The Appall

Jorie Graham’s poem in our December 5, 2024, issue begins:

The Killing Spree

whizzed past, we liked the look of it, it liquefied
death, it was here to stay, it actually
had nowhere else to go, was in its last stages now, longed to be
revelation, longed to be part of
nature making its
whistling sounds above, its
screaming
below. The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay about
in the dust-filled amnesia. . . .

In her decades-long career, Graham has written many such poems examining the devastating conditions of the world. “I have felt the requirement to show up, set an example, bear witness all my life,” she told me over e-mail this week. “It feels like a spiritual requirement as much as a political one. I believe poetry asks as much of one, by other means.” 

Graham’s poetry often draws from her life—in the sense that experience, too, is “forever probing, tentative, anticipatory, and open-ended,” as Helen Vendler wrote in a chapter about Graham from her book The Given and the Made. Graham has written, for example, about the Parisian student protests in May 1968 (in which she took part alongside her classmate Daniel Cohn-Bendit), about her own illness, and, across several collections, about the warming planet. She now teaches at Harvard, where she is the Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric emerita.

In our correspondence, I asked Graham about “The Killing Spree,” the war on Gaza, to which it appears to respond, the contemporary crisis of attention, and how poetry can help to resolve it.

Nawal Arjini: You’ve said before that you hope your poems engage readers’ senses before their intellects—if I understand you correctly, you believe a visceral connection to the poetry is necessary to begin to shake us out of the numbness of contemporary life before the intellect can kick in. Is that a fair summary?

Jorie Graham: Yes, that’s very fair. But not just about poetry. It takes a visceral connection to experience itself to permit us to even undergo experience. Just because we are alive, it’s increasingly not a given that we are even undergoing experience—able to fathom in our senses what experience holds and transmits.

Can you elaborate on that?

We are incarnate for a reason. What you call the numbness of everyday life is perhaps our numbness to experience—which comes about because so much of the way life is lived now bypasses the use of the panoply of senses we call the body, addicted as we are to the screen and the sensorial shortcuts—the oversimplifications—of virtual reality. There is no idea whose truthfulness can be gauged if it is not run through the senses. We know this. We casually refer to that which we most share as our “common sense.” It is or was our lie detector.

So . . . there’s nothing numb about everyday life. It’s we who are being rendered numb, our senses sanded flat precisely in order to compel us to reach for the incessant shortcuts, the sugar-like highs—the jolts of artificial stimuli—that bypass our sensory detectors to keep us distracted, entertained. To keep us in a state where we accept information (which bypasses experience) in the place of knowledge (which requires the sensory dive of experience). It’s a big part of why we find ourselves so bewildered and baffled and exhausted. Poetry, both the writing of it and the reading of it, is an antidote to this.

I felt that quite keenly in your poem in this issue. In the first few lines we—both the “we” of the reader and the “we” in the poem—find ourselves in sympathy with the killing spree itself. Do you ever read (or write) a poem the other way around—can you ever reason yourself into emotion?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t think so . . . But yes, that feeling of being in the spree, of being the spree, is keen in the opening of this poem, which modulates through multiple voices or points of view. It starts in the grip of the spree, the bloodlust, the addiction that we are witnessing all around us, in the vast and horrifying destruction in Gaza, which has been on my mind—on all our minds—but also in violence across the globe. The spree has an acceleration, a runaway and a tipping point of its own, which fuels the syntax here. It’s almost the spree that is “speaking.” And the spree is not limited to the killing of people, it’s after nature itself. The more you enter into the spree the more it needs to keep you in its thrall, that you not feel the appall your soul would otherwise “naturally” feel. The machine-mind can and will do that to you. It is a virus. A contagion. Few are immune. The poem then tries to break its spell. And an individual speaker, one of a few in the poem, emerges, bringing itself into presence as the human in us most often does—by summoning an other—“friend, stranger.” And the countervailing force to the spree—imagination—begins to operate.

This poem has a kind of plot—a structure you’ve often avoided as a too convenient hook on which a reader can hang their entire interpretation. What are the risks in bringing narrative into poetry? What are the rewards?

It’s true I have often eschewed overt narrative—as it can permit some readers to limit the manner in which they experience a poem—in favor of buried narrative. But there is always narrative. A poem is an undergoing—you step into its river at one point in time, in one state of existence, and you exit it in an altogether other. But even a so-called narrative poem is never simply its narrative. That’s the genius of form—it tells a countervailing story, or it enacts a second-order twist on the surface story. There is the content of a poem, after all, and then there is its subject, often its secret subject. So when I use “story” I make sure it contends with these other “narratives.”

In the case of this poem, when the individual is encountered—the character who comes to life, as it were, in his dying—one of the speakers in the poem begins to penetrate his consciousness, a mind that is terribly alive as it is about to be executed, about to “go out.” For this man’s disappearance from existence, as he goes out, for his individual memories to be felt, he needed to be afforded the kind of sturdy narrative presence that story accords.

