T.S. Eliot and Jorie Graham

I love “Burnt Norton” because it reads like music feels. It’s the experience of time I guess, as it moves through the poem. The movement is what makes it beautiful, because it kind of carries you into awareness of the present.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Consciousness doesn’t last longer than a moment, and maybe that’s a good thing. Without the limitations of time, at least in these mortal bodies, I think we would be crushed. Eliot is gesturing towards a paradox: immediate experience can’t be divorced from the past or the future. Even in my imminent frame, I can’t deny the pressure of transcendence bearing down on the moment.

But there is relief in the still point. These lines from “Burnt Norton” are some of my favorite lines in poetry:

And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Jorie Graham is another poet who is like, hyper-aware of the present. Sometimes it gives me anxiety. There’s a sense that the speaker of the poem desperately wants to bear the reality Eliot’s bird said humans can’t handle. She really wants to know it. I was binging on Jorie Graham poems for way too long, and then I stumbled across an interview she gave in the Paris Review. Anyway, she talks about this profound experience she had in a tiny little chapel in Italy. Something about that experience, and wanting to distill it into a poem, keyed her in to her own “desire-for-belief” –a huger for presence. This hunger links her to Eliot for me. I think she has his capacity for presence, but it seems to torment her more. It's almost as if she wants to be freed of it.

From “Covenant”

O sweet conversation: protozoa, air: how long have you been speaking?
The engine [of the most] is passing now.
At peak: the mesmerization of here, this me here, this me
passing now.
So as to leave what behind?
We, who can now be neither wholly here nor disappear?
And to have it come so close and yet not know it:
how in time you do not move on:
how there is no "other" side:
how the instant is very wide and bright and we cannot
                                                                     ever
get away with it--the instant--what holds the "know"

Graham’s poetry is stunning because it presses the limits of language and presence. Her hunger is loud, and far from being satisfied.