Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) by Jorie Graham

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

by Jorie Graham

"How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) "Mother's Sewing Box," "For My Father Looking for My Uncle," and "The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria." Finally, the poet's words again: ." . . you get / just what you want" and (just before that), "Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires."--Marvin Bell

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

First published June 1, 1980

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

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Geese

Today as I hang out the wash I see them again, a code
as urgent as elegant,
tapering with goals.
For days they have been crossing. We live beneath these geese
as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading.
Sometimes I fear their relevance.
Closest at hand,
between the lines,
the spiders imitate the paths the geese won't stray from,
imitate them endlessly to no avail:
things will not remain connected,
will not heal,
and the world thickens with texture instead of history,
texture instead of place.
Yet the small fear of the spiders
binds and binds
the pins to the lines, the lines to the eaves, to the pincushion bush,
as if, at any time, things could fall further apart
and nothing could help them
recover their meaning. And if these spiders had their way,
chainlink over the visible world,
would we be in or out? I turn to go back in.
There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling
without the sense that you are passing through one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,
your body an arrival
you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,
this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.


Tennessee June

This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything
and loves the flaw.
Nothing is heavier than its spirit,
nothing more landlocked than the body within it.
Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns
bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine
your mind wandering without its logic,
your body the sides of a riverbed giving in ...
In it, no world can survive
having more than its neighbors;
in it, the pressure to become forever less is the pressure
to take forevermore
to get there. Oh
let it touch you ...
The porch is sharply lit---little box of the body---
and the hammock swings out easily over its edge.
Beyond, the hot ferns bed, and fireflies gauze
the fat tobacco slums,
the crickets boring holes into the heat the crickets fill.
Rock out into that dark and back to where
the blind moths circle, circle,
back and forth from the bone-white house to the creepers unbraiding.
Nothing will catch you.
Nothing will let you go.
We call it blossoming---
the spirit breaks from you and you remain.



*

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat random choice from Blloon’s catalogue. Some of this poetry is lovely — some just didn’t make an impression on me, but there are some gorgeous images, ways of tilting the world askew and looking at it anew, haunting ones…

I think unfortunately my overall reaction is of ambivalence, but things stick in my head — “The starlings keep trying / to thread the eyes / of steeples.” And looking at other reviews, it sounds like this was a first collection, and that perhaps I should’ve come across Jorie Graham before. I might look for more of her work, mostly for the language rather than the content.

Originally posted here.

[beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

jorie graham can certainly craft a striking image, some examples here:

For who
is it after, after all, face
inhabited by self as rock by lichen, blistering with motive?

These are the questions
its petals part in answer to: where
is God? how deep is space? is it inhabited? The artichoke
is here that we imagine
what universe once needed to create it,
penetrable jewel;
what mathematics.

but ultimately, it's too crowded, too convoluted. and at times a lot of unnecessary work for little reward. phrases that are beautiful in isolation lose their power when surrounded by passages that simply try too hard to elicit something from the reader. it's a shame because some of it is so controlled and delicate, and I'll definitely be going back to a few of these poems.

I just wish it held together overall.

[Ely · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this one up on a complete whim off Scribd, and I actually ended up really liking it. Interested to read some more of Jorie Graham's work!

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most accessible Jorie Graham I've read. A few of the poems are perfect -- so impressive in a first book (at least, I think it's a first book?!).

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Jorie's debut and unsurprisingly wonderful it doesn't at all feel like a debut even if she's still to work her way into the development of her own form. Some of her best in here too if I can be , challenging

[actuallymynamesssantiago · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo leí hace bastante, lo recuerdo muy suelto, libre, cool.
I'll be back.

[Leanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have embarked on a quest to read all of Jorie Graham's books over the next few months. I've read bits and pieces of her here and there and I've been taken by her confidence and urgency.

"Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts" is her first book, published when she was 29. I found Graham's voice to have that truth-telling urgency that I had enjoyed in other poems. I guess she has had that voice of one who wants to dispense wisdom since she was pretty young. I was also really taken by many of Graham's nature images. She has some razor-sharp metaphors and conceits--nothing too fussy or intricate, just straighforward, original parallels between flowers, plants, animals, and other concepts and behahviors. I've studied Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery recently, and I hear that Graham is grouped with them, as a "poet of the mind." And there are some of those metaphysical introspections about consciousness, but I found Graham's versions more palatable and resonant. I would say the only thing that I was turned off by in this book is that every now and then, the voice could sound too self-important in the book's task (as I define it) of explaining the world.

Favorite poems and phrases:

"Whore's Bath"-- gorgeous, startling image of a woman putting her face into her bathwater: "Oh when will the whole become a permanent mirage? / Kneeling, I / can go abroad into my face, making both--the real and its proof-- / disappear. What a fabric!"

"Cross-Stitch"--a poem about a cricket that's wandered into a house! She ends with, "...This cricket, for instance, finding the way / from there to here, / and finding the way to lose it." This is what I mean by Graham's ability to "truth-tell"--who would have thought about the weirdness that is a cricket who knows how to get lost inside a house, but doesn't know how to get out? I love how Graham makes me look at the cricket in a new way, but in a way that seems right.

"Strangers"--great first few lines: "Indeed the tulips / change tense / too quickly." Another beautiful section: "The starlings keep trying / to thread the eyes / of steeples." And some of her "trademark" empathy and declaration of how things are: "It's hard, you can't / cross over..."

"Mother's Sewing Box"--so much in this poem gave me shivers! An opening line that I bet Louise Gluck learned from: "In an old cookie tin, because / things last longer / in the dark." Fantastic image: "On the string / the knots are birds that sit, / that cannot leave." This was one of the few poems in the book overtly about a relationship and it was well done.

