地方所需的沉思：喬麗葛拉罕的生態詩

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 地方所需的沉思：喬麗葛拉罕的生態詩. “The Meditation Place Demands”: Jorie Graham’s Ecopoetry. 指導教授：狄. 亞. 倫. Advisor: Dr. Aaron Deveson 研究生：涂. 宇. 安. Advisee: Yu-an Tu. 中華民國一〇四年二月 February 2015.

(2) i. 摘要本文嘗試以梅洛龐蒂的哲學闡釋普立茲獎得主美國詩人喬麗葛拉罕的生態詩。為求完整呈現其生態詩觀，本文挑選葛拉罕較具代表性的詩集，包括《植物與幽靈的混合體》（1980）、《侵蝕》（1983）、《美的結束》（1987）、《永不》（2002）、《海變》（2008），分三章討論。第一章探討葛拉罕早期三本詩集中對於理性和笛卡兒式主體的批評。如同梅洛龐蒂，葛拉罕質疑理性和科學方法將事物客體化和抽象化。在葛拉罕的早期詩中，邏各斯中心和科學方法不僅造就了封閉的自我，也否定了自然的內在價值。第二章討論葛拉罕如何在晚期的作品《永不》中探尋一種替代理性的方法來認識自然，並根據梅洛龐蒂的肉身主體重新建構有別於笛卡兒式我思的自我概念。許多學者認為葛拉罕的詩作過度晦澀，並將其晦澀視為《永不》的重大缺陷。本文將為《永不》的晦澀辯護，分析詩人如何巧妙地利用讀者在面對晦澀時產生的心理狀態彰顯詩中含意。第三章討論葛拉罕最新的生態詩集《海變》中以梅洛龐蒂的存有論為基礎，延伸結合生態系統中能量循環與物質交換的概念，勾勒出自我與非人類他者和諧共存的可能。. 關鍵字：《永不》、生態詩、梅洛龐蒂、《海變》、晦澀、喬麗葛拉罕.

(3) ii. Abstract This thesis explores the ecopoetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Jorie Graham through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Examining a number of poems from Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Never (2002) and Sea Change (2008), the thesis argues that Graham’s poems show an increasing urge for embeddedness and embodiment (both thematically and stylistically) which resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology. Graham’s poems suggest the current ecological crisis can be understood as the collective failure of humanity to perceive our interdependence with the human and nonhuman other. While her early poems problematize purely rational approaches to the world which place us outside of nature, her later poems try to enact bodily encounters with things in the natural world as an alternative way of engaging the world. Chapter One discusses the links between Graham’s early poems and MerleauPonty’s critique of the Cartesian subject-object bifurcation and its reinforcement in science. I demonstrate that Graham’s early poems problematize logocentrism and the scientific method, specifically how they privilege abstract truth over bodily reality, objectify and isolate the body and the natural world. Chapter Two then investigates the way Graham’s Never enacts bodily encounters with the nonhuman others as an alternative way of engaging nature and how it reinvents the notion of the self based on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. This chapter also discusses Graham’s difficult style. While many critics saw the difficulty as a flaw of Never and Graham’s poetry in general, I would argue that it helps foreground the irreplaceability of things in the natural world. Finally, Chapter Three examines the way Sea Change takes the experience of fleshly encounters as the basis for understanding and imagining our.

(4) iii. interdependence with the global ecosystem.. Keywords: difficulty, ecopoetry, Jorie Graham, Merleau-Ponty, Never, Sea Change..

(5) iv. Acknowledgments This thesis would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of many people. I am particularly indebted to my thesis advisor, Aaron Deveson, who first introduced me to the work of Jorie Graham, and whose kind guidance and endless patience benefited me enormously. His critical comments and suggestions helped me shape my arguments and clarify the chapters. I am also profoundly grateful to Sun-Chieh Liang and Frank Waddell Stevenson for their constructive suggestions and encouraging words. I cannot imagine a better committee. Special thanks are due to my family for their love and unwavering support. Without them, my grad school years would have been much more difficult. Finally, I thank Tom Maxon, my most tireless reader and best friend. This work is dedicated to him..

(6) v. Table of Contents Introduction I. Ecocriticism and Poetry. 1. II. Ecocriticism on Graham’s Poetry. 4. III. Reevaluating Graham’s Ecopoetry. 14. Chapter One: Rediscovering the Body. 18. I. Merleau-Ponty and the Lived Body. 19. II. Confronting the “Bedrock Poverty”: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion and The End of Beauty. 24. Chapter Two: The Interminable Logic of Manyness. 39. I. The Flesh and the Value of Diversity. 40. II. “How They Insist on Encounters”: Body and Place in Never. 42. Chapter Three: Nothing of Him That Doth Fade. 58. I. Merleau-Pontian Circularity, Ecology, and Capitalism. 59. II. “A Confinement Gone Insane”: Circulation and Accumulation in Sea Change 61. Conclusion. 76. Works Cited. 79.

(7) 1. Introduction I.. Ecocriticism and Poetry. When ecocriticism became a recognized critical school in the 1990s, its focus was barely on poetry. As J. Scott Bryson pointed out in 2002, “within the new world of ecocriticism, scholars were largely ignoring the works of ecologically oriented poets and were focusing almost exclusively on nonfiction and some fiction, examining the works of Thoreau, Leopold, Dillard, Abbey, and other prose nature writers” (1). The table of contents of The Ecocriticism Reader, a landmark ecocritical work published in 1996, clearly reflects this: out of the twenty-five essays anthologized, five of them deal with nature writing, while only one is about poetry (in the form of Native American chants and songs). Towards the very end of the twentieth century, environmentally concerned poetry was only beginning to gain attention from ecologically-minded scholars. In 1999, Leonard M. Scigaj published the first important book-length critical work on ecopoetry, Sustainable Poetry. Three years later, Bryson’s Ecopoetry, the first anthology of critical essays on ecopoetry, was published. The past decade saw some scholarly efforts to map out new territories for ecocriticism (for example, Camille Dungy’s Black Nature (2009) and Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep’s The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (2012)). Nonetheless, the primary approach to ecopoetry is still realist referentialism. Most ecocritics, like Scigaj, tend to oversimplify poetry by primarily trying to make poems correspond to certain ideological positions which they celebrate or criticize. And those that do not engage environmental politics on the surface tend to be viewed as toxic deviations from the purity of ecoliterature. In his dissertation Lyric Ethics: The Matter and Time of Ecopoetry, critic Adam.

