19 feb 2005

As I hang the laundry up I feel the world's
moral earnestness well up in me for hours, each vertigo
of fraught fission, as though a window stood empty
in a fat snow of nanoseconds, fissures of thought
like grains of oat, filaments of web on my eyeglasses...


That's sort of what Jorie's poetry makes me feel like. It's a crude parody; I'm sure I would do better with a longer and better acquaintance with the style. (At least she doesn't write "finding the dead animal poems" like Stafford's deer or Eberhart's groundhog.) Certainly one feels, reading Graham, that here is a sensitive, serious, and intelligent person, maybe a bit self-absorbed and with a high opinion of herself. There's a way she has of sustaining a particular plaintive tone, never letting it go. The geese flying above her head remind her of the passage of time. She goes from there into a Yeatsian riff on "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold": "as if, at any time, things could fall further apart / and nothing could help them."

A good parody would have to get the tone, the stylistics mannerisms, and make them seem a little bit ridiculous instead of deeply serious. It would not really be a parody of the author, but of a superficial reading of the author.

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