164 Poetry for Students
not chosen to riot, the police would not have ar-
rested them. On the other hand, Graham implies
that one should not be so quick to blame the stu-
dents and workers exclusively for their troubles.
She exposes guilt on the part of the authorities as
well, addressing the “two Americans rounded up
by chance” and the inexcusable beating of a preg-
nant girl in the jail cell. The vicious attack, exag-
gerated or not, implies an authority that would
stoop to the lowest level possible to exert its power.
Not only does the “man in a uniform” beat people
indiscriminately, but, when he finds “the girl in her
eighth month,” he beats her “frantically over and
over,” aiming directly for her unborn child by pum-
melingher belly. Of course, the obvious irony in
this stanza is the fact that the attacker is the one
screaming “aren’t you ashamed?” at the helpless
mother-to-be. His question is not only ridiculous
and hypocritical, but it is also ambiguous: should
the girl be ashamed for her part in the student un-
rest or for being pregnant and (probably) unwed,
or both? The point is that the answer doesn’t mat-
ter. Any “guilt” the young student may bear is com-
pletely overshadowed by the atrocious cruelty of
the uniformed man.
In stanzas 10 and 11 of “The Hiding Place,”
Graham asks three questions that ultimately have
no answer, but that indicate there issomething for
the “light” to reveal, if only one can figure out what
it is. “How thick was the empty meant to be?” refers
to “the air thick, with dwellings, the air filled dou-
bled” which the speaker encounters upon her re-
lease from jail. Freedom feels especially vibrant
and thick after having lost it for a period, and the
question is really asking how free human beings
are meant to be. The other two questions that Gra-
ham poses are related in terms of how things are
and how they should be. “What were we finding in
the air?” and “What were we meant to find?” again
examine the role of freedom in our lives, the
“Everything spilling whenever the wall breaks.”
What one may actually find upon first release is the
immediate rush of liberty and abandonment, a sense
even of victory or complete autonomy. But these
emotions are usually short-lived. Perhaps what one
was meantto find is a way to maintain that free-
dom, so that when looking back into the past, one
can do so without shame and without a need to hide
from history. That the poet uses the word “meant”
twice in these three questions implies the existence
of a higher, or a designed, purpose in life and in
the events people create for themselves. The hard
part is in achieving that purpose and keeping it in
the light.The hiding place in this poem is just as elu-
sive at the end as it is in the beginning. The con-
tention here is that one does not actually exist. So
why title a poem by a name that has no represen-
tation or explanation within it? Beyond the obvi-
ous “writers do it all the time” reply, Jorie Graham
seems to want people to ponder more than the ex-
istence (or non-existence) of a place to hide. What
is more pressing, and more indicative of human life
and human history, is why one needsone. This is
a question that has many centuries’ worth of an-
swers, but, at this point, no solution.
Source:Pamela Steed Hill, in an essay for Poetry for Stu-
dents,Gale, 2001.Sources
Costello, Bonnie, in The New Republic,Vol. 206, No. 4,
January 27, 1992 pp. 36-40.
Forch, Carolyn, ed. Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century
Poetry of Witness,Norton & Norton, Co., 1991.
Gardner, Thomas, Review of Region of Unlikeness,in Con-
temporary Literature,Vol. 33, No. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 712-
34.
Graham, Jorie, Region of Unlikeness,Ecco Press, 1991.
Olsen, William, “Lyric Detachment: Two New Books of Po-
etry (Jorie Graham’s Region of Unlikeness, Chase
Twichell’s Perdido),” inChicago Review,Vol. 38, No. 3,
1991, pp. 76-89.
Sacks, Peter, “What’s Happening,” in New York Times Book
Review,May 5, 1996, p.16.
Vendler, Helen, The Breaking of Style,Harvard University
Press, 1995.
———, The Given and the Made,Faber and Faber, 1995.For Further Study
Costello, Bonnie, review of Region of Unlikeness,in The
New Republic,Vol. 206, No. 4, January 27, 1992, pp. 36-
40.
Intriguing reading of Graham’s poetic journey up un-
til Region of Unlikeness.Although the review is not
negative, it is less laudatory than most.
Gardner, Thomas, review of Region of Unlikeness,in Con-
temporary Literature,Vol. 33, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 712-
34.
Gardner contextualizes Graham’s poetry among that
of three other contemporary poets, Phillip Booth,
Linda Gregg, and John Ashberry, ultimately sug-
gesting that for these four poets, language functions
as both “wilderness and home.”The Hiding Place