"The Geese"--this and the above were perhaps my favorite in the book. A few lines: "...We live beneath these geese / / as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading." She also describes passing spiders as "chainlink over the visible world." That is so what they look like. And what a metaphor.

"Mimicry"--I really just like the first few lines. Are they supposed to be funny? If so, perhaps the only humorous moment in the book: "The other woman, / how I envy her,/ a sort of Canada / to this confusion." Heh.

"Still Life"--I just liked the description of a squirrel jumping between trees: "small leaps like stitches / until their separation is // firmly repaired." Don't squirrel jumps look like stitches? And isn't it a cool idea, to think of them weaving together trees? I'm such a sucker for a mind-blowing image.

All in all, quite enjoyable. Louise Gluck's "The Wild Iris" came later, and is pretty different in tone and structure, but still, I wonder if she had a gander at this. Although I suppose that writing about flowers and animals is pretty stereotypically poetic!

[Inverted · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first of Jorie Graham, which is sensible if one plans to follow her creative arc, and now I do. The first three sections are just damn exquisite. I am fairly new to American contemporary poetry, and haven't read anyone quite like her, so awe. I am reminded of Wild Iris , but only because of the flora. I especially like how she wildly moves from one poetic level to the next, or how she pieces them together—I constantly find a great sense of abandon in her leaps, of audacity in her scaffolding. I want to mimic her if I can.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

not a lot of depth, sometimes the faint light of a good idea but never properly pursued

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graham’s poetry, even in this first collection published in 1980, is rich in beauty, mystery, and, of course and famously, complexity. Shuttlecocks become blossoms, lies become snowfall, trees become time, mirrored faces become rocks covered by lichens. Individual and pairs of lines stay with you: “I believe / forever in the hooks. / The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.” Though, I confess, when I hear this in my mind I often replace “something” with “everything” but Ms. Graham is right: something.

To continue:

“Because our skin is the full landscape, an ocean, / we must be unforgettable or not at all.”
“That only perfection can be kept, not / its perfect instances.”
“The vigor of our way / is separateness, / the infinite / finding itself strange / among the many.”
“Because they are wild / they are useful.”
“They say the eye is most ours when shut…”
“Turn out the lights, I think, or water will.”

And one more pair of lines: “The professors of ethics are gathering in the meadows, / tears in their nets. / Butterflies teach us to see meanings vanish.” Anyway, the collection is delightful and provocative. Here is a whole poem for evidence:

Framing
Something is left out, something left behind. As, for instance,

in this photo of myself at four, the eyes
focus elsewhere, the hand interrupted mid-air by some enormous,
sudden,
fascination.

Something never before seen has happened left of frame,
and everything already known
is more opaque for it.
Beyond the frame is why

the hydrangea midsummer will go no further, though it continues,
why this century, late and turning,
tuns away; beyond
is where the story goes after all the knots are tied, and where

the insects meet in order to become
the grand machine they are the perfect parts of; beyond
is what the wind
leans towards, easy as can be, the sheep

we have already counted,
the world too large to fit.
Within, it would have been a mere event,
not destructive as it is now, destructive as the past remains,

becomes, by knowing more than we do.

[chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.
-- "The Way Things Work"

This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything
and loves the flaw.
Nothing is heavier than its spirit,
nothing more landlocked than the body within it.
-- "Tennessee June"

The world is more like a person than not
and we are dust
only compared to what escapes us.
-- "To Paul Eluard"

The blue of the sky
is due to the scattering of sunlight
on its way out of the sky.
But no one said how slow, how willing.
-- "How Morning Glories Could Bloom at Dusk"

[s · Rating 2 out of 5]

honestly two stars might be generous. lots of bad similes and good lines were ruined by over-explaining. also a major issue with blending poetic language with more clinical, essay-like word choice?? just an absolute mess

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems like dissections of the mind.

[Desirae · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely not my kind of poetry.

Very coffee table, light reading, not a lot of complex ideas or images.

[Elba · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Almudena Anés · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un excelente ejercicio de poesía de carácter ontológico.

[caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like a 3.5- I liked some more than others in this collection but there are some real gems. I feel like I should re-read in the spring and some of them will hit harder.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

tree poetry for the dissociative and the tender hearted

[Ivan Zhao · Rating 3 out of 5]

jorie graham can write some sentences but mannnn am i confused trying to read this

[Sophie Crocker]

"i believe now that sorrow / is our presence in this by default"

[Dinah · Rating 5 out of 5]

How Jorie Graham emerged from the poet hive fully formed is totally mystifying, as is this poetry. The search for pronoun refferents nearly drove me to distraction, but once I gave myself over to the slippage I found the read haunting, philosophically suggestive in surprising ways, and really quite moving.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't get enough of this book. The arcs. She wants you to catch the ball, but I feel like I keep dropping it. My favorite modern collection of poems, but I don't like anything else of hers that I've read. Weird eh?

[Eleanor]

A first glimpse at the full first book... interesting to read with later work in mind... such transformation of style, and such a freeing that happened, and which, I think, without reading too much into it, a freeing that was happening or dormant but about to happen...

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection for avid poetry fans and newbies.

[Tony]

Easily forgettable first book, if not for a couple of poems that contain echoes, or perhaps seeds, of her later work.

[Carole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps I'll write about this later.

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much clearer than most of the other work I've read by Graham, I found this more moving than I expected, but it didn't completely change my opinion of her.

[Me · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly exceptional! An astounding debut!

[Gregory Knapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult, but worth it.