(8) 2. William Dickinson observes that “poetry has been misread or misapprehended by many ecocritics” (5). Many of them “judge environmentally concerned and metaphorically rich poetry according to its realist, mimetic, and representational virtues, rather than by the relational dynamics that it presupposes in its metaphorical engagement with the environment.” In so doing, “ecocritics risk marginalizing lyrical approaches to the natural world that provide an alternative way of thinking ethics” (56). One is reminded of Juliana Spahr’s statement that “nature poetry was immoral” for its inaccurate representation of the ecosystem and its plight (69). Spahr feels that nature poetry is often ignorant, full of erroneous descriptions of nature. “[E]ven when it got the birds and the plants and the animals right,” Spahr notes, “it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat. And it wasn’t talking about how the bird, often a bird which had arrived recently from somewhere else, interacted with and changed the larger system of this small part of the world we live in and on.” Indeed, a realistic depiction of the ecosystem and its crisis can educate its reader about why and how we must take actions to save our planet. But the lack of action today cannot be attributed solely to a lack of understanding of the environmental problems and their solutions. More often, apathy is the cause for the inaction among most people, who most likely know about the escalating environmental crisis but are not emotionally motivated to get involved. The urge to address these environmental issues directly and objectively with reference to scientific evidence in literary works is the result of a growing impatience towards this prevalent inaction.1 However, by focusing primarily on the objectivity I am thinking of Spahr’s sonnets (Well Then There Now 20, 22, 24) on our interconnection with the biocommunity which consists of blood statistics 1.

(9) 3. and correctness of the apparent content of a literary work, ecocritics may be replicating the very mindset responsible for the depletion of natural habitats and species. What this approach fails to see, is the fact that how we are invited to engage a poem is often a hidden metaphor for our encounter with things in the natural world. And that great poems always say more than it appears to. What must be rebuilt first of all is not simply more scientific explanations about nature, but rather an authentic relationship with nature, one in which we live and experience, rather than simply know about, our interdependence with other living and nonliving organisms. Is there, then, not a need for a poetry that confronts the full complexity of our living experience with nature at the risk of “misrepresenting” the natural world as we know it in the objective sense? This is a question I shall pursue in this thesis. Ultimately, I want to defend non-realist, “difficult” poems against charges of obscurity and not effectively engaging environmental issues, and show that many of them not only possess an environmental awareness, but also powerfully challenge many anthropocentric suppositions responsible for the current environmental crisis. Jorie Graham’s ecopoetry, as I shall argue in this thesis, provides an important way of thinking about how poetry can articulate ecological values in non-realist manners. Her ecopoetry is unique not only in the way it unites environmental activism with poetic difficulty, but also in its original representation of the self and nature. Before Graham, poets like Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and Robert Hass, had already been working on describing our phenomenological engagement with nature. Their works tend to celebrate and lament our relations with nature, while confining nature to its traditional sense as the planet Earth. On the other hand, an ecocritic such as Tim Morton sees the traditional idea of nature as separated from the human subjectivity as itself the source of ecological problem. For Morton, the way ecoliterature has been.

(10) 4. celebrating our embeddedness in nature as if the latter is only a “surrounding medium” (4-5) is dangerous. “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (5). At his most extreme, Morton even suggests that poets should refrain from writing “about” nature at all. Graham sets herself apart from all these approaches, including the traditional phenomenological poems, Morton’s radical rethinking of self and nature, and Spahr’s realism, by reinventing the subject as both distinct from things in the natural world and yet always already intertwined with them, and registering the experience of perceptual engagement with nature in a contextualized, polyvocal language. II.. Ecocriticism on Graham’s Poetry. Few would question Jorie Graham’s status as one of America’s most important poets today. She is author of a dozen poetry collections, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, the 2012 Forward Poetry Prize, and the 2013 International Nonino Prize, and the first woman to be appointed Boylston Professor at Harvard University. Nonetheless, her rise to national prominence serves as a stark contrast to the little critical attention her oeuvre has received so far. This is perhaps due to the complexity of her works. Like T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, two important influences to her, Jorie Graham is well known for producing “difficulty” poetry that addresses a wide range of issues across disciplines. To date, only one book-length study of her work has been published.2 The majority of the critical responses to Graham’s poetry are done in the form of book reviews, and, as a result, lacking in depth or scope. Needless to say, among the already few scholars who studied Graham’s works in depth, only a small proportion of them did so through the lens of ecocriticism. And still fewer of. 2. The only book-length study of Graham is Catherine Karaguezian’s No Image There and the Gaze Remains: The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham. (NY: Routledge, 2005)..

(11) 5. them did justice to Graham’s ecological themes.3 What follows is a literature review of Graham’s works, beginning with her early poetry, then her first ecological project Never (2002), and finally her most recent ecologically oriented poetry collection Sea Change (2008). Since this thesis is primarily concerned with the ways in which Graham addresses environmental issues through her idiosyncratic linguistic strategies and a variety of formal devices, the literature review will focus on critical responses to her ecological themes and the “difficulty” her language poses. 1. Graham’s Early Poetry (1980-2000) Early critics tend to take a poststructuralist approach on Graham’s poems and believe that they value the Word over the World. Opinions such as this have long since blinded scholars from noticing the ecological themes in Graham’s early poetry. Even for those who did study Graham in ecological contexts, there is the common assumption that Graham’s poems are anthropocentric rather than ecocentric. In 1999, the famous ecocritic Leonard M. Scigaj, in surveying Graham’s early poetry from Erosion (1983) onward to Materialism (1993), went so far as to claim that Graham is devoted to “a poststructural language poetry that…remains blind to the needs of nature” (xv). Using Graham only as an example of the Establishment poets who practice “the poetics of textuality, based on Derridean linguistic gaps or Wittgensteinian logic,” Scigaj criticizes Graham for her tendency to “remove us from the practical world we must engage” (56). According to Scigaj, Graham’s poems often. 3. Different scholars have defined ecoliterature differently. My understanding of what constitutes an ecological theme, or ecopoetry, is based on Alison B. Wallace and Jonathan Skinner’s definition of ecoliterature and ecopoetics respectively. Alison B. Wallace defines ecoliterature as “any writing that focuses on place, on the thousands of local landscapes that make up not scenery through car windows, not Sierra Club calendars nor slick ads for hiking gear, but rather our daily contexts, what David Quammen calls our "matri[ces] for destiny" (Wallace). On the other hand, Jonathan Skinner, founder of the journal Ecopoetics, explains that “‘Eco’ …signals…the house we share with several million other species, our planet Earth. ‘Poetics’ is used as poesis or making…Thus: ecopoetics, a house making.” (Skinner 5). Ecoliterature, then, is anything that deals with our belonging to and dwelling on Earth..

(12) 6. indulge in “lonely anthropocentric introspection” (59) rather than actively affirm individual’s social agency. While critiquing poststructuralism for reducing the natural world to textuality, Scigaj turns to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, whose ideas he uses as the theoretical basis for an alternative environmental poetics that emphasizes our being-in-the-world and interdependence with nature. Curiously, while celebrating phenomenology as the ideal philosophical basis for environmental poetry, Scigaj gives Graham’s phenomenological poems little credits.4 Scigaj insists that in Graham’s poems “landscapes…never possess an ecological dimension.” His view has since influenced many scholars and crippled ecocriticism on the works of Graham. An important aim of this thesis is to show that, contrary to what many critics believe, it is possible to trace an ecological concern in Graham’s works, including her early poems. Furthermore, I argue that many of Graham’s poems are critical of poststructuralism, rather than blindly indulge in them. Following Scigaj, Willard Priest Greenwood, in his Aesthetics and Ascetics of an Ecological Sublime (2001), investigated the representation of nature in Graham’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective. The dissertation studies Graham’s volumes from Hybrids (1980) onward to Swarm (2000)—only to come up with the conclusion that her poetry demonstrates an asceticism whose tradition is the “subordination of the natural world to the aim of art, which competes with the beauty of the natural world for our attention” (70). Greenwood suggests that Graham treats things in the natural world as abstract symbols devoid of particularity: characterized with a sense of “placelessness and namelessness,” they appear only as “beautiful interruptions” (6970) subservient to the artist’s aesthetic ambitions. In my thesis I not only show that In evaluating the poem series “Notes on the Reality of the Self” in Materialism, which clearly shows Graham’s phenomenological interest, Scigaj acknowledges that a number of them do attempt to “counter dualism and prove that our moments of consciousness are imbricated in the natural world,” but meanwhile pointing out that “Graham has an inadequate sense of agency” and that she never “consider[s] nature as a separate and equal series of interdependent ecosystems” (59). 4.

