Contemporary Poetry

lyric subjects 47

have sought to enter, to break the surface, one of the ways it

has been crooked – the blindness that one may see. And in the

poets that go that way, twisted syntax, breaks against smooth

sequence or sense, line breaks of queer kinds, white spaces,

interruptions, dashes, overpunctuation, delays, clotted rich

diction, obscurity, disorder, ellipses, sentence fragments,

digressive strategies – every modulation in certainty – are all

tools for storming the walls.^41

One can read into Graham’s self-portraiture an evocation of the
phrase ‘Penelope’s web’. The phrase is associated with a task
that is perpetually in process but never done or completed. This
act of weaving in the poem is also associated with the pattern-
ing and evocation of memory. Graham’s ‘Self-Portrait as Hurry
and Delay’ points to the loom as trapping Odysseus, ‘her hands
tacking his quickness down as if soothing it to sleep’ (p. 50 ).
Not unlike the evocation of ‘keeping the gap alive’ in Pollock’s
action painting, Penelope’s action of unthreading, snipping and
weaving enables what the speaker refers to as ‘his wanting in the
threads she has to keep alive for him / scissoring and spinning and
pulling the long minutes free’ (p. 51 ). Eventually creation and its
destruction are seen as a continual undistinguishable cycle, what
Graham points to as ‘beginning always beginning the ending’
(p. 52 ). The title’s reference to self-portraiture enables Graham to
meditate upon the motivations of poetic writing, its relationship to
memory and actions that have not yet occurred. Like Ashbery and
Bhatt, Graham places poignant refl ections on artistic intention and
how self-portraiture generates questions regarding the writing of
poetry. She asks us to consider poetry’s relation to absence, omis-
sion, creation and destruction.

NOBODY’S VOICE: MICHAEL PALMER

A key fi nal question needs to be addressed: what happens to the
individual speaking voice, or lyric ‘I’, when the self is displaced
from centre stage and an experience of language takes its place?
American poet Michael Palmer suggests that the two apparently