Imagine you are looking at a flowering tree branch in a vase on a table. You think of trying to write about it. As you look, you're aware of your own breath, the warmth of your clothes. You smell the fragrance of the flowers. You struggle to keep your attention focused on the vase. You reach to touch the branch and notice some unopened buds. Do they have their own way of communicating? You recoil, ashamed to be part of the damage of removing the branch from the tree. You imagine the tree. You place your hands over your eyes, and now your mind and its images occupy the space where the blossoms were. What message can you take from this encounter? There is the beauty of the blossoms, the damage to the tree, and the inescapable progress of your consciousness as you react to both.
For more than four decades, Jorie Graham's poetry has documented the complicated, multidimensional, ever more uncertain sallies of human perception into the bristling presence of trees, birds, streams. Virginia Woolf followed Mrs. Dalloway and others over the course of 24 hours in London. Graham, whose lines are Woolf-like in their walks about the page, tracks a minute in the life of a raven. Her forays also lead her to strangers, art, angels-and recent poems have ventured to speak in the uncanny idioms of artificial intelligence and machines. The free play of her attention gives rise to precise descriptions of what she sees, hears, smells, and touches, but the unfolding drama of consciousness is always an indispensable part of the poem.
This story is from the May 2023 edition of The Atlantic.
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This story is from the May 2023 edition of The Atlantic.
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