(13) 7. many of Graham’s poems are ecocentric rather than anthropocentric, but argue that this placelessness is a significant aspect of Graham’s ecopoetics. Up until the publication of Never in 2002, scholars generally considered Graham a poststructuralist poet, if not the opposite of an ecopoet. In 2005, Adam William Dickinson observes that “there is almost no ecocriticism on the works of Graham” (77). 2. Never (2002) In 2002, the publication of Never finally drew critics’ attention to the poet’s environmental themes. Never not only features several poems commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency, but is entirely structured upon and “written up against the sensation of what is now called ‘ecocide,’” as Graham herself makes clear in the endnotes.5 The volume, arguably Graham’s first book-length ecopoetic project, met with both positive and negative reviews. Helen Vendler, as usual, was among Graham’s most dedicated supporters. In her “Indigo, Cyanine, Beryl: Review of Never,” Vendler interprets the volume as “the dream of a potentially unified (if now disunified) globe” (171). As a book about change in the natural world, Never invites its readers “to feel an extinction (a never) taking place every nine minutes”— which is “to undergo a vertiginous sense of disappearance and irremediability” (171). Stylistically, Vendler observes that, “Graham makes her single voice multiple,” achieving a kind of “polyvocality,” “by the proliferation of slashes, parentheses standing alone, brackets standing alone, and parentheses within brackets”: her brackets “enclose alternative phrases she does not want to choose between,” “indicate gesture or glances,” or “hold in mutual suspension The note to the poem “Evolution” states that “Today, the rate of extinction is estimated as one every nine minutes. Throughout the writing of this book, I was haunted by the sensation of that nine- minute span—which might amount to the time it takes to read any poem here before you. My sense of that time frame [and its inevitable increase, even as we "speak"] inhabits, as well as structures, the book. It is written up against the sensation of what is now called ‘ecocide’”(Never 111). 5.

(14) 8. a number of simultaneous phenomena.” The stylistic approach shows the poet’s “attempt to make language equal to our perceptive body, with its several senses always in mutual interplay with the phenomenal world” (180). By registering the sense perception in such a way, Graham hopes to “reproduce, in what she believes to be an accurate way, the shimmer of body-mind as it attends to nature. And from the motions of nature she wants to build a new and reliable consciousness, one that will be as moving and integral as outworn religious and philosophical system.” In his review “Celebrating a World in Danger,” Bin Ramke notes that, with a sense of urgency, Never conveys “the way place bears upon the subject and determines it (one might call this awareness environmental, if not ecological), a sensitivity to the way the self and its language fracture under pressure (the politics of the moment)” (Ramke). The way Graham’s poems confront the environmental crisis is through “enactment”: “[t]he … implication of Never is that if we take account of the present, beginning with the sensuous body, located in its environment, progressing to the mind which body and place inform, we create a self that can begin to truly see and thus to know this world to which it belongs. A world in danger of erasure is what Never celebrates.” Edward Byrne believes that Never demonstrates, in “a mature, distinctive style,” “new ways of viewing and understanding today's natural world: …with a sense of immediacy and urgency… [Graham] promotes an interactive involvement with the environment through encounters in which the poet's structural technique and sensuous language reveal an individual in the act of contemplating the beauty or the disfigurement of the world she discovers around her” (Byrne). As a response to today’s escalating environmental ruins, the poems “manage to praise the classic power and magnificence of nature,” at the same time “warning about the dangers of.

(15) 9. diminishment or perceived possibilities” in today’s world. While acknowledging that the poems are “sometimes difficult,” their appearance “seemingly chaotic,” Byrne nevertheless maintains that “the works contained in Never present a directed sense of unity in purpose… a comforting connecting thread exists throughout this volume.” The reviews summarized here are representative of the general view of Never, that despite its slight or occasional difficulty, the poetry is effective in delivering its environmental cause and engaging the reader. Such is the view commonly held among Graham’s supporters. For other reviewers, Never is unfortunately eclipsed by its opacity, arbitrary style, or lack of innovation in both form and content. Notably, these criticisms are not new for Graham: similar complaints have been made about her previous volumes.6 Willard Spiegelman, for instance, finds Graham’s constant use of parentheses and brackets in Never “annoying,” as “it's often impossible to understand why she uses one marker instead of the other at any given moment,” while admitting that “Never is a very strong book” and that “[n]o other contemporary poet weaves so richly synaesthetic a fabric, or vibrates so excitedly between the seen and the heard” (Spiegelman). William Logan is probably the harshest among all when he criticizes the volume for being “fragile and incoherent,” and at times “blindingly tedious” (Logan). For Logan, Graham’s “microscopic infatuation with detail” in nature is taken to such an extreme that the poems become “nagging minutiae,” no longer about the “nature but that part of nature named Jorie Graham.” And the way Graham constantly questions As early as Erosion, there have been complaints about Graham’s puzzling linguistic contortions or obscurity. For instance, Stephen Behrendt, in an early review of Erosion, criticized Graham’s “selfindulgent syntactical distortion” (Rev. of Erosion, Prairie Schooner, Vol. 59 (Summer 1985), 119). Swarm was labeled “solipsistic” (Fred Muratori, Rev. of Swarm, Library Journal, Vol.25, No. 1 (Jan 2000), 118). And by the time of The Errancy, some critics already felt that Graham’s poetry had lost its original formal inventiveness, and become “clichés,” as Aaron Belz puts it in his Rev. of The Errancy, Books and Culture: A Christian Review (Mar/Apr 1998). 6.

