We Have Other Plans: Review
[To] The Last [Be] Human, by Jorie Graham
Carcanet Press
336 pp.
Milkweed Smithereens, by Bernadette Mayer
New Directions
96 pp.
Jorie Graham and Bernadette Mayer gained notice in the American poetry scene in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, heavily influenced in various ways by the New York School, their study of film, languages, and Western philosophy, and an avant-garde belief in the limitlessness of poetry, which pushed against patriarchal structures of “what a poem is not.” As their writing evolved, they went on, in the 21st century, to become writers of some of the most apocalyptic — yet in some unlikely ways, stubbornly hopeful — poetry of the new millennium, practicing a unique poetics in thought and form at once vastly different from, yet complementary of, each other. Their two most recent collections, [To] the Last [Be] Human by Graham and Milkweed Smithereens by Mayer showcase the talent of each (the writer transformed into “a pinnacle of coral,” as Mayer dreamt she was, or said so in a poem from Milkweed)–in poems that feel alive, fragile, endangered, profuse.
[To] the Last [Be] Human is a collection of Graham’s last four books (Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway) under one title. These are works that gather up the concerns of the still-newish millennium into one large package, and they explore some of Graham’s most interesting marriages of idea to form, unique to this moment (the MRI, the bot, the ecological disaster humanity is facing, which Graham is acutely aware that all our descendants will face as well).
Milkweed Smithereens is Mayer’s last book, published the month of her death, which gathers new work alongside archival material. From the title it would seem to be an attempt to shatter or move away from a focus, everything flying apart, but the book seems to have its own nuclei — two longer prose poems called “from The Covid Diary” and “from The Second World of Nature or Next Planet.” One might argue that a poet whose career extends into recent history can only be apocalyptic, as we slip into climate disaster and make our way through an ongoing global pandemic — but to write about these things with cynical hopefulness and humor (Mayer, who died this past year at the age of seventy-seven) and the exhaustive searching for sense that resists a still point on the page (Graham, who is seventy-three) are the distinguishing and enduring trademarks of these two acclaimed woman poets.
Poets of movement and moment, Graham and Mayer are masters at reimagining form. Graham plays with the long wandering discourse of the poem in a deft exploration of rhyme against parameters of expanding or shrinking white space. Graham follows the moment of the death (in front of her children) of a family pet, struck by a car, from an untitled poem in Place, and it’s the way in which she sits with the moment, from the instant the car hits the dog to the eruption of grief and embrace of death that gathers into the weight of the poem’s ending:
I must find the reason
for the loved still-young creature being carried now onto the family lawn as they try
everything, and all murmurs shroud hum cry instruct, and all the
six arms gleam, firm, limp, all over it, caresses, tentacular
surround of the never-again, rush of blood and words, although look, you out there
peering in, listening, to see who we were: here: this was history:
their turn
is all they actually have
flowing in them.
She’s captured a senseless moment but one that’s timeless and human — of shock and then of grief, and Graham finds a way both to immerse herself and step back, entering and exiting the scene with the reader, amplified by lines that gently probe purpose: the dog’s, her children’s, her own, as they accordion in and out.
Where Graham’s lines ebb and flow and pull us in to create weight, Mayer often lets the momentum of her music provide her ultimate direction. Mayer’s experience of the pandemic is broken and woven around the archived material in Milkweed Smithereens, in snapshots of Mayer’s isolation and experience (and she leans heavily on the New York School approach of naming, as Trump, George Floyd, Rebecca Solnit, and others find their way into these poems, along with Covid lockdown, and the California wildfires of 2020). Her musings, while they can feel off-the-cuff, or follow the wordplay of her predecessor Gertrude Stein, offer poignant and relevant insights into the power and influence of nature, and the future we face, caught up in an interconnected global experience that we can barely comprehend:
i agree to find the holy grail if you pay me a poem, i agree to go to syria if you write me a poem, i agree to eat, i mean to write you a poem about lunch if you’ll tell me everything about syria, i agree to pay for lunch in syria if you’ll i don’t know, it’d be expensive to have lunch in syria but maybe we’d learn something.
Mayer accumulates her meaning, leaping from one idea to the next until the reader finds themselves with armfuls of meaning. Mayer outlines her approach to poetry, that’s been her approach for decades, in this passage from The Covid Diaries:
The idea that writing is easy comes from the frank o’hara method. But it is in fact easy, especially if you don’t try to say more than you are thinking, to say other than what you’re thinking, for instance you might be trying to say what somebody else is thinking, like barthes or lacan. Slowly does the middle tree turn yellow, always having been the most interesting fall tree, it is somewhat damaged with dead parts you can see from the field, it’s the tree whose branch snapped off & hung there threatening our (covid) social life till when it fell. Now threatening is cold weather, can’t sit outdoors, our plan is to borrow a tent from grace, & in it use our mr. heater buddy, little buddy, maybe it will work.
In this way she follows her thoughts where they go, which brings her to an acknowledgement of existential threat, but somehow she chooses to hold on to hope in the face of it. And yet—
Maybe it’s just fear of the winter, this is a day supposed to be sunny but what is this white sky? Seen some yellow & orange trees, the sky is white: western wildfires, we’re having a drought.
