In what might be humanity’s final hours, Jorie Graham’s recent poetry offers an elegiac grace for our species. What I’ve always treasured in Graham—how she registers her mind’s acrobatic detours and excursions on the page, rendering this for her readers—is still here, but her latest books are possibly more momentous, reflecting her concerns about climate disasters, extinction, and the increasing disembodiment resulting from our headlong technological expansion. Together, her last five books, To 2040 and [To] the Last [Be] Human (which gathers four previous books: Sea Change (2009), Place(2012), fast (2017), and Runaway (2020)) tell a compelling story about the 21st century from a disorienting vantage, where both speaker and setting are sometimes intentionally ambiguous. Earlier this year, Graham told the New Yorker that she has increasingly adopted what she calls “radically nonhuman points of view” because destabilizing the speaker, by expanding the lyric self to both the tellurian (perhaps animals, or the sea floor) and the virtual-mechanical (an MRI machine, chatbots, even the Twitterverse) is now an “urgent practice.” [1] These diverse voices are often juxtaposed with Graham’s deft poetic deployment of an imagined future: to wit, the opening poem’s title and first line in To 2040, “Are We/extinct yet.”—note the flatness of the period on this question (5). And yet in these poems, stranded in an apocalyptic future, human language is somehow present and spoken. By whom? feels like an open question, as does with whom? Someone in “Are We” asks, “do you have a/ body do you have/ yr self in/ mind” (To 2040 5). And while “I Am Still/ on the earth,” another title and first line from To 2040, can be read several ways, “still” seems to indicate that the speaker of these poems has (unaccountably) remained after this extinction event (14). This deliberate disorientation, while fresh, is nevertheless distinctly Jorie Graham: she still asks her readers to think with her, so that, if the poem is an artifact, it is one of minds—hers and the reader’s—in motion.

            In “Are We,” a raven arrives. Sort of. “Do you remember/ despair its coming// closer says” (6). I love that the raven does not ask this question, but its coming closer does, signaling that the voices in these poems might come from anywhere. (Indeed, fourteen lines later, the light also speaks.) Graham is a metaphysical poet whose thirst for the real now meets a dystopian future that is empty and somehow not empty: the raven’s arrival prompts the speaker to ask “Is this a real/ encounter I ask. Of the old/ kind. When there were// ravens. No/ says the light. You/ are barely here. The/raven left a// long time ago” (6-7). The speaker argues with the light:

            But is it not

here I ask looking up

through my stanzas.

Did it not reach me

as it came in. Did

it not enter here

at stanza eight—& where

does it go now

when it goes away

again, when I tell you the raven is golden,

when I tell you it lifted &

went, & it went. (To 2040 7)

This stunning gesture might be a lonelier version of my favorite moment in “The Bird on My Railing,” from Place, where Graham raises the question of what vestiges of an image are transferred between poet and reader, finally expressing what sounds like a wish (more than fervent curiosity) to see what her reader sees. There is an imperative: “you who are not seeing it with your own/ eyes: look:”—she tries to pin down the light (for the reader, for herself) in the moment she writes, which vanishes in the effort, as assuredly as water slips through cupped hands. “[Y]et go back up/ five lines it is/ still there I can’t/ go back, it’s/ gone,/ but you—/ what is it you are/ seeing” (To the Last, 76). [2] Graham’s self-referential lines, both when locating—or attempting to locate—the raven in “Are We” and the light in “The Bird on My Railing” exploit the tension between the physical world that prompts the poem and the poem’s textuality—she is ever conscious of the made thing the poem is. I find the move delightful when it tries to make sense of the transaction with the reader; it is as if to say, “if I describe, will you, reader, experience?” Despite this formulation as a question, this much I suspect Graham trusts: that poetry works. That words, with all their pitfalls, carry. And in much of the late work, Graham shows us just how seriously she takes this by locating poetry in a post-human world. Thomas Gardner once argued that Graham’s poems “ask whether we can both acknowledge our distance from words and use that distance to think with”. [3] Over two decades later, she still asks this of us. The implicit (yet never naïve) trust she has always placed in language (she once said that what leaks in between attempts with words to seize the thing is the thing) [4] is now vaulted into a remote and impossible future: “Years go/ by. Imagine that. And there is still a speaker. There will always be a speaker” (To the Last 145). Graham’s radical hope (a term she uses often in interviews) is that there will always be a speaker, except for this haunting feeling that, once the ravens are gone, the memory of ravens will fade, and with that, the ability to conjure ravens on the page will also fade.   