(16) 10. her own subjectivity makes her poetry a literal failure: “Graham has worked so hard to question the authority of the poetic voice she has lost her own authority.” Roger Caldwell makes a similar point when he claims that many lines in Never “neither make much sense nor seem distinguished as poetry” (Caldwell). Formally, he finds “nothing new” in Graham, as “we have had modernist collage and postmodernist inconsequentiality with us for a long time now.” Nevertheless, he acknowledges that “it is possible to forgive many of her obscurities and obfuscations” for “[t]here is a buoyancy in Graham's poetry, a freshness of vision which is rare in contemporary poetry. With her abundance of present participles and her indefinitely extended syntax she is very much the poet of the felt moment and pregnant with possibility.” As this summary shows, the main debate between Never’s reviewers, as is the case with many of Graham previous poetry collections, is whether Graham’s language and form can deliver the message she intends to communicate. Does Graham’s idiosyncratic linguistic strategy serve as hindrance to her presentation of the environmental issue, limiting her visionary power and eloquence? Or does it offer a much needed critique of the dominant ideology responsible for today’s ecological crisis? In his 2005 dissertation Lyric Ethics: The Matter and Time of Ecopoetry, Adam William Dickinson offers his answer to this question in an attempt to reevaluate Graham’s contribution to ecoliterature. Examining Graham’s poems from Materialism (1993) and Never alongside poems by Canadian poets Jan Zwicky and Don McKay, Dickinson argues that in their lyrical approach to matter the poems embody an “ethical attentiveness to [the] relational (linguistic/nonlinguistic) apprehension of matter, or ‘material metaphoricity,’” the articulatory dynamic of the is and is not of a thing (i). In his analysis of Graham’s poem series “Notes on the Reality of the Self”.

(17) 11. from Materialism, Dickinson argues that Graham’s lyrics demonstrate that things and selves are interrelated in their constitution as material metaphoricity, and that what is at work in that articulation of self and world is a materiality resonantly open to difference, to non-systematic meaning” (79). In enacting “a lyrical engagement with matter and with the self” (90), “Notes” demonstrate that “[t]he self is a resonant structure; it is a material fabric hinged between the visible and the invisible, the external and internal, the human and nonhuman. To understand the reality of the self is to make leaps between paradoxical contexts, it is to exceed the systems of linguistic logic…. The relationship [between the nonhuman material world and the reality of the self] is … a leap of illogical associations, and yet it is also a relationship that maintains the tensions of connection” (91). In other words, “the reality of the self,” like the reality of matter, full of contradictory elements, is “an ecological structure” (90) that requires “paradoxical articulations of non-systematic thinking” (92). Any attempt to fix them to a stable meaning will only lead to “material isolation” (87). In analyzing Never, Dickson suggests that Graham’s poetics help redefine time and unsettle “the ecocritical subordination of time to place” (ii). According to Dickinson, the volume “addresses the relationship between experiencing wonder at the elemental forces that collide and mix along the seashore and the role of lyric thinking in being responsible to the different temporality of such environments” (257). “Wonder,” Dickinson maintains, “as distinct from the sublime… is a metaphorical dynamic…that opens one to the plurality and depth of time. Thus, wonder at the archive of nature (that is, being open to the natural world as an archival encounter) is to be in an ethical relation, it is to face the deep time of the elemental other” (i). As the first scholar to defend Graham against earlier ecocritics, Dickinson’s.

(18) 12. dissertation offers an important ecocritical analysis of Graham’s earlier poems as well as her more recent, less studied poems. Nonetheless, the discussions are confined to a small number of poems in Materialism and Never due to the scope of the research. 3. Sea Change (2008) By the time Sea Change came out, it had become clear that Graham should not only be considered an ecopoet, but an important one. As Garth Greenwell points out, “The last years of the Bush administration have seen something of a renaissance of political poetry on the American scene: perhaps not since the Vietnam War have so many of our poets spoken out on public themes…. But very few of these poets have devoted their attention to global warming…. In shouldering the topic of global climate change, Graham is charting territory almost unvisited by our major American poets” (Greenwell). Despite its significance as one of the few poetry collections that take global warming as its primary subject, as with many of Graham’s later works, Sea Change found critics divided on its value. For Graham’s admirers, it engages the reader viscerally by effective mingling perceptions. For her detractors, it is obscure and lacks moral agency. In her review of the volume, Helen Vendler points out that Sea Change demonstrates Graham’s gifts as a “poet of swiftness and simultaneity – the swiftness of both thought and time, the simultaneity of the sensuous and the mental” (“A Powerful, Strong Torrent”). The volume manages to “[combine] the constant fluctuation of the real and the intermingling of body and mind in all perception” and “conveys truths, both external and internal, that are otherwise, in more sequential treatment, unattainable.” Vendler also draws attention to the new kind of lineation Sea Change adopts, which consists of units beginning with a long line that starts from the.

(19) 13. left margin followed by one or more deeply indented lines set at the center. Often the line breaks do not coincide with sentence breaks. The unpredictable lineation, whose length are determined by “[i]ntensity of thought and considerations of rhythm… allow[s] for various modulations – a drop in the voice, a qualification, an addition – all suited to Graham’s conversational (for the most part) intonation.” Against charges of obscurity constantly leveled at Graham, Vendler claims that, though often perplexing in their appearance and requiring leaping associations, Graham’s poems are “unlike such Language Poets as Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe (whose moment seems to have expired)” in that they “always rewardingly [make] sense, whatever [their] acrobatics.” Apparently, most reviewers, like Vendler, try to appreciate the poems’ complexity. Still, some are more critical of the poems’ obscurity than others. James Longenbach only mildly complains about the obscurity when he comments that the Sea Change is “simultaneously vexing and alluring” (Longenbach). Garth Greenwell, on the other hand, worries that the obscurity of Graham’s poems also represents moral obscurity. The constant use of sweeping parataxis in the place of subordination eliminates “a philosophy (and a syntax) capable of subordinating, at least theoretically, human iniquity to human goodness” (Greenwell). As Greenwell points out, at times it seems difficult to tell whether Graham is inviting critique or simply expressing cynicism when she merely juxtaposes human atrocities to mundane snippets of life. Considering the equivocal prospects her poems offer, “what rational basis can there be for any response” Greenwell asks, “save welcome to our imagined destruction?” “[S]omething crucial to the meaningful representation of human life is lost.” In addition, Garth Greenwell notes that Graham’s poems have, in recent years, “become predictable.” The “syntactical flattening-out of her recent work” that “leads.

(20) 14. to a…moral flatness” also risks musical flatness. Jason Guriel, in reviewing Sea Change, also highlights Graham’s lack of clarity. After quoting what seems to be a paradoxical description of natural scenery from the volume, Guriel asks: “Is Graham being imprecise to underscore the imperfection of the self’s perceptions, or just sloppy? The question cannot be answered because the idea underlying this sort of poetry—language is always already inadequate— inoculates it against charges of obscurity” (61-62). The incoherence also prevents Graham from addressing problems such as ecological crisis and Guantanamo Bay detention camp with enough efficiency, as they “require a clarity that can only be strengthened by the struggle for the right words, not weakened by it” (62). As this literature review makes clear, the existent ecocriticism on Graham’s works is insufficient—ecocritical studies on her poems either allow themselves to be restricted in scope or dismiss her poems as altogether anthropocentric. Meanwhile, Graham’s poetic style, specifically the difficulty it poses, remains a subject of debate among critics. Graham’s contribution to ecoliterature must be reexamined and reevaluated. III.. Reevaluating Graham’s Ecopoetry. This thesis is a long-overdue study of Graham’s ecopoetics and the first to offer an in-depth analysis of Graham’s environmental themes through the lens of phenomenology. Of particular interest to this study is the work of Merleau-Ponty, especially his notions of the lived body and the flesh, which he formulated in Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible respectively. Graham has openly acknowledged her debts to Merleau-Ponty in her book and interviews.7 However, to date, no scholars have undertaken the task of evaluating the In the interview in The Paris Review, Graham mentioned reading “Stendhal, Marx and Engels, Merleau-Ponty” when growing up in Rome. In a Q&A article in Smartish Pace, Graham also named Merleau-Ponty, among Bergson, Heidegger, Lyotard, Agamben, and Nietzsche as an important 7.

