A Plea for Futurity: On Jorie Graham's "Runaway"

Jorie Graham | Runaway | Ecco | September 2020 | 96 Pages

My first exposure to Jorie Graham was brief and unintentional. I was sitting in a cafe on Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts one morning and looked up from my coffee to see a figure rush past, heading towards the door. I knew immediately it was Graham from the way she moved—elegantly, purposefully—and her wild hair, her velveteen jacket, the silver jewelry at her throat and fingers. 

My next sighting was more planned. At the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, I went to see her read from her 2017 collection, FAST. I’d gone with a friend and student of Graham’s who’d become as enraptured by her as I was. She read slowly before a small audience, and I recall being stunned by the hushed urgency of her words, the assuredness and depth of her voice, and the audience’s undying focus on the lines as she spoke them—as though they were answers to questions we hadn’t even thought to ask.

I no longer find myself in the physical vicinity of Graham, and the chances of her appearing over the rim of my coffee cup or seeing her read at a bookstore are slim given the current state of things. But alone, in the quiet of quarantine, I’d hoped to glean some of that same visceral energy from her newest collection, Runaway. 

It can be hard really settling into a Graham collection—the weight of past readings, the enormous critical praise that has followed her from the start of her career, can crowd around the text. It’d be near impossible to find an avid poetry reader who had never heard of her work or its slew of praises, had never read her lines, had never felt the familiar certainty and power of her voice. But there’s also a magnetism in all her works. Nevertheless, it pulls us in. 

The poems in Runaway maintain the usual dynamism and brilliance of Graham’s past collections, which, taken together, constitute an incisive and reverent study of the depths of human truth and mortality. Runaway, in a sense, leaps ahead of the pack, mimicking its title. The collection  is Graham’s examination of a world that feels new again, a meditation on the poet’s newfound cluelessness in our rapidly changing world. It’s a collection for the moment, filled with the urgency of a poet’s debut work, and rife with a consistent sense of rushing, of tripping over one’s own words.

In Runaway, a work cleanly broken up into four numbered sections—perhaps as counterweight to the frenetic energy within the poems themselves—Graham gives us a sensation of flooding, of running over, of words pooling and collecting as lines pulse and gather momentum while moving quickly down the page and into one another.

In a sense, of course, the collection is an extension of Graham’s previous works. In FAST, we can see the ways in which the poet’s own experience with cancer treatment is set as the backdrop of an already-raging ecological crisis and several devastating American wars, and a reckoning with what links such extreme forms of terror. In Runaway, Graham writes into the impending doom of global climate change, holding onto the acute anxiety that accompanies it. 

This is apparent in the opening poem of the collection, which begins with an epigraph from Donne’s “Lovers’ Infiniteness.”  Donne’s poem centers on the speaker’s desire to be given, and then to possess, all of his beloved’s desire. Within the lines, the speaker questions the totality of love, challenging the idea of totality itself by coming to the conclusion that ultimately, “all” her love would never be enough: “all was but all,” the epigraph reads. It’s this notion, that having or possessing all of something is perhaps meaningless, or even dangerous, that brings us into Graham’s own poem, “All.” In “All,” we see the speaker question humanity’s own need to lay claim to the totality of the world, highlighting the repercussions that must be faced as a result of that all-encompassing desire. 

There’s an urgency to this first poem that sets the tone for the rest of the collection. The poem begins following a storm: “After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on. / You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips.” The long, complete sentences that make up the first few stanzas then devolve into phrases and short sentences often starting midway through the lines themselves. For example, at one point Graham writes: “but not. The rain stopped. The perfect is not beauty. / Is not a finished thing. Is a making.” This transition from lingering, languid sentences to more staccato, harsh fragments create a sort of hushed pressure in the language. It’s as if the poet’s pen cannot quite keep up with the words that are forcing themselves down, there onto the page.

A master of experimental language,  Graham’s insistent moving down through the course of the poem is also reflected in the repeated use of hyphenated words.  In “All,” this is apparent in moments when the speaker describes a tree, “the tipping-down of the branches,” then later, after rain, the “not-yet-absorbed, not-yet-evaporated / days.” This formal choice, a creation of language within the poem itself, reflects the speakers newfound cluelessness to this world, and a confusion towards a crumbling environment: the pervasive destruction is such that it cannot be captured in simple, familiar prose, but instead requires some additional, pieced-together language in an attempt to capture such tragedy. 

In contrast, a work like “Rail” feels less dense across its two pages, a long, thin poem that echoes its title in shape, daring the reader to not get pulled in. And this is a choice less common in Graham’s other works, which are often filled with run-on sentences and long lines spanning several pages.  “Rail” opens with the speaker “setting out over the / unknowable earth,” then followed with cataloguing of the surrounding environments, the lines devolving from short phrases into just single words as the poem reaches its conclusion. We see a formal reduction, a literal breakdown, as the longer sentences in the poem’s opening (“Before, they are / transparent.”) transition again into short phrases, single words: “wildly,” and then “difference,” and then “end;” a disintegration on the page itself that serves to mirror the environmental destruction Graham focuses on.

The collection closes with a work simply called “Poem,” an elegy to the world we’re in the process of losing.  “Poem” spans two pages but is made up of just a few sentences, the first line acting as a refrain that will then close the poem. The work opens with the devastating statement: “The earth said / remember me. / The earth said / don’t let go,” The lines “remember me” and “don’t let go” act both as commands for the reader within the opening stanza, demanding at the collection’s close that we retain its message. Graham places these phrases within their own lines so that they stand freely, separate from the rest of the stanza as their meaning reverberates through the rest of the poem.  Following this opening are nine stanzas made up of one sentence, commas and dashes moving us quickly down the page. There’s a breathlessness that comes with such a formal choice, made stronger by the series of commas and short phrases.

And, as Graham often does, the stanzas in “Poem” usually end with a single word or the start of another phrase, forcing us to keep reading, to keep searching for an end. At one point, the speaker writes: “emptiness, it / shrinks from light again & / again, although all things / are present, a.” The repetition of the “g” in “light again” and “again” on the succeeding line urges us along, necessitating the efficient ampersand to force us then into the next stanza. And the “a” that ends this stanza is the start of a new phrase, again adding to the urgent quality with which we move into the next stanza, looking for what comes next.  

“Poem” ends with the sort of reverence that opens Runaway, calming the frenetic energy of the succeeding lines with three short sentences that mirror the start of the poem: 

The earth 

said remember 

me. I am the 

earth it said. Re-

member  me. 

In this crushing conclusion, Graham repeats this personification of the earth and its commands as an incantation of sorts. This time she gives a full sentence to the earth’s in own speech with the inverted line, “I am the earth it said.” The hyphenated “remember” that follows emphasizes the environmental breakdown central to this collection, and further slows the reader down. We’re left with “member me” as the last phrase on the page, a reminder of our responsibility as individuals, a “member” of the earth.