                In some of Graham’s recent work, the shifting “you” is not directed towards her actual readers (living now in the 2020s), but someone she is confident will show up, though she and all humans will be long dead in the then she is propelling us into. From “Dusk in Drought”: “I wish I knew/ whom to address/ this time” (To 2040 28). From “Fog”: “To whom do I recount this” (To 2040 67). Perhaps at times her impossible speaker or interlocutor is an alien or some new intelligent earth life that will have evolved after the sixth extinction event (which, if I haven’t made it clear, is well underway). Perhaps it is the earth itself, as she understands that the rock we spin on will survive—we are among the endangered. Perhaps the “you” is an artificial intelligence; Graham’s late work enlarges to engage with the increasing virtuality of human existence. In the title poem of her latest book, this detachment continues: “is this which we call speech what u use” and “what do I do to make this audible” (To 2040 21). Whoever “you” is in any given moment, it seems to be both inside and outside the poem. There are multiple voices on display, for instance, in this excerpt from “Cage”:  

                                                               

After what?

It does not matter after What. It’s just the after. Yes

it hurts. What do you mean by

            forgotten. I mean

            not enough. Who is this

            speaking. I am the not enough. I am

all you have said. I am yr passageway. (To 2040 55)

This is sometimes a reader who can talk back and ask her questions she can hear, questions that may or may not be transcribed in the poem (“Yes/ it hurts” is the answer to a question, perhaps implicitly, but not explicitly posed in the poem). “What” is capitalized, “It does not matter after What,” signaling that there has been an event, but the rest of this passage indicates that we won’t be exploring that event in these poems so much as who will write and listen to poetry in the aftermath. Elsewhere the voice seems to be unmoored in time—when is now? How long has it been? The reader will have to piece together an urgent message about who we were—and part of the grace I sense is that we weren’t all bad. Without bypassing our transgressions, the poignancy of our being soon gone leaves room for Graham’s large-scale compassion for us. “All” ends this way: “we have to consider the while it seems/ to say or I seem to say or/ something else seems to we are not/ nothing” (To the Last 229).






“I Won’t Live Long” begins: “enough to see any of the new/ dreams the hundreds of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals shouldering their/ demise without possibility of re-/ generation” (To the Last 274). This doesn’t stop Graham from trying to conjure the suffering she won’t see with her own eyes.

After the publication of fast, Graham said in an interview that the “feeling/thinking” we have of our feeling/thinking as being trustworthy is something we can’t help but experience—the “sensation” of the self’s integrity [5]. She’s right: no amount of informed awareness that the self is constructed or mediated can completely undo this Cartesian fantasy, that we can trust that “we are capable of transmitting truth about what is in here and out there.” [6] In her earlier work, Graham often set mind and body apart— telltale Cartesian affinities—though always mindful of, and incorporating its complications into, her poems. She might have made this comment about the self a decade or more earlier. But because Graham sees even the most alien ideas through, that tenacity inevitably led to her exploring how to render these non-integral selves in her work. In that moment in her poetic career (2018), the self on Jorie Graham’s page was already fracturing into multiple “radically nonhuman” voices. I wonder whether Forrest Gander’s 1997 comment that Graham’s poetry “reminds us that there is no place to be human outside of language” is complicated by her more recent adoption of nonhuman speakers that nevertheless use (through their human author) language. [7] Is she giving voice, or overhearing it? It feels like the latter, but language is necessarily her instrument, so there is inherent tension in these experiments. In “Fog,” she refers to “a red bud/ whose name is long gone” (To 2040 67).


