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Title: Swarm by Jorie Graham ISBN: 0-06-093509-X Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 05 June, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.64 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Again and Again and Again She Does It
Comment: It's fascinating I think that Jorie Graham's initial reviews for Swarm were rather scathing. Recently though they've warmed up to her and the book, and it is clear now critics widely consider the work an extraordinary glimpse at this master's mind and style. It's a lot different from Graham's usual, but then again Graham has made a name for herself and her interest in changing styles from book to book. I suggest sticking with it and giving it time! If you love Graham you'll love Swarm!
Rating: 5
Summary: Pushing through.
Comment:
Jorie Graham, in our blandly supersensible age, has somehow reconjured Mallarme's "night made of absence and questioning." I haven't been this enchanted or mystified -- one and the same emotion, really -- by a book of poetry since Nightwood. How is it possible that an American wrote this, and a TEACHER? You'd expect there to be some lingering trace of workshopped inanity, of the tenured smugness Franny railed against, but there isn't. Not a whiff. She must be something of a Machiavel to have landed her job, because Swarm is a full-bore assault on the idea of poetry being teachable.
I think the trouble people have with this book is the same reason why it delights me -- that it's written by an American. If a Czech or a Polak had written this, the author would be hailed as a genius. But somehow we expect less from ourselves. "How many syllables Is your nation?" Graham asks at one point, and gets a monosyllabic grunt in reply. Americans are expected to be sensible, but not intelligent; perceptive, but not well-read; energetic, but not exhausting. Graham, the defiant one, is the second of all these categories. She makes no secret of having learned her craft from books -- though life is always her well of inspiration -- and that she expects the reader to rise to the challenge by maybe even reading some of them. The cheek! This presumptuous woman may even expect us to have some knowledge of foreign languages, helping us to develop a more flexible, childlike receptivity to new combinations and juxtapositions of words ( my German must sound to the members of that poor nation something like a Jorie Graham poem. ) To ask us to take on such a burden merely to get some pleasure out of 110 pages of poetry... This is not done. Give us more autobiographical mini-narratives about New Jersey marriages on the rocks.
The irony is that Swarm is the most epochal volume of poetry written in this country since Leaves of Grass. Graham, like Joyce, like every great artist, is an exile, even if she still remains within our borders. There's no way to analyze it in the depth it deserves here, but Graham's influences include, among seemingly everything else that's ever been written, the negative space of Mallarme, the cut-up technique of Burroughs, and the primitivism of Dickinson. It's a celebration of form, but not over content -- Graham knows, is seemingly alone in knowing these days, that perfect form creates its own content.
It will take work to decipher, but then anything of value does. The benighted reaction to this book is the final proof of her grim formulation: "This much is certain. / Dream has no friends."
Rating: 1
Summary: "Smarm" instead of "Swarm"
Comment: Well, that's not true. There's nothing smarmy about these poems. In fact, there's nothing to these poems at all and the people listed here who've liked the book are only fooling themselves. Indeed, claiming that they understand these poems is another way of patting themselves on the back and I would really love to see any one of Jorie's (many) sycophants write a considered, analytical paper extoling (or even making sense of) the virtues of this book. I am not an frivolous reader or a superficial one and these poems don't cut it. This is an absolutely unreadable book of poems by a poet whose entire reputation rests solely on the advocacy of lone-wolf critic Helen Vendler. These are, quite simply, bad poems. Avoid this book at all costs.
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Title: Never: Poems by Jorie Graham ISBN: 0060084715 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 02 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Dream Of The Unified Field by Jorie Graham ISBN: 0880014768 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Materialism (American Poetry Series) by Jorie Graham ISBN: 0880016175 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 21 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Errancy by Jorie Graham ISBN: 0880015292 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 01 June, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Erosion (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) by Jorie Graham ISBN: 0691014051 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1983 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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