Volume 10 159
In writing about Region of Unlikeness,Helen
Vendler argues that by invoking historical moments
in her work, Graham participates in the construc-
tion of new knowledge about history: “Language
about history is as contingent as the ‘beast’ and its
linked stories, but if uttered at the ‘right’ time will
partake, however socially and historically con-
structed, of the shape of that historical moment.”
Thus, as is the case for most of Graham’s lyrics,
“The Hiding Place” does not offer any answers to
the problems of history. Rather, by its very exis-
tence, it raises provocative questions.
Just as “The Hiding Place” evokes an interro-
gation of the public realm, so does it invite the
reader into the uncharted waters of the private
realm. Throughout the poem, Graham wonders how
reliable the memory of her own past actually is: “I
remember the cell vividly / but is it from a photo-
graph?.” A few lines later, she writes “Do I see it
from the inside now—his hands, her face or / is it
from the news accounts?” Here, Graham poses
questions most readers have also posed. Are mem-
ories of the past accurate? A great deal of the poem
dramatizes the tension between being inside and
outside. Graham wonders if her memory of these
events is from inside, that is, from her own expe-
rience or if an outside force, like a story or a pho-
tograph, has planted the images in her head. If his-
tory is unreliable and one’s memory is unreliable,
then on what can one rely? Graham might ulti-
mately argue that like history, one’s past is inde-
terminate. In the final analysis, all one has is in-
terpretation.
Because all one has is interpretation, an ex-
acting lyric poem provides the perfect medium for
raising these questions. Readers unaccustomed to
Graham’s elusive thematics or her fragmentary
lines may find her motives concealed behind these
distancing gestures. Indeed, without question, the
most satisfying reading of the title points to the real
hiding place being the poem itself. Thus, the poem
becomes a metaphor for the room in the Parisian
building, history and one’s past because it partici-
pates in each. Meaning, answers, formulas are hid-
den in the poem. It is difficult to determine what,
exactly, the poet wants readers to take from her
poem. In the final stanzas, Graham describes ask-
ing a man, a certain leader, a question: “The man
above the fire, listening to my question, // the red
wool shirt he wore: where is it? who has it? / He
looked straight back into the century: no conces-
sions. / I took the message back.” If one replaces
the word “it” with the words “the meaning of the
poem ‘The Hiding Place,’ ” then the “it” in the first
line and the “its” throughout take on an entirely dif-
ferent significance. Where is the meaning to the
poem? Who has the meaning? Does the reader?
Does Graham? Is the meaning lost in history? Is
the meaning hiding in the hiding place that is the
poem “The Hiding Place”
Graham is an important postmodern writer,
and one tenet of postmodernism is the text’s aware-
ness that it is a text and not life itself. In other
words, the poem is not a photograph; it is not re-
ality, nor does it pretend to be. It is an interpreta-
tion of reality. It is one of many versions of real-
ity, just as there are many versions of history, or,
for that matter, of one’s past. The poem, a partici-
pant in both the present and the past, reveals itself
only a little, like life itself. Only over time, can peo-
ple begin to understand the complexities of the pre-
sent and the past, and how they converge.
Finally, it should be clear by now that the hid-
ing place is not the past or history or the poem: it
is all of them, and more. In fact, all are connected
via the poem. Carolyn Forche claims that poems
about events become events themselves, carriers of
the events they refer to: “If, as [Walter] Benjamin
indicates, a poem is itselfan event, a trauma that
changes both a common language and an individ-
ual psyche, it is a specific kind of event, a specific
kind of trauma. It is an experience entered into vol-
untarily.... One has to read or listen, one has to be
willing to accept the trauma.” Readers of Graham’s
poem take on the trauma of the Parisian students,
the burden of history, the ambiguity of interpreta-
tion. The message Graham refers to in the stanzas
above, the message she brings back, is the experi-
ence of exchange, of expression, of listening and
engaging. If readers and writers do this, there will
be no need for a hiding place of any kind.
Source:Dean Rader, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Greg Barnhisel
Barnhisel holds a Ph.D. in American litera-
ture. In this essay, he describes how Jorie Graham
uses the powerful experience of being involved in
the 1968 Paris student/worker strike to explore
questions of being and the representation of the
world.Jorie Graham’s poem “The Hiding Place”
takes as its subject the student and worker upris-
ings in Paris in May of 1968, but as is the case with
most of this very deep and complex poet’s work,
the poem also addresses more profound metaphys-
ical issues. The volume in which the poem appears,The Hiding Place