For a much fuller account of Graham’s poetic strategies for disrupting teleological thought, see my “‘A Columbus of the Imagination’: America, the Millennium and the Poetry of Jorie Graham”, in European Journal of American Culture, XIX/2 (Summer 2000), 96-111.
Prometheans Unbound: Susan Howe and Jorie Graham 189
The very nature of Swarm as a sequence, then, produces a complex and shifting deconstructive play amongst textual and mythological remains, and allows Graham to register the abject status of a woman’s poetic voice within American literary history.
And, by extension, the sequence explores the abjection of the body in relation to those male powers that – in the words of Swarm’s jacket blurb – “human beings feel themselves to be ‘underneath’: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love”. Most strikingly, especially in terms of related imagery of books and bodies, this exploration takes place in relation to Whitman. Swarm deliberately sets out to test its opaque, or
“partially occluded” textual surface, against Whitman’s poetic claims to transparency, that he is America’s “bard” “undraped”.15Graham’s poetics in Swarm, in its struggle to compel a new reading sensibility, implies a womanly reading against the whole romance of the American book and poet that Whitman’s project implies. Whitman, in one of the last poems he wrote, sees himself emerging from the pages of his book into the embrace of his readers:
My songs cease, I abandon them,
From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you.
Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here together alone?) It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms – decease calls me forth.16 Swarm seeks to suspend such a poetics of touch.
For Graham, Whitman’s image of the poetry book, as that which allows you to touch his body as you touch its pages, seems complicit in a coercive poetic gesture.
Despite – maybe because of – Whitman’s claim to “advance personally” from “behind the screen” of poetic subjectivity into corporeal identity, Swarm is suspicious of Whitman’s poetic touch, and seems to suggest that its manly embrace is a veil under which women’s poetic voices are silenced. By throwing attention on to its own resistant poetic surface, its scattered pages themselves like veils, Graham’s sequence attempts to unveil the oppressive maleness that underpins Whitman’s gesture of holding on to lyric subjectivity, his desire to be touched as a “man”. In fact, the
Despite – maybe because of – Whitman’s claim to “advance personally” from “behind the screen” of poetic subjectivity into corporeal identity, Swarm is suspicious of Whitman’s poetic touch, and seems to suggest that its manly embrace is a veil under which women’s poetic voices are silenced. By throwing attention on to its own resistant poetic surface, its scattered pages themselves like veils, Graham’s sequence attempts to unveil the oppressive maleness that underpins Whitman’s gesture of holding on to lyric subjectivity, his desire to be touched as a “man”. In fact, the