Doom Scroll: Jorie Graham’s Late Style

Let’s say it while there’s still time: Jorie Graham is our most important living poet. “Our” being readers of American English; the time being late, inexorably approaching an end; “important” being as much a measure of the aim as the attainment. The judgment would be a little ambivalent even among her devoted admirers. Graham is an indulgent artist, and this indulgence has led away from easy pleasure. On the page, what Graham has wanted Graham has got. She denies herself no unlovely line break, no syntax clipped or extended beyond the ear’s sympathy, no recourse to abstraction or knotty elaboration natural only to its maker. Ever since her third book, The End of Beauty (1987), she has achieved a kind of escape velocity, ascending to a plane of self-license on which general criteria no longer apply. But no matter: she rigged the game. For nearly forty years her poems have issued from a voice so desperate and imposing that it has served as the guarantor of its own words. Do whatever she likes and she can’t quite lose. But the wins have not come as they once did.