“pretty” response to her dying mother’s behavior in the nursing home; she is
unsparing in showing her own failings as well as those of others. Every reader
can identify with such a situation. But in “Evolution” the world-weary nar-
rator, curiously knowing about the relation of past and present, the journey
into the future, and the fate of the self, seems unable to see herself as others
see her. Dif¤culty in such a poem is less the inherent dif¤culty of a complex
response to a particular situation than it is a calculated “dif¤culty,” designed
to impress readers with the profundity and importance of the issues at stake.
Why, then, have “Evolution” and related Graham poems won such ex-
travagant praise from reviewers and prize committees? The answer, I think,
is that such poems are just familiar enough to hit a responsive chord without
quite giving themselves away. “Evolution” is a neo-Romantic lyric medita-
tion, the representation of a thought process that culminates in the recogni-
tion that “Our future” would ideally be one where we could be ourselves, in
all our nakedness, even as, so we know, “all the sentences come to complete
themselves.” Shades of the prison house inevitably close in on us. Given these
parameters, the poem’s willed indeterminacies like “What is enough / of it?
And keep?” are curiously contained within a formal ¤xity (the passage from
“nakedness” to “show its face”) that belies these ostensibly open meanings.
Yet—and this is what makes the comparison of Armantrout to Graham
valuable—“Evolution” testi¤es at every turn to its author’s awareness of
the Language movement, even as it doesn’t want to take dislocation and dis-
continuity to the extremes of Armantrout or Bruce Andrews, of Charles
Bernstein or Clark Coolidge. Consider the lines “The way it goes where it
goes, slight downslope, / like the word ‘suddenly,’ the incline it causes.” The
reference is to the fact that “súddenly” is a dactyl and hence “inclines” down-
ward (/ x x ), thus making “súddenly” itself a verbal “downslope.” But unlike
Armantrout’s recognition, in the poem “No,” that “The copula may take the
form of a cable / or snake” (Pretext 46), the reference to “suddenly” seems
more clever than integral to the poem.
Comparison and contrast, in any case, can make a poetry class learn to
differentiate between enigmas that cannot be resolved because the poet has
no answers and those that are, more properly, surface dif¤culties, easily pene-
trable on a second or third reading. Graham’s is usually considered a “philo-
sophical” poetry, what with its frequent allusions to Heidegger and Agam-
ben, Levinas and Lacan, and it is true that hers is highly unlike the more
transparent mode of such of her contemporaries as Sharon Olds or Rita
Dove. If we wanted to place Graham’s poetic, we might assign it to the “Ro-
mantic esoteric” slot—highly complicated and serious but with none of the
256 Chapter 13