Never: Poems

by Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham's collection of poems, Never, primarily addresses concern over our environment in crisis. One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 2, 2002

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

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

We did not change, but time changed us. It should be,
it seems, one or the other of us who is supposed to say—lest
there be nothing—here we are. It was supposed to become familiar
(this earth). It was to become “ours”. Lest there be nothing.
Lest we reach down to touch our own reflection here.
Shouldn’t depth come to sight and let it in, in the end, as the form
the farewell takes: representation: dead men:
lean forward and look in: the raggedness of where the openings
are: precision of the limbs upthrusting down to hell:
the gleaming in: so blue: and that it has a bottom: even a few clouds
if you keep
attending: and something that’s an edge-of: and mind-cracks: and how the
poem is
about that: that distant life: I carry it inside me but
can plant it into soil: so that it becomes impossible
to say that anything swayed
from in to out : then back to “is this mine, or yours?”: the mind
seeks danger out: it reaches in, would touch: where the subject is emptying,
war is:
morality play: preface: what there is to be thought: love:
begin with the world: let it be small enough.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

here on the adoring jorie marathon it's tragic that they all seem to outdo each other this was , unbelievable. some of the best nascent-climate-aware ecopoetry I've found , and o it's Jorie so more, Heidegger, mystic, Prayer

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a treasure trove of images and words, long and a little difficult, sometimes inscrutable, but worth the time and light to illuminate the life in the words. The first poem, Prayer, has the most powerful phrase that has attached itself to me on every journey and in every dark place, it lights me over and over. I have heard it on the wind in Utah, in the waves in Florida, in the blue sky, in the rain, in the snow alight in the sun. It is my mantra, the longing, again and again, on any voyage or pilgrimage, the longing to be changed, that is mine.

this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.

and at the same time, you can't step in the same river twice, or so said an ancient Greek, and each moment of wonder I have felt, I have felt the singularity, the mindfulness of the holiness of the time and space I am feeling it. I could come back to the same place again and again, but not the same holiness, or life changing moment.


I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

This is why I dance in the grove of trees near the stream that empties in the lake, and why I stand with my face to the falling snow, and why I try to bare myself to the wind in the desert. I can't go back to the moments of pleasure and wonder, I can't. And that is what these poems are about.

Graham is a bit too abstract to be my favorite poet, but she is a power, a force, and worth it. trust me.

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutes fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change----

this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in, and say take this, this
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Afterwards

I am beneath the tree. To the right the river is melting the young sun.
And translucence itself, bare, bony, feeding and growing on the manifest,
frets in the small puddles of snowmelt sidewalks and frozen lawns hold up
full of sky.
From this eternity, where we do not resemble ourselves, where
resemblance is finally
beside (as the river is) the point,
and attention can no longer change the outcome of the gaze,
the ear too is finally sated, starlings starting up ladderings of chatter,
all at once all to the left,
invisible in the pruned-back
hawthorn, heard and heard again, and yet again,
differently heard, but silting
the head with inwardness and make a always a
dispersing but still
coalescing opening in the listener who
cannot look at them exactly,
since they are invisible inside the greens- though screeching-full in
syncopations of yellowest,
fine-thought, finespun
rivering of almost-knowables. “Gold” is too dark. “Featherwork”
too thick. When two
appear in fligt, straight to the child-sized pond of
melted snow
and thrash, dunk, rise, shake, rethrashing, reconfiguring through
reshufflings and resettlings the whole body of integrated
featherwork,
they shatter open the blue-ad-tree-tip filled-up gaze of
the lawn’s two pools,
breaking and ruffling all the crisp true sky we had seen living
down in that tasseled
earth. How shall we say this happened? Something inaudible
has ceased. Has gone back round to an other side
of which this side’s access was (is) this width of sky
deep in
just-greening soil? We left the party without a word.
We did not change, but time changed us. It should be,
it seems one or the other of us who is supposed to say- lest
there be nothing- here we are. It was supposed to become familiar
(this earth). It was to become “ours.” Lest there be nothing?
Lest we reach down to touch our own reflection ere?
Shouldn’t depth come to sigh and let it in, in the end, as the form
the farewell takes: representation: dead men:
lean forward and look in: the raggedness of where the openings
are: precision of the limbs upthrusting down to hell:
the gleaming in: so blue: and that it has a bottom: even a few clouds
if you keep
attending: and something that’s an edge-of: and mind-cracks, and how the
poem is
about that: that distant life: I carry it inside me but
can plant it into soil: so that it becomes impossible
to say that anything swayed
from in to out: then back to “is this mine, or yours?”: the mind
seeks danger out: it reaches in, would touch: where the subject is emptying,
war is:
morality play: preface: what there is to be thought: love:
begin with the world: let it be small enough.