(21) 15. significance of Graham’s poetic responses to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. In my thesis, I examine a number of poems from Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Never (2002) and Sea Change (2008), and argue that the poems show an increasing urge for embeddedness and embodiment (both thematically and stylistically) which resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project. As this thesis suggests, Graham’s poems show that the current ecological crisis can be understood as the collective failure of humanity to perceive our interdependence with the human and nonhuman other. Her poems problematize purely rational approaches to the world which place us outside of nature, and try to enact bodily encounters with things in the natural world as an alternative way of engaging the world. For Graham, it is only when we have fully inhabited our own bodies that we can better inhabit the earth, since the experience of encounter provides the necessary basis for imagining and understanding our interdependence with others. Chapter One discusses the links between Graham’s early poems and MerleauPonty’s critique of the Cartesian subject-object bifurcation, its reinforcement in the scientific method, and his notion of the lived body experience as an alternative mode of engaging the world. Unlike earlier ecocritics, who believe her early poems to be altogether anthropocentric, I demonstrate that Graham’s early poems problematize logocentrism and the scientific method, specifically how they privilege abstract truth over bodily reality, objectify and isolate the body and the natural world. As a result, things in the natural world are deprived of intrinsic values, and we are faced with the problem of placelessness. Graham’s early poems suggest that our failure to identify with nature and understand our interdependence with it stems from our alienation. philosophical influence..

(22) 16. from our own bodies. In other words, to overcome the problems of isolation and placelessness, we must first reaffirm our own bodily reality and encounter others. Chapter Two investigates the way Graham’s Never enacts bodily encounters with the nonhuman others as an alternative way of engaging nature and conceiving of selfhood. Drawing on Molly Hadley Jensen’s reinterpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, I show that in Never the self is understood as a network of lived relations that thrives on exchange with multiple others. In Never, the world of lived relations provides the foundation for the self’s identity and truths. By reaffirming the bodily reality over abstract truth, Never also reaffirms the irreplaceability of the natural world. Finally, this chapter discusses Graham’s poetics of failure, specifically how it risks failure to communicate by suspending reason and simply focusing on reproducing the perceptual experience. While many critics saw Graham’s linguistic style and poetic form as a flaw of Never and her poetry in general, I argue that its difficulty is due to her refusal to abstract and simplify the natural world, and that it helps foreground the irreplaceability of things in the natural world. Chapter Three examines the way Sea Change takes the experience of fleshly encounters which reveals the self as a network of lived relations as the basis for understanding larger networks of exchange. While Never suggests that the self is interdependent with its surrounding, Sea Change tries to imagine our interdependence with the global ecosystem. In Sea Change, death is understood not as the disintegration of self, but rather the selfish accumulation of things which disrupts the natural process of circulation. While disintegration is a natural process of ecological circulation, which thrives on reciprocal exchange, global capitalism aims at unlimited accumulation rather than balanced circulation. The chapter also discusses the way Sea.

(23) 17. Chang develops an affective language which manages to bypass rational abstraction and effectively engage the reader with ethical issues. In a time of growing urgency in the worldwide environmental crisis, the importance of ecoliterature and ecocriticism is beyond measure. My hope is not only to illuminate Graham’s ecopoetry, which has largely been ignored, but also to carve out new possibilities for the burgeoning field of ecocriticism, which often displays a tendency to privilege realist fiction and nonfiction over comparatively “difficult” poetry..

(24) 18. Chapter One Rediscovering the Body In his 1988 article “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth” David Abram observes that the escalating ecological crisis is “the result of a recent and collective perceptual disorder in our species” that prevents us from seeing our “own embodiment as entirely internal to, and thus wholly dependent upon, the vaster body of the Earth” (“Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth”). John R. White makes a similar point when he points out that “the ‘outer’ devastation of the environment is in the end a projection of the ‘inner’ alienation we experience from our own animality” (187). Environmental ethics, White suggests, should not simply be “a question of dealing with the values and norms which apply to ’the environment,’ as if the latter is something extrinsic to ourselves,” but rather include considerations of our own body experience. This thesis attempts to discuss the ecological crisis with a similar supposition, that the ecological crisis is the result of a collective failure to perceive our intercorporeality, or interdependence, with the rest of the world and to come to terms with the corporeality of our beings. The primary reason for this failure, this thesis suggests, is the rationalist tradition which places us in a confrontational and alienating relationship with the natural world and our own bodies. By examining the role our body plays in providing a way of understanding our intercorporeality with the rest of the world, I wish to show that many of Jorie Graham’s early poems, instead of endorsing anthropocentrism, as has been argued by previous ecocritics, are highly critical of the ways in which logocentrism and scientific methods abstract the human body and things in the natural world, ignoring their relations with the lived whole to which they belong. As the second chapter will make clear, such understanding of the.

(25) 19. early poems will greatly illuminate Graham’s later poems’ attempt to recover the full complexity of the body experience essential for understanding our interdependence with the natural world. To prepare for my argument, the first part of this chapter will introduce some of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas which serve as the theoretical framework for my discussion of the problems involved in the Cartesian subject and the scientific method, especially his notion of the lived body as an alternative way of conceiving the self and engaging the world. Part two will then examine some of Graham’s early poems which expand on these notions. I.. Merleau-Ponty and the Lived Body. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project offers a critique of reason and an articulation of an alternative way of engaging the world. In his own words, his philosophy is an “attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason” (Sense and Non-Sense 63). An important aspect is his rediscovery of the body as a sensing subject. As Merleau-Ponty points out in Phenomenology of Perception, the experience of our own body contradicts the traditional Cartesian assumption about the self. Rather than confirming the Cartesian supposition that “one exists as a thing or else one exists as a consciousness,” the lived body experience reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing[:]…the body is not an object, [and] my awareness of it not a thought, that is to say, I cannot take it to pieces and reform it to make a clear idea. Its unity is always implicit and vague. It is always something other than what it is…rooted in nature at the very moment when it is transformed by cultural influences, never hermetically sealed and never left behind. Whether it is a question of.

(26) 20. another’s body or my own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it, which means taking up on my own account the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it…Thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body or the body in reality.” (178) For Merleau-Ponty, a primary problem with the Cartesian cogito is that it does not explain the body as we experience it, but only regards it as an object viewed from the outside. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived body, on the contrary, attempts to delineate an alternative way of engaging the world and conceiving of the self which does not posit us outside of things. According to Merleau-Ponty, the physiological body which objectivistic philosophy and science consider as a mere object in itself does not exist. It is only conceptualized. The lived body is, rather, both the in-itself and for-itself. It is the natural subject present in the world at the level of perception. It is this lived body, rather than the rational mind, that gives us our first access to truth and meaning: “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” (Primacy of Perception 13). For MerleauPonty, the world and our natural existence are true in themselves. “Each thing can, after the event, appear uncertain…[,yet] what is at least certain for us is that there are things, that is to say, a world” (Phenomenology of Perception 401; hereafter referred to as PP). The presence of our body subject in the world serves as the foundation of rationality, since this very presence reveals itself to reflection as the contingent fact no reason can account for. “It is before our undivided existence that the world is true or.