So many leaves are
falling, it’s exhausting
Underneath even the most commonplace observation is a razor-sharp awareness of explosive ramifications.
[To] the Last [Be] Human, like Milkweed Smithereens, also seems to follow Mayer’s trajectory on the Frank O’Hara method — at least, if O’Hara had also married the forms of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams in terms of how the line might look and read:
Manacled to a whelm. Asked the plants to give me my small identity. No, the planets.
The arcing runners, their orbit entrails waiving, and a worm on a leaf, mold, bells, a
Bower–everything transitioning–unfolding–emptying into a bit more life cell by
Cell in wind like this
Sound of scribbling on
Paper. I think
Graham’s preoccupations in the moment, the particular moment, run large, containing the macro and micro multitudes of Whitman’s lines, but she has, in most poems, internalized a perfect execution of W.C. Williams’ anticipatory breaks, using enjambment like a hand-crank to generate electricity.
Like Mayer’s Covid Diary, Graham’s poems also take on current affairs and climate change:
Fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of Extinctions is
now
says the silence-that-precedes–you know not what
you
are entering, a time
beyond belief. Who is one when one calls oneself
one? An orchestra dies down. We have other plans
for your summer is the tune. Also your
winter. Maybe the locks at Isigny
will hold
Neither poet is willing to concede defeat and accept annihilation in the face of overwhelming odds, putting faith in the use of “our mr. heater buddy, little buddy” (Mayer), and in “the locks at Isigny” (Graham), praying they’ll hold.
While Mayer’s collection is interesting for its juxtaposition of older work with with her freeform poems about the Covid-19 pandemic (and collaborative work as recently as 2022 with her husband Philip Good), Graham’s is unique in how she integrates machine learning into her poems, living as we are in a world permanently reshaped by the likes of Alexa and ChatGPT. The new consciousness is here, and while there is much to be afraid of, Graham sees a reflection of herself:
Will I survive I ask the bot. No. To download bot be
swift…
This is the best thing
since me.
This assimilation into the technological world is even more apparent in “From Inside the MRI,” which also is a “reflection,” mapping Graham from the inside out, inextricably linking the mortal entity to the immortal-like flow of machine, whether for better or worse (the question is still unanswered), in real-time against the backdrop of the natural world:
If yes, if yes–here’s this to worship–hi hi hi hi–hi hi high high–
High high not not not not highnot highnot not not–are you
Ok–next lasts
Three minutes–ready? Yes?--not not not not be be be be notnot bebe notnot bebe
Next one one
Minute–yes–yes yes yes yes
Yes yes yes yes– can you hear me–next one will last
forever. Question: were you looking up at the cherry all these long weeks. All during
the bombing the destruction of land home flesh the taking of refineries
the turning point the dam which if they breach it will eliminate the
town the graven images the mosques the waterworks the UN School–the idea of
shelter–Question: the children
here–in lock-
down–
Graham makes poetry out of the interplay of the machine, the technician’s dialogue, and her own inner monologue, which moves far past her own encounter and into the ramifications of other technologies we use. The question of what we worship, what we should fear, comes together in not just her consideration of machines, but how they become enmeshed in the human experience.
Neither [To] the Last [Be] Human nor Milkweed Smithereens is strictly classifiable as eco-poetry, or as overtly political, but both are heavily concerned with the environment, technology, and ecological disaster and the disaster of current politics. Each draws from a wealth of influences which present like shadows through the work — and this is the hope of the best poets of the generation who absorbed great work in order to transform it. In doing so, Jorie Graham and Bernadette Mayer have become two of the most daring voices in poetry today.There is a lifetime of influences in these works, in these poems delicious for the writers we hear inside their lines: from the likes of Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, and John Ashbery to Shakespeare, Thoreau, Stein, Williams, Whitman. The subversive freedom of cummings moves through lines from Mayer’s “The Joys of Dahlias”: “sleep now, smart pants or the midnight dancer/will tutti frutti your fabulous memory/toodle-oo.” While not formally similar, some of Graham’s work recalls Lowell’s line: “my eyes have seen what my hands did.” Both books call to mind Eliot’s “Marina” — “This form, this face, this life/ Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me / Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken.” Graham and Mayer are involved in an active search in their work, drawing in the best of what has come before them. These books by Mayer and Graham are both collections that hope to present something new, and both poets, through observation, are calling attention to what they can’t stop, and calling attention to what is possible, whether through philosophical interrogation (Graham), or as often through the back door (Mayer), in active dialogue with our time.
Valerie Duff-Strautmann has reviewed books for The Boston Globe, LARB, and PN Review. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, POETRY, The Common, Great River Review, and elsewhere. Her first book, To the New World (Salmon Poetry, 2010), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize from Queens University, Belfast—and her second book, Aquamarine, is forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Press in October. She was once part of the Arrowsmith Press publicity team; currently, she is working in Donor Relations and Stewardship at MIT.