____
god making of himself many
creatures [in the cage there is food] [outside only the great
circle called freedom] [an empire which begins
with a set table] and I should like, now that the last washes of my gaze
let loose over the field, to say, of this peering,
it is the self- there- out to the outer reaches of
my hand, holding it out before me now, putting it into where
my breath begins to whitely manifest my difference to
night air: look: it is a law: the air
draws on itself the self’s soft temperature:
it looks like rain: there is a beforehand: I brought
my life from it thus far: moments are attached.

_______

Elsewhere a people now is being forces
from home. Looking out, as dusk comes on,
no looking up or down anymore.
Everyhitng take in as stone by grass.
Does one know
what one likes. What one is like. What is a feeling
of the heart. What troubles
the soul. What troubles the jonquils nearest me
as the light, the cage of this,
goes out. What is it that can now
step out. And is the open door through me.

Woods

O stubborn appetite: I, then I,
loping through the poem. Shall I do that again?
Can we put our finger on it?
These lines have my breathing in them, yes.
Also my body was here. Why try to disguise it.
In the morning of my year
that will never be given back.
Also those who will not give it back. Whoever they
may be.
How quietly they do their job
over this page. How can I know when it’s the
case- 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. Once can stand out here,
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
(speckling) (golden) laying in
these foliate patternings, this goldfinch, this
suddenly dipping through and rising to sit very still
on top the nearest pine, big coin, puffed-out,
little hops and hopes when he turns, sometimes
entering into
full sun- becoming yellowest then- these line
endings
branching out too only so far
hoping for the light of another’s gaze to pan them,
as the gaze pans for gold in day, a day sometimes overcast,
but what
would the almost-gold (so that I can’t
say “golden” bird be but your eye?
Do no harm him. I can bring him back,
and the way he hopped, turning, on the topmost spike
of the pine-how many minutes
ago was it I said “golden”- and does he still linger there
turning chest into and out of the story, hot singular,
not able to shed light off himself yet so
full of my
glance- me
running on something that cripples me-
do not harm him, do not touch him, don’t probe
with the ghost in your mind this future as it lays itself out
here, right over the day, straight from the font, and yes
I am afraid, and yes my fear is
flicking now from limb to limb, swooping once completely out of
sight- oh flickering long corridor- then
back,
the whole wind-sluiced avenued continuum taking
my eye around in it- who could ever hold so many
thoughts in mind- him back now, back, my fear,
and my mind gathering wildly up to still itself on him.

In/Silence

I try to hold my lie in mind.
My thinking one thing while feeling another.
My being forced. Because the truth
is a thing one is not permitted to say.
That it is reserved for silence,
a buttress in silence’s flyings, its motions
always away from the source; that it is re-
served for going too, for a deeply
artifactual spidery form, and how it can, gleaming,
yet looking still like mere open air, mere light,
catch in its syntax the necessary sacrifice.
Oh whatever that might be. How for song
I looked today long and hard at a singing bird,
small as my hand, inches from me, seeming
to puff out and hold something within, something that
makes
wind ruffle his exterior more-watched
him lift and twist a beak sunlight made burnt-silver
as he tossed it back- not so much to let
anything out but more to carve and then to place firmly in the
listening space
around him
a piece of inwardness: no visible
passaging-through: no inter complication and release:
no passage from an inner place- a mechanism
of strings, bone, hollow
chamber- no native immaterial quiver time turns material-
then towards [by mechanisms ancient and invisible] expression,
and the tragic of all upward motion-
then it all lost in the going aloft with the as yet
unsung-then
the betrayal (into the clear morning air)
of the source of happiness into mere (sung) happiness.
Although there is between the two, just at the break
of silentness, a hovering, almost a penitent
hesitation, an
intake, naked, before any dazzling release
of the unfree into the seeming free, and it seems
it goes elsewhere, and the near (the engine) overruns
into the truly free. This till the last stars be counted?
This plus the mind’s insistent coming back and coming back?
This is up against the coming back. The death of
uncertainty. The song that falls upon the listener’s eye,
that seeks the sleek minimum of the meaningless made.
Here in the morning light. In matter’s massive/muscular/venerable hearth
of all this flow. Next door the roses glow.
Blood in the hand that reaches for them flows.



