The Disconnect and The End: <em>Killing Spree by Jorie Graham and We Interrupt This Broadcast by Gregory Orr</em>

The infinitesimal exactitude of poetry is such that a single line can startle you with recognition, reorient your perspective, and give voice to a previously unarticulated (perhaps even inexpressible) suspicion about the way things are. I experienced this kind of revelation at the opening lines of Gregory Orr’s poem “So Often There’s a Disconnect” from his latest collection We Interrupt This Broadcast, which goes like this: “So often there’s a disconnect: / You know the world / Is ending and you eat your soup.”

Suddenly numerous moments I’ve experienced during which some vague notion lingered somewhere in my mind, some abstruse itch I could neither locate nor satiate: Like the time I was just about to cut a PB&J in half when I was interrupted by a phone call informing me that a friend had died. After I hung up, shocked and saddened, I still cut the sandwich.

Jorie Graham’s latest work, Killing Spree, also contains a revelatory line addressing the same phenomenon. Her poem “When the End Starts” begins by continuing the title line: “all of us are shopping.” The implicit idea behind both Orr’s and Graham’s lines can be phrased two distinctly different ways: Orr’s is more about personal persistence in the face of stupefying disaster, whereas Graham’s focuses on our lack of productive confrontation with this disaster, the complicity of our inaction. In fact, these connected but combative perspectives can be extended to the collections themselves, with Orr’s representing a more hopeful, perhaps even naïve, attitude, whereas Graham’s is wholly mired in a kind of reticent fatalism.

More significantly, though, these two contemporary American stalwarts show just how poetry can effectively engage with the hyper-present, how it can disregard notions of timelessness in favor of firmly planted temporal ethic, and how much richer and deeper their visions are as a result.

Gregory Orr’s fourteenth collection opens with an elder of the literary tradition, the mythological bard Orpheus, who, in Orr’s vision, “stands on the bank / Of the river that separates / What’s alive / From what’s dead.” From his perch overlooking (or, I guess, underlooking) the living world (“No longer welcome / In either realm”), Orpheus considers the state of things:

Orpheus is old, worn out,
Worries the same is true
About the world around him.
Has it also slipped a gear or two?

Who better to consider our history than the ultimate expert on the consequences of looking back? But even a figure famed for his grief struggles to determine how to “witness all this / Diminishing / And still / Be able to sing?” Everywhere he looks he sees catastrophe: “Even as Orpheus speaks / Another species / Vanishes completely.” And this, Orpheus believes, is the fault of humanity:

He suspects we humans
Must have voted
Somewhere
In our secret hearts
That we didn’t
Need them.
                        And now

It’s true—we don’t.

But if our world is damned, is there any place for hope?

Orr imagines an alternate Earth called “Un-Earth,” a deliberate play on the verb, where “roots are / Revealed / While / Branches are hidden.” A kind of Bizarro World of opposites, sort of like the portrait of the USSR the one-note comic Yakov Smirnoff used to crassly paint in the 80s (“In America, you break law. In Soviet Russia, law breaks you!”), Un-Earth allows Orr to invent a new world whole-cloth, a literary device for our struggling spirits over our decimated terrain. On this other Earth, “wisdom… / isn’t stored in libraries,” but rather

It’s down there mixed with the molder
And bones
And the only way to learn it
Is to earn it yourself by digging down
Into the buried
Past—not just world’s but your own.

Orr quotes something his mother used to asked him: “What on earth / Are you doing up at this ungodly hour?” Now “Un-Earth” as its equivalent deity, the Un-God. If the verb unearth is evoked in Orr’s philosophical exercise, then the suggestion of a new verb, “to ungod,” is left to the reader to define, though it seems clear that in Orr’s vision it involves some amount of un-deifying.

Orr, the founder of the MFA program at the University of Virginia, finds some optimism and solace about the future in his students, who he celebrates in a poem called “They Came to Learn,” which, like many poems in this vein, is trite and, as antidote to the horrors of our political and ecological disaster, rather depressing. It contains lines like “And so they gazed and contemplated / as the seasons passed. / And so, they gathered / at season’s or semester’s end / those snowy pages of a thesis / they might take into the world.” This is about as insightful as a graduation speech. The fact that Orr is personally moved by the passion and potential of his students is wonderful, but his notion doesn’t scale beyond the confines of his classroom. Being optimistic about the future because of a small sampling of people you’ve encountered is a little like believing a building fire won’t destroy the entire building because the trainees hoping to be firefighters someday seem like a strong bunch. Someone still needs to put out the fires right now—otherwise there won’t be any blazes to battle. Or, more aptly, everything will be burning, so firefighting will no longer be a trade skill but a necessity for surviving.

Orr’s COVID poems similarly seem less than fresh, but perhaps this is due to recency bias. I’m trying to imagine someone reading a poem like “Pandemic Lockdown Blues” and finding in its clumsy rhyming and stale observations a lens through which to understand a rather rarefied period in history. Could they glean anything from

Mold’s growing on my traveling shoes—
Guess I’m here till I turn to clay,
But it’s not as if I get to choose.
Sun goes down, I hit the booze—
It’s one more anxious covid day,

other than we must have been pretty bored and isolated during the lockdowns? Sure, Orr’s depiction is as accurate as any other, just as anyone’s story about where they were when 9/11 happened captures what most of us experienced—but that doesn’t make it insightful. For many of us, COVID was a supreme inconvenience, but the heart of it was about the sick and dying, just as 9/11 is less about, say, airport security severity than it was about the hundreds of people who perished. Focusing on the other aspects of the tragedies, while understandable to certain extent, also seems a little beside the point.

