Swarm

Rating:
Summary: Pushing through.
Review:

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:
Summary: "Smarm" instead of "Swarm"
Review:

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:
Summary: Okay?
Review: Do we all agree that the hype around Graham was just that?

Rating:
Summary: Worthy
Review: Here's a poet worthy of that label they've slapped on her: genius. No need to be jealous, just willing to learn from her.

Rating:
Summary: Again and Again and Again She Does It
Review: 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:
Summary: there is only one Jorie Graham
Review: Nobody but Jorie Graham could write poetry this intense, structural, abstract, and do it successfully. The first aspect of this poetry that one notices is that Jorie Graham has left the standard line/narrative/physical world format almost completely behind, writing a lot of one-line stanzas, and leaving large space between words for the reader to fill. It doesn't look like standard poetry (well, maybe a poem or two do). The second aspect of the poetry in this book is that she's taken words so far from solid ground and scattered them into the stratosphere. In this book you will not find any images like salmon swimming upstream...you will find a minimalism of words where possible, attaching to concepts, not anything sensory that's so easy to hold onto. In Swarm, you're more likely to find lines like "Where definition first comes upon us empire" or "Explain inseparable explain common". At first you will not understand the connections between these words, but they are there, and they are vast. From the first poem to to the last and still reflectng back on it, I've always hoped this book would be remembered in the annals of poetry as the revolutionary book that it is. Jorie Graham is the poet to start a new poetic era. Read this book, you'll find her "planting a wildfire in your head".

And after seeing how people either seem to love this book or hate it according to the reviews here, Swarm is controversial if nothing else.

Rating:
Summary: sure
Review: Sure, it's extraordinary. The reason it is extraordinary is quite simple, and to do with her epigraph at the start of 'The Errancy', which is that line from Wyatt, about seeking to catch the wind in a net. Here she pushes her whimsicality, her quite irritating unpindownableness to a new limit, and succeeds quite unexpectedly. It is an achievement, after all, to be unexpected more than once. She has done it, and remains credible: this spiny, out-of-focus poet, who somehow manages to make it mean something, so close to where others fall down. A GREAT BOOK.

Rating:
Summary: "Smarm" instead of "Swarm"
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Change your mind about Jorie Graham
Review: Yes, I will confess: I never had a clue what Jorie Graham was about. Almost didn't care; though something appealed to me in the fragment, the frenetic jump, the denial of imposition of meaning, the coy opening of the poet's arms: daring me to climb inside, drown even. Well, "Swarm": I'm telling you, I still don't get it, but the book opens Graham's style wide, the way a drop of ink runs to gray in water. I can feel her hitting a fevered pitch in the form/al experimentation that began with "End of Beauty." No friends, these poems aren't any "easier" than the ones that came before--but there is something in them different, not any more closure, not any more willingness to help you navigate, yet the book itself coheres as a unit. Past the the pre-lingual linguistic utterances I can detect repeated themes, scattered clues. I've read and re-read the book three times now and plan to continue. I hate to sound like one of the "converted" but I must say I am beginning to believe Jorie Graham has something to do with my daily life, my understanding of this strange sign-driven world, my hapless navigation through it.