158 Poetry for Students
discusses the various thematic possibilities of the
title of Graham’s poem, ultimately suggesting that
all are linked.Jorie Graham’s poem “The Hiding Place” re-
calls another text bearing that same title, Corrie ten
Boom’s The Hiding Place,an autobiographical ac-
count of Boom’s experiences hiding Jews from
Nazi soldiers during World War II. Though the hid-
ing place Graham explores in her poem is a vastly
different kind of “place,” Graham’s poem seeks an
intensity similar to that which ten Boom’s book
elicits. Like ten Boom’s text, “The Hiding Place”
is autobiographical, though to what degree is al-
ways up for debate. However, where ten Boom’s
text refers solely to the actual location in which
Jews were hid, Graham’s text is far more elusive.
For the poet, the hiding place is not only the literal
space in which she and other students hid, but the
hiding place is also, history, the past, and, ulti-
mately, the poem itself.
Oddly enough, Graham never mentions the
hiding place specifically in her poem (“The last
time I saw itwas 1968”), a poetic move that sug-
gests the title refers to more than one specific place.
However, she does make reference to a literal hid-
ing place where she and others stayed for 11 days
during the student demonstrations in Paris in 1968:
“I spent 11 nights sleeping in the halls.” This line
and the opening passage are the only real signs that
the title denotes an actual place and not a mythical
or symbolic place. Graham needs for the actual
place to exist, however, so that she may dramatize
the other hiding places her poem considers. The
place in question is a room or building in which
she and other students seek refuge. During the up-
risings, the Parisian Police turned the area around
the Latin Quarter in to a kind of war zone. Studentswere beaten, arrested, harassed, and small bastions
of student support groups sprouted throughout the
city. Graham, who was 18 years old and a student
at the Sorbonne in 1968, was in the middle of the
action. Since she hid for 11 days, she must have
felt that her safety was in jeopardy; apparently, it
was, for she and a host of others were imprisoned
in a cramped cell amid miserable conditions.
To write a poem about such a hiding place and
to include in that poem a very realistic representa-
tion of women vomiting and urinating in a prison
cell is to engage in what poet Carolyn Forche might
call a “poetry of witness.” In her introduction to
her anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Cen-
tury Poetry of Witness,published in 1991 (the same
year as Graham’s Region of Unlikeness,in which
“The Hiding Place” appears), Forch claims that the
poems in her anthology “will not permit us diseased
complacency. They come to us with claims that
have yet to be filled, as attempts to mark us as they
themselves have been marked.” Forch is correct: it
is easier to forget than to remember. Graham’s
poem forces readers who do not know and readers
who may have forgotten to remember the Paris
demonstrations, the prison-like conditions, the
mini-reign of terror. In her introduction to the Best
American Poetry 1990,Graham implies that Amer-
ican poets have let the world off the hook, that they
don’t confront the difficult issues like they could
or should. In “The Hiding Place,” Graham reminds
readers what was done to people and what poetry
can do to those same people.
Because people forget, because history erases
the past, people write. The implication of Graham’s
poem is that the hiding place under question in the
poem is not just the geographical locale where she
and others holed up, but history itself. The passing
of time, the sweep of years, the accumulation of
dates and facts and personal experience obliterates
memories from the minds of the living. History suc-
cessfully hides its more embarrassing moments
simply by allowing people to forget.
Throughout her poetic career, Graham has
used the lyric as means of forcing readers to re-
member by taking on history. In Region of Un-
likeness,Graham has two poems with history in
their titles, one called “Short History of the West,”
the other “The Phase after History,” suggesting that
how history is created and recreated is one of her
more important themes. In “The Hiding Place,” as
in other of her poems, Graham posits that history
is made, like a poem. It is not an objective, finite
fact. It is a construct, and anything can be con-
structed to hide anything else.The Hiding PlaceFor the poet, the
hiding place is not only the
literal space in which she
and other students hid, but
the hiding place is also,
history, the past, and,
ultimately, the poem itself.”