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The Sunday Poem: No. 111 Jorie Graham

Independent, The (London), May 20, 2001 by Ruth Padel

Prayer

What of the quicksand. My desperate eye looking too hard.

Or of the eye of the world looking too hard

for me. Or, if you prefer, cause,

looking to take in what could be sufficient -

Then the sun goes down and the sentence

goes out. Recklessly towards the end. Beyond the ridge. Wearing us as if lost in

thought with no way out, no eye at all to slip through,

none of the hurry or the between- hurry thinkings to liquefy,

until it can be laid on a tongue

- oh quickness - like a drop. Swallow. Rouse says the dark.

More Articles of Interest: For One Must Want/To Shut the Other's Gaze; Underneath (Libation); Region of Unlikeness - R book reviews; Jorie Graham: Ten poems; Little Exercise

Jorie Graham is a prize-winning, philosophically-minded American poet who grew up in Italy, went to the US to study film-making with Martin Scorsese, and is now a Harvard Professor. English poets say they find her difficult - a quality more prized in America than here. Her poems are deeply conceptual, combining medieval philosophy with lyric accounts of landscape and nature, probing physical things (like a spider's web, a school science project) for metaphysical insight; always grounding abstract speculation in visual observation, and art, but self-referential too. They are all about language and poetic process: form - the way words relate to each other in a poem - mirrors not content but the way her poems stalk content; their flashes of perception en route to insight.

In this poem from her eighth collection, she uses gaps between words to get this hesitancy across. Prayer is a reaching-out across a gap: conceptually, between the material and spiritual world; perceptually, between the self (the eye, or "I") and the outer world; mystically, between self and God. Like prayer, the poem moves towards images of ecstatic unity (oh quickness; something laid on a tongue like a Communion wafer; Swallow).

The great image of knowledge and reason in the Western philosophical tradition is light. You need light to see; you need God, and reason, to help you understand. This poem, a prayer for understanding, desperate to create a relation between the self and the world, makes looking its image of, and way into, understanding. But the looking is two-way; the poet's eye is looking too hard; but the eye (pause) of the world may be looking back, also looking too (pause) hard (big pause, line-break and stanza-break) for me. The stages of thought are slow and broken up; the looking is almost too hard for me in the other sense of that phrase.

In Plato's theory of vision (which fed medieval philosophy), rays flow from object into eye but also from eye into object. Perception, like understanding (or, if you prefer, cause), entails interaction between me and the world. Here, the mind trying to understand meaning and cause - just a bit, what could be sufficient - is confounded by the world, and by the poem's own tactics, when it breaks the sentence with a dash at sufficient. There is no full stop, but the new sentence has a capital letter. The poem, and the outer world, are taking charge of understanding. The sun goes down with a new beginning; the sentence, like a light, goes out. The central (ninth) line is the beginning of smooth linguistic flow towards the end, in, paradoxically, three utterances none of which is a proper sentence (recklessly... end; beyond / the ridge; wearing... drop). There is no grammatical subject, no main verb. Language, our normal tool for understanding meaning, has lost its rules, its grammar and syntax. The world is wearing us; we are no longer in control, our normal source of light has "gone" down, "gone" out. Yet this is when we are taken, with no more hesitation gaps, beyond / the ridge.

God is light, but it is when you are struggling, in the dark night of the soul, that you find Him. Here, when you stop struggling to make rational sense of this quicksand world, give up grammar, hurry or the between- / hurry thinkings, get lost in / thought with no way / out as if thinking is a labyrinth with no eye at all, no window to outer reality: that's when you hear the voice of the dark and accept its imperatives (Swallow, Rouse) like the voice of God in a vision.

George Herbert's poem "Prayer" called prayer "the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage... Church bells beyond the stars heard... something understood". Graham's "Prayer", representing another heart on pilgrimage towards understanding, a soul rephrasing itself in that quest, is answered by the absence of light and syntax; by the dark. n

Taken from "Swarm", Carcanet. The "Sunday Poem" exhibition, now running at the Poetry Library, Level 5, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, finishes on 27 May. Telephone 020 7921 0943 for details.

The Sunday Poem: No. 111 Jorie Graham

Independent, The (London), May 20, 2001 by Ruth Padel

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