All of which is to say that if Orr’s descriptions of contemporary phenomena seem a little out of touch, then how can we countenance his portrait of an alternate, more humane planet? He is much more effective when he’s in a more damning mode, as in the poem “Late-Empire Confession,” in which he notes

I could have done something
Though I don’t know what.
We all saw it happening.
But that fact won’t absolve me. 

No, it won’t. We all must confront our complicity in political oppression, climate change, unregulated capitalism, and ubiquitous corruption, particularly if we’re in positions of any kind of power. “I was as powerless as the next,” Orr writes, “But less poor than most. / I bought my own happiness.”

As We Interrupt This Broadcast moves along, it becomes clear that of all the people on this alternate “Un-Earth,” Orr is most interested in his other self. Most of the collection, in fact, revolves around what at first might appear to be a self-reckoning but instead ends up being merely self-portraiture. There’s “Inner Monologue Addressed to My Alternate Self,” which grapples with the complexities of self-love, a worthy subject, to be sure, but one that feels less vital in the teeth of a dying planet. Conjuring an entire Earth filled with other versions of everything and choosing to focus on yourself seems like a lot of work for what could have been achieved via other strategies. The final section of the book, Part Four, is made up of poems like “Sixteen Sort-of Sonnets in Old Age,” which do not deliver on the promise of the Un-Earth premise. In fact, that concept is mostly forgotten by the conclusion, which is filled more with pieces like “Three for Keats,” yet another poet celebrating the influence of another poet. All of these are fine pursuits in and of themselves, on occasion, but since Orr went out of his way to establish an idea with such poetic potential only to then mostly ignore that idea in the subsequent pages, the collection is less like the call to emergency suggested by its title and more like something tantamount to choreographing a dance on a sinking ship.

Jorie Graham is no dancer. But she is a relentless self-reckoner. The opening poem to her sixteenth collection, “The World,” equates her own faults with those of our planet:

THE WORLD

didn’t change much
at first. At
first it
didn’t change

much, at first I
didn’t—I don’t—
change much.

Graham is in the world, and the world is in Graham—indicting one is indicting the other. And in “Demonstration,” Graham even takes on the guilt of this world, telling an imagined reader of the future:

If you can hear this,
If this reaches you,
forgive us,
we did not know who we were.

Who we are, it seems, are shortsighted creatures who fall prey to self-aggrandizement. In “Before,” Graham describes the sentiment like this: “of all times this is the one now.” How can we seek solutions about the future when we can barely look beyond our present?

Over and over again, Graham considers the ways we confront antagonistic forces, sometimes with selfishness disguised as tempered gratitude, as in the poem “No One Today,” in which Graham itemizes the senseless tragedies that have not befallen her presently:

                        …I
did not die. My
love did not. Is intact. I
checked. Beloveds 

were not dragged

into the net of
the eye of
the drone, were not dis-
membered into 

instant ancestors—
not even memories—too
fast, too torn, no.

But Graham knows the nuances of the hypocrisies capitalism pushes us into. She doesn’t blame our complicity (coerced or not) for causing the problems, as she sees the precariousness of our historical moment. The title poem provides some perspective:

We are so late in this story.
Unable to tell our heroes from our tormentors.
Unable to be convinced ever again of
anything. 

About halfway through the collection comes “Upon the Furthest Slope You Know,” in which Graham lays out the most succinct summation of our plight:

We knew all along
we were being driven

however kindly—
and always with water & treats
and names murmured
which had been bestowed

upon us
long ago
before we could resist
the temptation 

of being made so
singular—
to slaughter.

Daunting and deft evocations of contemporary malaise are Graham’s specialties. Her poems are often characterized as spare, but they are also unsparing, and in their depth and length, they are often more expansive than some other more linguistically wide-ranging verse. Her achievements come through the complexities of her intellectual and emotional ideas and the unwavering penetration of her lyrical eye.

Not that she isn’t remarkable with phrases. “Approaching Sundown” describes this time of day by observing “there is suddenness / to all surfaces.” In “Death,” she notes the way “Midday wintering light / oiled gently up every tree,” which is such a wonderful use of that verb. There’s also the “instant ancestors” line quoted above from “No One Today.” Her language is much closer to ornery than ornate.

The book’s conclusions offer very little in the way of solace. One of the most effective poems comes near the end. “Then” extends Graham’s remarkably astute diagnoses of our current ailments, as well as it captures the emotions undergirding them:

          …I
will let go
of the world
as it was

once. It was probably
never that way
I will think,
but its cage 

wasn’t visible then
& we thought we were
free, we thought
there was history

in the world—
but it was an
illusion, wasn’t it, it
must have been,

because otherwise how
could it have
disappeared
so suddenly.

One of the grand difficulties of being alive is how minimal our control is over our impact on the world around us. Sometimes we shout and yell and desperately seek attention, only to be met by utter silence, while other times the slightest miscalculation can domino its way through a myriad of disastrous consequences. We’re nostalgic for the comforts we felt in our youth, but we misattribute that comfort to the era and not our coming of age in that era. We’re contributing to climate change, but we have no power over the real villains of the environment: corporations and governments. We were made to buy into the myth of “the singular reason / for the world’s incomprehensible / demise,” which does nothing but deflect accountability.

Graham is one of America’s greatest working poets, and The Killing Spree is one of her best collections. Unflinching in its portraits of our malevolent present, unwavering to its dedication to considered craft, and uninhibited by naivety, The Killing Spree illustrates the vitality of poetry in reckoning with the unspeakable. We should follow her example even into darkness.