Graham: Sometimes I feel I am living an extended farewell, where my eventual disappearance, my mortal nature, normally a deep human concern, has been washed away by my fear for the deeper mortality- the extinction- of other species, and of the natural world itself. I cannot look at the world hard enough. My love for it has never been so directed. I can take nothing for granted. Creation astonishes me where it used to just delight me.
In many ways this book is an attempt to describe to a future people what is was like to have water, to have seasons, to know what blossoming was and a daybreak where one did not fear the sun, or a heavy wind where one did not fear its' going too far, beyond normal. What is normal, I have kept wondering. Where is the tipping point? Where does the positive feedback loop set in? Where is the point of no return? How are we going to be as people then? What is an ethical compass for when scarcity sets in? How does one retain one's humanity under those circumstances or does one become inevitably barbaric in the defense of one's tribe? Where does one draw the line- what is a line under those circumstances- and which side of the line will one be on?
And what is art for then? What is dreaming for? What is the imagination supposed to do with its capacity to imagine the end? Is the imagination of the unimaginable possible, and, perhaps, as I have come to believe, might it be one of the most central roles the human gift of imagination is being called upon to enact? Perhaps if we use it to summon the imagination of where we are headed- what that will feel like- what it will feel like to look back at this juncture- maybe we will wake up in time? I have written it in order to make myself not only understand-we all seem to understand- but to actually feel (and thus physically believe) what we have and what we are losing- and furthermore what devastatingly much more of creation we are going to be losing.
. . .
Wengen: This collection feels as if it ties the connection between the past and the unknown future into a state of teetering present- yet you weave hope throughout. Would you consider yourself a hopeful person? Do you have faith in the future?
Graham: In the short run I cannot but hope, I wouldn't have written this if I were hopeless. I think artists have a large responsibility at present- that of awakening the imagination of a deep future. If humans have to be asked to make sacrifices for people they do not even know will be alive- sacrifices the results of which will not be evident, if at all, except four or five generations hence, then we are going to have to help awaken an imagination of that deep future, in order that people feel connected to it in their willingness to act. After all people are going to be asked to radically alter their lives- for their whole lives- in order that their kind and their world might remain. I happen to feel one can reawaken that sensation of an unimaginably far off horizon. We are so collapsed-down now into a buzzing noisy here-and-now, an era of instant gratification, decimated attention-span, that it is going to take some work to help people see in their mind's eye that far off horizon many generations beyond their own time, a time towards which they are going to have to try to take a leap of faith- and a leap which involves deep sacrifice at that. But I wouldn't be making the effort to answer you in this way, at length, or to write such a book, if I did not believe we still had that chance. A real chance. And that art could be in service of that goal.
_______
read the full interview at Poets.org
_______
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: "For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption- intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic- rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems."
No comments:
Post a Comment