Group work - Jorie Graham

Group members - Lauren Baggett, Isabelle Chang, Linda Doan, Kristina Mahler and Melany Zerbino

Our group chose to discuss Jorie Graham’s “Prayer”. Initially we discussed the meaning of the title and the way it invokes the issue of faith in the poem however the group agreed that the role of faith in this poem is devoid of religious connotation. The figure in the poem is watching minnows in motion and they are acting on some unseen motivation that exists within them; it is sort of a mystery to the spectator. The minnows are exhibiting a force which cannot be put into words; there is something intangible at work in the world which is felt by the figure. The poem deals with freedom and the freedom one experiences when realizing you are part of something larger and this realization requires faith in oneself and the world. However, the notion of freedom and the image of the fish acting as one being contradict one another. The second part of the poem is paradoxical to the first; the last line of the poem “It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here:never.” suggests a lack of agency and that the speaker is free and yet restricted in their choice. The figure in the poem is restricted in their speech and does not speak aloud in the poem; however the reader is seemingly privy to their internal realizations. We related this to a statement in Graham’s poetic statement which reads “it is not because language has failed the author, it seems to me, but but because the human speaker has reached the point where the action of mind takes place in silence” (147). As a language poet Graham has a more lyric style and her poem is somewhat abstract but much more literal than most of the other poems by language poets. Graham does not shy away from the use of “I” in this poem, she finds the medium to produce “I” in the language. Parataxis is shown through the equality relations created by paradoxes and the force of the individual and the collective appear equal at the end of the poem. There is no hierarchy of experience in this poem, both the experience of the figure and the minnows are equal. Graham states that for her the power of poetry “resides most vividly in its capacity to make a reader receive utterable and unutterable realities at once” (148), “Prayer” is a powerful example of her ability to convey this sense of realization as well as “the inexpressible, the emissary of the nonverbal territories of intuition, deep paradox, conflicting bodily impulses...,profoundly present yet non-languaged spiritual insights [and] certain emotional crisis states” (148). As a language poet Graham does not think language is exhausted by any means. She sees language as the tool; it’s how you use the instrument and not the instrument itself.