Skip to main content

Impressions, doubt and questions - the body according to Jorie Graham

More impressionistic than narrative progression creating space for doubt, questions and uncertainty.

‘The poem that contemplates the relationship between body and mind. At what point, the poem asks of its readers, subject, and speaker, can the work of the mind transcend the body, or is the mind permanently fixed to the body? There is a paradox in this relationship in Graham’s poem. Signorelli, who painted bodies of exquisite precision and beauty, who understood the physical nature of the body as well as anyone of his time, found himself plagued by doubt upon the death of his son and could not understand his son’s death until he explored every cavern of his corpse’


***

 

At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body by Jorie Graham

 

See how they hurry

to enter

their bodies,

these spirits.

Is it better, flesh,

that they

 

should hurry so?

From above

the green-winged angels

blare down

trumpets and light. But

they don’t care,

 

they hurry to congregate,

they hurry

into speech, until

it’s a marketplace,

it is humanity. But still

we wonder

 

in the chancel

of the dark cathedral,

is it better, back?

The artist

has tried to make it so: each tendon

they press

 

to re-enter

is perfect. But is it

perfection

they’re after,

pulling themselves up

through the soil

 

into the weightedness, the colour,

into the eye

of the painter? Outside

it is 1500,

all round the cathedral

streets hurry to open

 

through the wild

silver grasses…

The men and women

on the cathedral wall

do not know how,

having come this far,

 

to stop their

hurrying. They amble off

in groups, in

couples. Soon

some are clothed, there is

distance, there is

 

perspective. Standing below them

in the church

in Orvieto, how can we

tell them

to be stern and brazen

and slow,

 

that there is no

entrance,

only entering. They keep on

arriving,

wanting names,

wanting

 

happiness. In his studio

Luca Signorelli

in the name of God

and Science

and the believable

broke into the body

 

studying arrival.

But the wall

of the flesh

opens endlessly,

its vanishing point so deep

and receding

 

we have yet to find it,

to have it

stop us. So he cut

deeper,

graduating slowly

from the symbolic

 

to the beautiful. How far

is true?

When one son

died violently,

he had the body brought to him

and laid it

 

on the drawing-table,

and stood

at a certain distance

awaiting the best

possible light, the best depth

of day,

 

then with beauty and care

and technique

and judgment, cut into

shadow, cut

into bone and sinew and every

pocket

 

in which the cold light

pooled.

It took him days,

that deep

caress, cutting,

unfastening,

 

until his mind

could climb into

the open flesh and mend itself.


***


Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Levine's Acid Rage - They Lion (lie and) Grow

  THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968)   Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow.   Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow.   Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow.   From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bow
Post a Comment
Read more

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising  what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground.   I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’
Post a Comment
Read more

The Strange and Compelling Inner Life of Clarice Lispector

Dedication - Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo When the house of language has its roof blown off and words do not shelter, I speak - fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome silence)   ---   “ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” - From The Hour Of The Star (1977)   ---   When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne - "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself” Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished
Post a Comment
Read more