(27) 21. exists…which is to say…that we have in [the world] the experience of a truth which shows through and envelops rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind” (Primacy of Perception 6). It should be noted that the lived body is not a “nothingness” (PP 249), but a “fold” in the world where such dialogues occur, an “opening upon a world” (346). The lived body is not “a thing in object space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation” (291). It is my body in the world that makes there be a difference between far and near, high and low. What we consider as “objective” space and “objective” movements are in fact all ‘founded on our being in the world, “encompassed in the hold that our body takes upon the world” (321). It should therefore be said that “…far from my body’s being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body” (117). If there were no doors or walls to demarcate a house, the house would be in limbo stretching into eternity, the house-space would no longer exist. When a thing is perceived, what takes place is a “sort of a dialogue” (373) between the body and the sensible thing, a “communication” (372) or “natural transaction” (263). Sensation reveals the “co-existence” between the sensing and the sensible (257). “The subject of sensation is neither a thinker who takes note of a quality, nor an inert setting which is affected or changed by it, it is a power which is born into, and simultaneously with, a certain existential environment, or is synchronized with it” (245). The subject “plunge[s] into” the thing and the thing “thinks itself” in him (249). One feels that “the world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (474). The Cartesian conception of self does not acknowledge this reciprocal relationship or coexistence between the perceiving subject and the perceived world..

(28) 22. Instead, it sees the self as self-contained, autonomous, capable of imposing changes upon the world around him. In this sense, the Cartesian tradition leads us to “disengage from the object” (230), rather than affirm our ties with the rest of the world. The same subject-object pattern which characterizes the Cartesian self also manifests itself in science. While the Cartesian cogito thinks of the body only as an object, science abstracts all things as objects, deviating us from the field of lived relations. As Merleau-Ponty points out, Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always has been that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-ingeneral – as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our use. (Primacy of Perception 159) In order to extract objective explanations, science breaks things down, abstracts them from their original contexts, and considers them only in terms of their usefulness in general. The values of things are reduced to the mere information they provide. It is worth noting that Merleau-Ponty’s criticism here is reminiscent of Heidegger’s critique of modern science. As Heidegger notes, modern science “dissolved nature into the orbit of mathematical order of world-commerce, industrialization, and in a particular sense, machine-technology” (qtd. in Foltz 64). By forcing nature to disclose itself in this objective manner, science will most likely fail to encounter nature in the real world..

(29) 23. Taking Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the subject-object separation as my basis, I wish to draw attention to how, in Graham’s poems, the deep-rooted hegemony of rationality has led to our habitual alienation from the natural world by positing a subject-object relationship which only allows for patterns of domination. The subordination of the body to the mind and the nonhuman to human all follow this pattern. The European prioritization of rationality can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, whose search for logos is in its essence a quest for the immutable rational order. For Plato, knowledge must have its basis in realms beyond corrosive temporality. The Platonic form is founded on the presupposition that what we know by reason is superior to what we know through sense experience. This rationalist stance endorses a devaluation of body and the material world which became central to the Enlightenment thought. At the heart of the Enlightenment thinking is the Cartesian bifurcation of the mind and body and the Baconian technological control of nature. On the one hand, Descartes, like Plato, values rationality, or a priori knowledge, above sense experience. His bifurcation of the mind and body considers the mind, our capacity for reason, as independent of the body and world. Bacon, on the other hand, advocates the technological control of nature in the same manner the mind dictates the body. According to Bacon, the goal of modern science is to “conquer nature in action” (16) so that “the mind may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it” (7). Scientific experiments extract information “out of the very bowels of nature” (23; italics mine) by putting nature “under constraints and [making her] vexed; that is to say…by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded” (27). Bacon’s account of science turns nature into a female body to be dominated and exploited by the mind..

(30) 24. Understood as an object to be controlled and conquered like nature itself, the body has long been considered a source of problem instead of truth. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, on the other hand, provides a way of thinking of the body as enabling an access to real existence and meaning in its capacity to encounter, respond to, and resonate with things. All these notions, as the second part of the chapter will make clear, will be developed in Graham’s poems in their search for an alternative to the logocentric truth derived at the expanse of the wholeness of body and nature.. II.. Confronting the “Bedrock Poverty”: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion and The End of Beauty. In the introduction she wrote for Best American Poetry 1990, Graham argues that poetry attempts to render aspects of experience that occur outside the province of logic and reason, outside the realm of narrative realism. The ways in which dreams proceed, or magic, or mystical vision, or memory, are often models for poetry’s methods: what we remember upon waking, what we remember at birth—all the brilliant irrational in the human sensibility. Poetry describes, enacts, is compelled by those moments of supreme passion, insight or knowledge that are physical yet intuitive, that render us whole, inspired. (Graham, Best American Poetry) Like Merleau-Ponty, who aims “to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason” (Sense and Non-Sense 63) Graham takes it as poetry’s primary goal to describe the irrational and restore the wholeness of our being. Many of Graham’s own poems can be understood as attempts to recover the full complexity of our bodily experience. In her poems, rationality often fails to provide a satisfactory account of.

(31) 25. the world: what rationality claims to be the essence of the thing is usually a flawed truth which does not explain the world as we live it. In an early poem entitled “The Geese” in her debut volume Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), Graham critiques the way logocentric attempts to construct a discourse of place fail to take into account the reality of the lived body situated in the world. The result is an unsettling sense of placelessness that goes hand in hand with the dissociation of the body from the mind. The poem is a meditation on the spiders’ act of web-weaving. Describing the spiders’ attempts to create endurable, all-cohesive webs, Graham suggests that it is impossible to maintain an all-encompassing rational structure for understanding place, and that such a procedure necessarily excludes ourselves from the world it reflects on: 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. (The Dream of the Unified Field 12; hereafter referred to as Dream).

(32) 26. As the poem suggests, meaning, especially that of place, cannot be located in the abstract, outside the life-world. Efforts to stabilize meaning within a logocentric structure not only seem futile, but invoke the danger of further detaching us from place by providing textual illusions of it. If anything, the spiders’ anxious search for logos reveals a primordial longing to comprehend one’s place. In the poem, the aspiration for logos is paradoxically combined with a deep-rooted desire for bodily connections with things and place. Like the instinct-driven birds migrating between their wintering and breeding homes, “as urgent as elegant, / tapering with goals,” the spiders “imitate[ing] them endlessly to no avail” are propelled by the same impetus for inhabitation. The webs are a means with which to secure meaning as well as to provide a dwelling place. The longing for place, like fear, is a visceral feeling which cannot be resolved intellectually or rationally: 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. (Dream 12-13) Here Graham describes a moment when the lived body experiences its own isolation, an experience which runs counter to the Cartesian supposition of the body as a mere unconscious object. In privileging reason, the mind detaches itself from the body and.

