156 Poetry for Students

actly, is the hiding place? First of all, the hiding

place is, literally, the place where the characters are

holed up in the building; probably where she slept

for eleven days. Figuratively, however, the hiding

place is almost certainly the past. The speaker keeps

harking back to the past, to May of 1968, posing

questions about her actions and her motivations.

One can never return, completely, to the past. The

masks of experience, age, and priorities always hide

its precise details. Additionally, the hiding place

might be history itself. The individual experiences

of the pregnant woman and the girl vomiting are

hidden to most people behind the more objective,

more public discourse of historical facts. And,

lastly, the hiding place is human memory. How of-

ten do people (both intentionally and unintention-

ally) forget? Once a feeling or experience is for-

gotten, it is next to impossible to find again. So,

there is tension in the poem between present, active

language that may or may not be public, and past,

public language that was intended to be active, both

linguistically and politically. Given the potential

reference to the revolutionary figure Guiseppe

Garibaldi, it’s possible that Graham is making a

statement about the absence of political activism in

contemporary society; perhaps that instead of stand-

ing up for what one believes, many choose to re-

main, forever, in their own hiding places.

Style

Like most postmodern poetry, “The Hiding Place”

refuses to let the reader separate form and content.

The jagged lines, the lack of symmetrical stanzas,

the quick shifts from present to past and from pub-

lic to private, underscore the thematic issues at

work in the poem. Just as memory is chaotic, un-

predictable, asymmetric, and always jumping from

point to point, so is the poem itself.

Not only is the poem free of rhyme, meter, and

any consistent stanzaic formation, it deliberately

creates a sense of disarray. Furthermore, as the

poem progresses, the poem’s already tenuous or-

der digresses. In stanzas 1-7, Graham employs en-

jambed lines fairly often, and each line contains

similar numbers of words. After stanza 7, thoughts

spill over into other lines, words spread out on the

page, and lines may have only one or two words

in them. Additionally, Graham occasionally makes

the first word of a new sentence the final word in

a line, so that the reader is always halting or paus-

ing the reading process. For many postmodern writ-

ers and thinkers, history and knowledge are not

fixed, uniform entities. Rather, they are fragmen-

tary. Thus, the postmodern poem mirrors the post-

modern view of history, culture, and knowledge.

Graham is famous for her difficult language, her

obfuscating descriptions, and her non-linear lyrics.

Oddly enough, “The Hiding Place” is one of her

more narrative poems. Essentially, it is a complex

short story. Techniques such as italicized words and

non-transitional leaps puzzle the reader at first, but,

ultimately, the form of the poem helps contribute to

its theme of the uncertainty of memory.

Historical Context

“The Hiding Place” takes as its point of departure

the infamous student uprising in Paris in the spring

The Hiding Place

Topics for

Further

Study

• 1968 was a turbulent year in France, Germany,
  and America. Research what was going on
  around the world during 1968 and come up with
  some explanations as to why the political cli-
  mate was so volatile during this period of recent
  history. Why were students so upset? Why
  aren’t students rioting or protesting to this de-
  gree today?


• Graham is often cited as an important postmod-
  ern poet. Research postmodernism and look at
  some other postmodern poetry. Based on your
  findings, determine in what ways “The Hiding
  Place” may or may not be considered a post-
  modern text.


• Graham deliberately makes her poetry difficult.
  It would be much easier to write a short story
  about a memory of the 1968 uprisings in Paris.
  Consider why Graham would chose to write a
  lyric poem for an exploration of this memory.
  In what way is reading the poem similar to try-
  ing to make sense of a hazy memory?


• Graham is often compared to Wallace Stevens,
  John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. Read some
  poems by one or more of these poets and think
  about how and why her work mirrors theirs.