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of 1968. The uprising of 1968 started with univer-
sity students at the Sorbonne on May 3, 1968. There
was confrontation between students and police at
the Sorbonne that led to a period of guerrilla war-
fare in the streets of the Latin Quarter. Students and
their sympathizers built barricades in the old
Parisian revolutionary tradition. Armed police
fought back. The government zigzagged between
conciliation and repression. The conflict grew still
worse and then spread to the provincial universi-
ties. Toward mid-May many workers began to join
in. Strikes (usually of the sit-in variety) closed
down factories and by 20 May at least 7 million
workers had laid down their tools. Public services
ground to a halt. Transportation broke down. In
short, the country was paralyzed for a short time.
In the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne building was oc-
cupied and turned into a commune.
The students tried to reach out to industrial
workers during this period by offering a broad cri-
tique of the present system. However, the workers
really weren’t interested in making common polit-
ical cause with the students. In the end, the work-
ers had different interests than the university stu-
dents. Hence, students ended up settling for
relatively limited concessions. So, what looked like
revolution, turned out to be nothing more than a
student-led uprising. It lasted only a few short
months. But it did make clear that the university
system needed a complete overhaul, and that stu-
dents and faculty had to be involved in the changes.
The result was that during the next several years,
the Education Ministry carried out reforms. Among
other things, it broke existing institutions into
smaller units, with more local control over budgets
and instructional methods. At the same time,
though, student and faculty participation in institu-
tional governance tended to politicize French uni-
versities. In fact, some of them became communist
strongholds, others bastions of the right.
Graham was a young college student at the Sor-
bonne at the time. Her autobiographical account,
oblique as it may be, dramatizes what it must have
been like for students and political activists in Paris
amidst the war-like conditions of revolution.
Critical Overview
“The Hiding Place” appears in Graham’s 1991 col-
lection Region of Unlikeness,probably Graham’s
least recognized book. Perhaps because of that and
more ambitious poems in the collection, “The Hid-
ing Place” has garnered virtually no critical atten-
tion. In fact, even the book reviewers of Region of
Unlikenessavoided commenting on or even men-
tioning the poem. Similarly, recent book chapters
by Helen Vendler, one of the two or three most im-
portant scholars of contemporary poetry, concen-
trate on Graham’s more formally complex and ex-
perimental poems. Indeed, even though “The
Hiding Place” might seem a bizarre poem, it is one
of Graham’s most traditional pieces.
However, while “The Hiding Place” may not be
a magnet for literary criticism, Graham’s poetry is.
Aside from Helen Vendler’s chapters on Graham in
The Breaking of Styleand The Given and the Made:
Recent American Poets,influential critics such as
Thomas Gardner, Bonnie Costello, and Mark Jarman
have each written on Graham in the past few years.
In a review of Region of Unlikeness,Costello notes
the shift in Graham’s poetry toward a more narrative
energy, one that fuses plot and poetry as exemplified
in “The Hiding Place”: “Graham has taken it upon
herself in her recent work to confront the power of
plot and image head on. First she tested her meta-
physics in a quiet, lyric space of nature and art, but
lately she has plunged into the rush of history, mem-
ory, and contemporary life.” In The Given and the
Made,Vendler maps Graham’s altered poetics in Re-
gion of Unlikeness:“Graham’s tendency, in her first
books, toward the exalted and the prophetic has been
severely tempered, by the time she writes Region of
Unlikeness, toward the material and the actual.
Nonetheless, she remains determined not to let go of
a principle of transcendent judgment, even in the
presence of the unreliable and deniable chronicle we
call history.” For both Costello and Vendler, Gra-
ham’s best poetry is that which sees the lyric as a
meeting place for public and private concerns.
Other recent readers of Graham, such as Thomas
Gardner, have compared her to John Ashbery in
terms of both poet’s use of language as a means of
engaging the world, while William Olsen argues that
Graham and Chase Twichell see the lyric as a way
to disengage from the world. Vendler, Graham’s best
reader, sees her as following in the tradition of Ger-
ard Manley Hopkins and Seamus Heaney as poets
who break away from conventional modes of ex-
pression to create new worlds of experience.Criticism
Dean Rader
Rader has published widely in the field of
twentieth-century American poetry. In his essay heThe Hiding Place