(33) 27. the world. The result is a “bedrock poverty” (12), a feeling of placelessness. It is worth noting that the body has not lost its capacity to feel, and that it is still capable of being inhabited by a reality which cannot be explicated or divined otherwise. The mind, however, takes the body as altogether false and wants to outrun it, that is, tries to arrive at truth by bypassing the bodily reality. The way the body is described as an obstacle to the mind here is reminiscent of Socrates’ characterization of the body as the prison house of the mind in Plato’s Phaedo: “The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the soul was simply fastened and glued to the body—until philosophy received her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself” (122; italics mine). For Plato, the only way to encounter “real existence” is by reason, and the body only hinders the process. The poem, however, invites questioning of the validity of logos as the sole condition of truth and the prioritization of rationality in understanding place. By characterizing the body as where “the real / is crossing” (12), the poem suggests that real existence can be accessed in and through the body. The fact that things cross through the body without the mind immediately knowing only suggests a dissociation of the body from the mind. For Graham, the meaning of place must be constantly sought for—not in the conceptual realm, nor in the sensible world, but between them—where the two may eventually join, as Graham puts it, …somewhere in between these geese forever entering and these spiders turning back,. this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place. (Dream 13).

(34) 28. As the poem suggests, placehood cannot be built in the abstract alone, but must be founded on the bodily experience, since a place is where one’s lived experience “takes place.” As Merleau-Ponty notes, place exists only in so far as we have bodies. By subordinating the body to mind or ignoring our lived body relations with things, one only succeeds in deepening the gap (or the delay) between the mind and body, significantly limiting the lived experience which is essential for transforming space to place. Nonetheless, as Merleau-Ponty says, the lived body is “never hermetically sealed and never left behind.” The lived body perception may be ignored or delayed, but it will always come back in a way that astonishes us, and forces us to confront the bedrock poverty we have created by ignoring the living fields of interactions. The body, which Graham sees as essential in connecting us to place, would later become a recurring theme in her poetry, a great deal of which shows a tendency to scrutinize pure intellectualism and a desire to recover the full complexity of our bodily experience. “Reading Plato,” from Graham’s second poetry collection Erosion (1983), is another early poem which invites scrutiny of the extent to which prioritization of rationality has threatened to substitute the richness of our bodily experience. As the poem suggests, we have become accustomed to positing a manipulative subject-object relationship when approaching the natural world, rather than acknowledging our intercorporeality with the latter. The poem begins by stating that “This is the story / of a beautiful / lie” (Erosion, 6). This lie, we soon find out, is the art of fly tying.8 Like the spiders replicating the paths of the birds in “The Geese,” the fly tyer engages in a sort of imitation:. 8. Making artificial fishing baits that resemble flies..

(35) 29. They must be so believable. they’re true The artificial fly becomes a “true” fly when the fly tyer masters the form of a fly. Fly tying, then, becomes a metaphor for the search for the Platonic form. Instead of simply celebrating the human capacity to use reason to control natural things, the poem suggests, when prioritizing rationality, the Platonic form inevitably implies a devaluation of things that do not lend themselves to the logic of the rational: … He makes them out of hair,. deer hair, because it’s hollow and floats. Past death, past sight, this is his good idea, what drives the silly days. together. Better than memory. Better than love. (6-7) Though the Platonic form appears to offer intellectual compensation for things susceptible to change (such as love and memory), it is, nonetheless, a “hollow” thing, as such knowledge is affirmed at the expense of, a more personalized, intimate bond with people and things significantly based on bodily experience..

(36) 30. The way the Platonic form abstracts ideas from the world also implies a reduction of things in the natural world to manipulatable objects with no intrinsic values: in the air, in flesh, in a blue swarm of flies, our knowledge of the graceful. deer skips easily across the surface. Dismembered, remembered, it’s finally alive… As the poem suggests, rationality understands things by “dismembering” them: the fly becomes a set of qualities which can be reproduced artificially; similarly, our knowledge of the deer reveals the animal to us only as a dissectible thing. Ironically, an animal is “alive” only when it has been fully dissected. In this sense, death is transcended only by denying the life of the flesh. One cannot help but feel that the artificial fly skips across the surface all too easily and gracefully, when an encounter with things in their irreducible totality is excluded from the picture. As if in search for an alternative way of engaging the natural world, the poem ends by trying to imagine a past when men and nature were still one, well before rational dissection became the only valid way of revealing truth:.

(37) 31. Imagine the body. they were all once a part of, these men along the lush green banks trying to slip in and pass. for the natural world. (7) That the attempt to imagine an intercoporeality with nature is interrupted by the coming into view of the men disguised as dwellers is indicative of humanity’s current condition: as long as body and nature are still subordinate to the mind, the intercorporeal bond between the human and non-human will remain a nostalgic dream. The need to imagine an intercorporeality will continue to be emphasized in Graham’s poems, and eventually become an essential part of Graham’s poetic project, especially in Sea Change. While her later poems will show more faith in the poetry’s power in imagining intercorporeality, at this stage, they seem to still acknowledge the value of rational dissection in so far as it provides a sense of sublimation for the loss of such experience, despite being highly critical of the way rationality tends to isolate and manipulate. If we read the webs in “The Geese” and the fishing bait in “Reading Plato” as metaphors for poetry, we may be tempted to think that Graham takes the aspiration for.

(38) 32. rational order to be aesthetically necessary, as they seem to be what initiates as well as sustains the creative process. The relatively orderly form of these early poems also seem to support this reading. However, it is important to note that all these poems are fundamentally concerned with the process of synthesizing the mind and body which typically begin with the realization that rationality presents itself as more of a problem than solution to a situation. As M. Wynn Thomas puts it, “Jorie Graham's poetry is all about the vertiginous (and sometimes heady) experience of falling through the cracks –in reason, in consciousness, in time (Thomas). Both the metaphors of the webs and fish bait suggest a predatory posture emblematic of the way rationality understands the non-human other, turning them into objects to be dismembered or resources to be consumed. And by drawing attention to its own artificiality—that it could, too, be a “beautiful lie” (6), Graham’s poem distances itself from the more manipulative pursuit of form. As the rest of my this thesis shall make clear, Graham’s later poetry will see the poet become increasingly critical of reason, eventually to the point where she will be willing to sacrifice aesthetic orderliness and clear rhetoric so that her poems can be more “truthful” —not in the sense which rationalists like Plato would consider “truthful,” but “truthful” based on what has been experienced in the lived body. Four years after Erosion, Graham published her third poetry collection The End of Beauty (1987). The volume marks Graham’s transition from a slower, relatively orderly form to a more urgent and unrestrained style. Many of the poems in the volume scrutinize the notion of a self-contained order, or “shapeliness” (Region of Unlikeness 12), as Graham calls it.9 “We used to think that shape, a finished thing, was a corpse / that would sprout” (The End of Beauty 88), Graham writes in “Pollock and Canvas.” But now, “you must learn to feel shape as simply shape whispered the / See Graham’s “From the New World”: “God knows I too want the poem to continue, / want the silky swerve into shapeliness / and then the click shut” (12). Region of Unlikeness (New York: Ecco Press, 1991). 9.