            In anticipating the acquisition of these voices, Graham’s sense of the earth as abundant with intelligence is manifest in Sea Change (the first book in the tetralogy). Of a bird in “Embodies,” she writes “I no longer/ can say for sure that it/ knows nothing,” (To the Last 7). But recognizing the acumen of nonhuman animals is not enough. Of a tree in “This,” “the wind trussles the wide tall limbs in-/ telligently” (To the Last 8). I can’t help but recall James Bridle’s epic argument in Ways of Being, which compels us to recognize the intelligence of all living things and to be mindful of our relationship with machine intelligence, a book from 2022 that Graham’s past five books of poetry both anticipate and render rhapsodically. And she pushes this animating agency to greater abstractions. Of the evening in “Positive Feedback Loop,” she writes of it coming on “blinking, abundant, as if catching sight of us” (To the Last 44). Of a river in “The Medium”: “one must/ keep trying/ to make/ the unsaid said—that is the task of the surface” (To the Last 166). Of the sea in “Dementia,” “your plastic-laden ocean bearing grief inside it too” (To the Last 178).

                After insisting that her readers recognize earth’s sentience, she takes on the voices herself. By the time of “Deep Water Trawling” (fast), she writes from the perspective of the sea floor, in a relentless single-spaced sound off without line breaks. Why “am I—the habitat crushed/ and flattened-net of your listening and my speaking we can no longer tell them/ apart” and “ghostfishing—nets abandoned in the sea they continue to catch—mammals fish shellfish—we die of exhaustion or suffocation—the synthetic materials last forever” (To the Last144). (Incidentally, although “Self Portrait: May I Touch You” is probably not one of these nonhuman speakers, the same relentlessness of style here resembles freestyle rap: “attitude/multitude,” “solitude—do you do adulthood, husbandhood,/ motherhood—listen: sap in the dogwood—not like blood, crude, flood, lassitude—I want you/ to come unglued” (To the Last 186-187).)  

                Graham’s exploration of the disembodied voices is inextricably tied to her personal experiences with death. In the years that she has written the five books reviewed here, Graham has lost both of her parents, her husband had a life-changing injury, she has been afflicted with cancer, and she has, like the rest of us, endured a pandemic and witnessed the extreme weather effects caused by climate change. Personal and universal dirges merge here, for “our personal/ dead cast always deeper into/ the general dead” (To the Last 75). In “With Mother in the Kitchen,” “[T]he change of scale in our thinking has occurred. Planetary death so what is yours” (To the Last 176). With the death of her parents (her father in fast and her mother in Runaway), her poetic scope widens both temporally (“all aftermath”) and beyond the human. In “Dementia”: “technopoesis—accelerate, drift, drift—,” we see this expansion from individual to species:

am I the lack of

question, something that can be remembered from much

later on, from afterwards, from tomorrow, is it slow suicide this having thinned

to what will come to be seen as an introduction—were we the first introduction

to what might have been a species (To the Last 177)

 
And her father’s mind takes leave in “Dementia,” she reckons with the departure of the “human mind, now there is/ another mind, prefigured by drones → algorithms, image/ vectors → distributive consciousness → humanoid robotics → what is required now →/ is → a demarcation → what is artificial” (To the Last 178). This disembodied experience is rendered most drastically in “In the Nest®,” where she watches her mother die across continents using an app. 






After these wild and fruitful experiments, I’d like to examine a deceptively simple moment with a human speaker in “Earth,” a person lies on the floor watching sunlight and shadow glide. Graham, who insists that the poet be present, portrays this human self confronting the dynamics of the earth turning on its axis as it orbits the sun. It’s almost too much for one person to take in—to coordinate scientific knowledge with the senses from the limited vantage:

I see you my planet. I see your exact rotation on my

                        floor—I will not close these eyes in this my

                        head lain

                        down on its

                        sheet, no, its

sleeplessness will watch, under room-tone,

                        and electromagnetism,

the calculations fly off your flanks as you

                        make your swerve,

                        dragging the increasingly

yellow arc across the room here

                        on this hill and

                        I shall say now

because of human imagination:

                        here on this floor this

                        passage is

                        your wing, is

                        an infinitesimal

                        strand of a feather in

                        your wing […] (To the Last 124)

 

I interrupt at the metaphor the “human imagination” has fashioned, but as Graham tracks the movement of her mind against this trail of beam and edge (the speaker is also taking on the way light—electromagnetic radiation—interacts with her vision to create color), she insists on staying with the earth, its arc:

this brightening which does not so much move, as

                        the minute hand

                        near my eye

                        does, as it

glides, a pulling as much as a pushing—of event—

                        so that you are never

                        where you just were and yet

                        my eye has not

moved, not truly, is staying upon your back and riding you—

I don’t want the moon and the stars, I want to lie here arms

                        spread

                        on your almost eternal

                        turn

and on the matter the turn takes-on as it is turned by that

                        matter—Earth—as

                        my mind lags yet

                        is always

on you, and the lag is part of the turn, its gold lip

                        less than an

                        arm’s length from me

                        now so that I

                        can dip my fingers right out

                        into it (To the Last 124-125)