Exit Wound

the apparently sudden appearance of-
blossoming-out afresh, out of reach-
aiming for extinction, abandonment-
other fossils, then again no fossils-
because of having previously lived on earth,
deviating and branching into use and disuse…
“he was therefore unable to provide a unitary theory of evolution,”
to use reason to arrive at faith,
to bring the sacred into the branchings of the un-
reasonable-the blue between the branches
pulling upwards and away..

Alongside faith (leaping), always the
demon, the
comparative. The presence [only the mind can do
this] of
inner feeling up against living force,
what exists without having been perfected or made
complex,
what exists without having been made,
what exists without having been,
(therefore unable to provide a unitary theory)
(of evolution) (of regret)
----and then in the aside, the off-
hand, half-formulated, half-heard but yet still
living breath of a thinking,
down in the deep station of feeling…

Estuary

she wondered about the year 1000. She
worried the long stretch of horizon’s
yellow gapping of
sea from sky with an uplifted glance…
She felt it was a test.
All of this. She heard it hard, that word, this.
It seemed to furl out as from an opening.
a gesture of mind geometric in its widening…`

[Kennedy Rasile · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I feel Graham more than read her. Do I understand every word? Every turn of phrase? Every poem? Nope. But I am endlessly entranced by the beauty in her pages, the way her mind works, and by her ability to keep me engrossed even when I’m not sure where we are or where we’re headed.

I underlined so many lines, starred so many passages, circled and scribbled, it’s difficult to choose one quote. Lots of people quote from Prayer - and with good reason. But I’ve decided on By The Way:

“I mean, because I’m one of the few, you know, right here for you, going on like this, in America, where the dream is of course gone because it has too much power, one of the few, hiding from disbelief, and it’s not a dark place, you know, though so inward, and it takes up all the room.”

And maybe just one more:

“What you are carrying. You must jettison now.”

[Dylan McMahon]

This is my first collection of Jorie Graham's. I'm hooked.

Challenging modernist poetry that is deeply concerned with human perception of nature and the cycles within it- very much in conversation with Virginia Woolf and other "stream of consciousness" writers. But also with psychology-I was reminded of "Gestalt" schools of thought about human recognition of patterns from disparate parts when first getting accustomed to Jorie's fragmented, jagged syntax. The way she uses enjambment and punctuation to isolate single images or mimic trailing thought was particularly striking.

The progression of the collection was also fascinating-from beaches, forests, primordial soups and groups of minnows and birds, to giant cities, questions of faith and giant cities. I felt a whole world unfolding before my eyes as I slowly made my way through.

Typically, I don't like free verse, experimental poetry in this vein, but this is very strong.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why so difficult, Jorie Graham? Had to overwhelmingly wade through so much words, repetitions, brackets and parenthesis. But I agree when they say: she represents reality as being overwhelming; her poetry betrays a terror in the face of the "real." This is definitely it.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always bought in with Graham. I admire the work in this book of forming a parallel between consciousness and the movements of the ocean, the conflicting currents of wave approach and receding. And it comes to full force for me in a poem like "The Taken-Down God," where the poet struggles with the conceptual overflow of an experience at the Chapel of Santa Maria, conflicting with the limitations that this world requires. In literal terms, she is not supposed to write while in the chapel, and yet this is what she feels compelled to do. How does a poet negotiate these crosscurrents and impositions?

[Roxane Beth Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, Jorie. I just don't know about you. Mostly, I don't get you but love you anyway. This book has a lot going on in it, and it hardly matters what. THe kid knows how to turn a phrase, but I've liked other works by her better. Ask Chad for a more lucid description of Jorie.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book of one of our greatest contemporary poets, Jorie Graham. Graham's work is often considered obtuse, difficult, and complex but Never I think may be the best starting point for a reader new to her work.

[Michael P.]

Jorie Graham won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry, so who am I to say she is a lousy poet? All I know is that I did not find the poems in this book in the least engaging. I began the first eight, but was so bored that I did not finish a single one. Her works is not for me.

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I admire an author I read everything they have written.

[Brooke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring. Overly sentimental.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tough read, so read it slowly and even reread it. Don't read it when you are tired.