(39) 33. wind, not as description not as reminiscence not as what / it will become” (89). This new formal inclination for shapelessness speaks many things. One, I would suggest, is that Graham has grown more critical of reason and order than ever before. The order arrived at by careful calculation and reasoning—which structured many of her earlier poems—has now been proven more than insufficient. Now reader of Graham’s poems must learn to suspend reason and the desire for conclusion and simply “feel” the process of becoming in the body as it encounter things. Graham’s increased distrust in reason is clearly evident in “To the Reader,” which is perhaps the harshest criticism on engaging nature in purely rational manners Graham has so far written. In this poem, which Helen Vendler regards as “the most ominous” (The Given and the Made) in The End of Beauty, Graham describes a young girl digging up one square yard of land for her science fair project, aiming to catalogue and press onto the page all she could find in it and name, somewhere late April, where they believe in ideas, Thursday, a little of what persists and all the rest. (Dream, 61) As the poem suggests, scientific inquiry implies a prioritization of ideas over bodily reality. Its goal is to establish ownership by cataloguing the objective qualities of things. Like the Platonic form, scientific sampling and taxonomy is a way to extract “truth” through abstraction. This is why the girls believes that, when she is “pulling the weeds up with tweezers,” she is also “pulling the thriving apart into the true” (62). As in “Reading Plato,” dismembering makes for remembering: what is already alive cannot be true unless it is dissected and rationally comprehended. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the girl’s search for objective truth begins as a longing for placehood, as the opening lines tell us: “I swear to you she wanted back into the shut, the slow, / A ground onto which to say This is my actual life, Good.

(40) 34. Morning” (61). What spurred her interest in scientific investigation in the very beginning is an emotional encounter with nature: I swear to you this begins with that girl on a day after sudden rain and then out of nowhere sun (as if to expose what of the hills— the white glare of x, the scathing splendor of y, the wailing interminable _________?) that girl having run down from the house and up over the fence not like an animal but like a thinking, link by link, and over Like the spiders wanting to “chainlink over the visible world” (12) in “The Geese,” the girl is driven by the same aspiration for logos as well as a longing for place. The juxtaposition of the mathematic symbols with a series of fragmented, emotionallycharged images creates a stark contrast between the two ways of approaching place: science with its claimed objectivity and generalized methodology, and our lived experience, which reveals the world to us as complex and inexplicable. The contrast foregrounds the fact that things do not readily reveal themselves as objective but rather always as inseparable from our subjective experience of it. Whilst science “disengage[s] us from the object,” the lived body experience reveals our coexistence with things (PP 230). Meanwhile, the inclusion of blanks in the poem (“the wailing interminable _________? ” (61); “Mud, ash, _________ , _________ . We want it to stick to us” (62)) highlights the inexplicability of things beyond our rational comprehension, inviting us to suspend reason and imagine the bodily experience of engaging nature. “Where do we continue living now, in what terrain?” (62) Graham asks towards the end of the poem, again confronting us with the question of place. Essentially, our relationship with place depends on how we approach the land:.

(41) 35. If, for instance, this was the place instead,. where the gods fought the giants and monsters (us the ideal countryside, flesh, interpretation), if, for instance, this were not a chosen place but a place blundered into, a place which is a meadow with a hole in it,. and some crawl through such a hole to the other place. and some use it to count with and buy with. and some hide in it and see Him go by (62-63) As Helen Vendler points out, “[t]he trouble, Graham sees, is that material place - that one square yard of earth - is always already under interpretation” (The Given and the Made). This is seen in the way capitalism treats land as capital, and Christianity sees land as part of God’s Creation, reducing its values to the profit it brings and the physical manifestation of God’s will respectively. I agree with Vendler that the poem draws attention to the human imposition of meaning upon place, but while Vendler sees the poem as a project “to find adequate language for the given,” the hole in the meadow a metaphor for matter’s resistance to fixed linguistic definitions, I would argue that what is at stake here is not a language to represent the material, but rather a rootedness in place. By foregrounding the way the land has been objectified, treated as a means to something other than itself, Graham suggests that the particularities of the place has been ignored. If we only understand the land as a manifestation of God’s will or capitalist goods, it will no longer matter which land it is, or if the land is.

(42) 36. encountered in piecemeal or totality. What the girl wants, however, is the sense of belonging to a specific place, “a ground onto which to say This is my actual life” (61; italics mine). The very question the poem asks us, “Where do we continue living now, in what terrain?” is the question of whether we have fully inhabited the place we live in, or have we merely created a life of “bedrock poverty” (12). The ending of the poem suggests that how we approach the land in fact reflects how we value ourselves, as the hole in the meadow eventually reveals the hole in the human body. and to some it is the hole on the back of the man running. through which what's coming towards him is coming into him, growing larger,. a hole in his chest through which the trees in the distance are seen growing larger shoving out sky shoving out storyline. until it's close it's all you can see this moment this hole in his back. in which now a girl with a weed and a notebook appears. (63) To recap John R. White’s insight, the way humans willfully destroy the environment is only an outer manifestation of “the ‘inner’ alienation we experience from our own animality” (187). The many anthropocentric beliefs that propagate the control of land—including Christianity, capitalism, and science—all imply a logic that endorse the domination of the mind over the human body. Science, in particular, encourages a manipulative and alienating relationship with the human body and natural world. One.

(43) 37. is reminded of the painter in Graham’s “At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body” who cuts open the body of his deceased son “in the name of God / and Science / and the believable,” asking “How far / is true?” (Erosion 75-76). But the situation is apparently worse than was the case in “At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body,” since the truth discovered here is a meaningless one: the oppressive close-up of the trees in the meadow deprived of context “shoving out sky shoving out storyline” (Dream 63) eliminates the possibility for any sort of vision or possibilities of local stories. In this sense, the hole is the absence of true encountering with place. And the final image of nightmarish self-repetitions in which the girl reappears through the hole in the man only confirms this. In trying to enframe the essence of the natural world, humans enframe themselves. As in “The Geese,” the objectification of things always goes hand in hand with the objectification of our own bodies. As I have demonstrated in my reading of “The Geese,” “Reading Plato,” and “To the Reader,” contrary to what critics like Leonard M. Scigaj believe, Graham, from her debut volume onwards, has been concerned with various problems caused by anthropocentrism, especially how purely rational ways of understanding nature deprive the latter of any intrinsic values and substitute for bodily encounters. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the subject-object bifurcation, I show that all these early poems suggest that rationality works by excluding the self from the thing it thinks. Assuming that meaning is stable, self-contained, rather than a dynamic network, both the fly-tyer and the girl in the respective poem engage in a kind of rational dissection which ignores their own involvement with the things they encounter. Furthermore, as Merleau-Ponty points out about science, things are not valued as a lived whole, but rather for the utility values or taxonomical interests they.