For me, Jorie Graham’s brilliance is here, in the recognition that her mind’s lag is part of the whole turning: that a simple human experience, while it may seem to be of limited significance in the vast cosmos, is still very much integral—that we cannot separate ourselves from it. That, as bounded creatures, we cannot possibly encompass an awareness of all, but also that the mind’s inability to keep up is part of the whole phenomenon.  That Immer ist es Welt, so Rilke. Graham is fond of citing Frost’s notion that, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride its own melting. “Earth” rides its own melting.




I wonder if Graham isn’t anticipating her own elegy with the bird’s song in “The Bird on My Railing,” which recalls her own poetry as it “lets out the/ visible heat of its/ inwardness,” with its plume “feathering-out in/ the directions,/ filled out by the next and the next-on/ note, until the whole/shape of the/ song is wisped-/ up and/ shuts,/ the singing/ shuts, the form/ complete, the breath-bird/ free to/ rise away into the young day and/ not be—.” The poems ends here, minus the period (To the Last 77). Graham is celebrated for enacting her consciousness, both in the lyric moment and in the moment of poem-making, and this particular bird (she writes of many) echoes, in its song, her poetic gestures, their billowing syntax whose frequent interruptions depict the rhythm of consciousness at its greatest heights, their resolute presence, their musical dispatches from an evidently unstoppable mind.

            I’ve been pondering grace, whether that is the word for what I sense in these poems, accompanying the fast runaway virtual disembodied destruction, there might be something (forgive the construction) forgiveness-adjacent, and maybe it is grace. Ages ago, cyanobacteria ruined the mostly anaerobic atmosphere for many as it multiplied unchecked with its toxic oxygen byproduct, altering the environment and causing mass extinction, but in turn paving the way for beings like us. I keep grappling with this—we are not, I don’t believe, as innocent as cyanobacteria, but we are creatures who, like the child who destroys the rose out of sheer curiosity and wonder, do what we do, and maybe our constructive and destructive impulses are not so easily separable. Graham isn’t giving us a pass, but I believe she loves us and can see us from a great remove. In “Guantánamo,” she writes, “we will long to be forgiven. It doesn’t matter for what, there are no/ facts. Moon, who will write/ the final poem?” (To the Last 11).

As Graham grapples with both the damage we have caused and our increasing disembodiment, she has not completely spurned humanity. Even here, in a future where the landscape is bleak and we have disappeared in “On the Last Day,” there is hope, if not for our continued presence: “This is being/remembered. Even as it/ erases itself it does not/ erase the thing/ it was” (To 2040 10).  






Notes and Works Cited

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[1] “Jorie Graham Takes the Long View,” Katy Waldman. The New Yorker. Jan 1, 2023
[2] Powerful poetry invites commentary: I wrote this section about “Are We” before listening to David Naimon interview Graham on the Between the Covers podcast (August 9, 2023), where they had an extensive conversation about this raven, and I had written the bit about “The Bird on My Railing” before seeing that Walt Hunter wrote of this very poem in The Atlantic earlier this year (“Notice All that Disappears,” April 6, 2023). However, pairing the two and the take on self-referential gestures is mine. The enticement to dialogue inherent in Jorie Graham’s poetry ensures that certain poems will stir multiple readers, and, as if to cement my point about her fascination with her own poetry, she told Naimon that the final words of “Are We” made her drop her pen.
[3] “Jorie Graham’s Incandescence,” 1999. Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry, Ed. Thomas Gardner. 2005.
[4] Qtd. in an interview in Thomas Gardner’s “Jorie Graham’s Incandescence.” [ibid]
[5] “In Conversation with Jorie Graham,” with Peter Mishler. LitHub. February 23, 2018.
[6] ibid.
[7] Forrest Gander’s essay, “Listening for a Divine Word,” is a breathtaking analysis of Graham’s work. Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Thomas Gardner, 2005.