Your poetry often brings together injustices that might, in prose, seem to take place on vastly different scales. In “The Killing Spree,” the depiction of the destruction of a classroom as a place of peace and learning is most directly about death, and life, in Gaza. But it also recalls the (sometimes violent) suppression of Palestinian solidarity protests on American college campuses. How do you think about the question of scale in your work, both in general and in this poem in particular?

I don’t see the shift in scale as being so dramatic. The killing of this one man cannot be quantified as small alongside the vast destruction in Gaza. One can’t quantify suffering. That said, although this poem is not exclusively about Gaza, every college and university in Gaza has been obliterated along with many hundreds of schools. In an area of about 140 square miles there were twelve universities. There were, or are, so many people with advanced degrees in Gaza that this conflict has, among its other horrors, been referred to as a “scholasticide.” The literacy rate in Gaza was—or is—I don’t know what tense to use—98 percent.

So, yes, the desks are blown to bits, and dust settles over what had been a huge surge of culture—of genius, wonder, curiosity, erudition, discipline—alongside the more violent terrorist organizations we know are—were—also present. But when we see images of the desperate people under the rubble—or starving—or worse, much worse—it’s imperative to keep in mind they live, and lived, profound interior lives in which they imagined, explored, invented, and dreamed in their classrooms. In the poem, one man imagined the universe—as it was taught to him by another man who imagined the universe. Then war cast them into their new fates.

Is that what set the poem in motion?

Not exactly. That’s the loam in which the poem grew. But one of the questions that animated me was what happens to our personal, unique store of memories when we go out? We always speak of how the future is stolen from those who are killed—all those unlived futures—everywhere on earth where the spree is alive. But what of their pasts—their own unique pasts—their incidental memories—memories they might not even realize they have. Teilhard de Chardin speaks of a “planetary neo-envelope” that hovers over our globe containing all our acts of consciousness. I was very struck by that image as a young poet. I imagined all the particular memories of each living person woven into this layer that floats as a second atmosphere around the physical earth. All we loved, all we touched inadvertently, overheard unconsciously—not even the principal strokes of our lives but the fine filaments we don’t even know we hold. What if they are a vast fabric of immaterial reality that exists in opposition to the electronic networks and the killer-drone world?

So all these forces interact in the poem—the spree, the machine, and the numinous envelope of personal human memory (which AI can never reach, touch, or use). Does that life bleed out of him along with his bodily life? Meanwhile, alongside and indifferent—the planets, the stars… So perhaps there we have those changes in scale after all—Saturn whirling in so called “outer space,” mother singing in the kitchen in the deep reaches of memory’s “inner space,” all of it equally alive. Are the stars “dead”? Are his memories “dead”? Or is all of it “pouring forth” such that nothing can actually ever be extinguished—

What do you see as the effect of the encampments and their fallout on university life, in general or in your particular experience as a professor?

I was and am obviously upset at the rising antisemitism worldwide. But beyond the grief and shock we all felt at the events of October 7, the events on American college campuses stemmed primarily from outrage at what the government of Israel did, and is doing, to the people of Gaza and the West Bank—how its officials want the world to regard Palestinians—and what appears to be its attempt at ethnic cleansing. Protests differed in different venues, but I, for one, was heartened to see so many young people willing to put their bodies on the line for their beliefs. I was encouraged to witness their outrage and pain, their understanding of the economic underpinnings of oppression, and their powerful sense of political and ethical accountability. 

Ultimately, though the protests rose up about this war, they also represent something potentially much larger: a powerful generation (and coalition) rising up from a sense of powerlessness to reenter their bodies, feeling the injustice, the shame, but also feeling that there is something one can do about it. I was surprised that more members of society were not relieved to watch their children wake up and take on the mantle of citizen. Perhaps they—perhaps we—are not going to sit idly by, endlessly distracted on our devices, as dictatorship settles over the land, oppresses our most vulnerable, and potentially sets us on a course to destroy all life on earth.

There has been a lot of discussion in person, in print, and online about how to depict the violence in Gaza. Each individual picture is so terrible, but it seems even more terrible for the exposure to a seemingly endless series of horrifying images to inevitably create distance between the viewer and the event. How do you see the relationship between image, word, and numbness in a time of such violence?

That’s an essential and painful question. Almost the only way the news about what’s happening across all war zones, on all sides of conflicts, reaches us—especially in arenas where so many journalists have been targeted and killed—is via the online postings of citizen journalists. And the same depersonalizing side effects of that mode of transmission and reception I spoke of earlier are at work, alongside the way technology has worked to decimate our attention spans. And in that struggling attention span, we must remember to include how much or little “attention” our hearts, not just our minds, can now afford to carry. So we are reduced to means that offer quick access to information, but which ensure oversaturation happens appallingly quickly when one tries to bear witness to the horrifying imagery being shared by desperate and abandoned people facing extermination. It is terrible to feel this. It offends one’s soul. It offends one’s sense of justice.

But one needs to keep trying—one needs to work to stay open, to show up to witness. And we have the imagination as a tool—we can ask art to keep rinsing the soul, keep helping it stay lucid and awake and raw enough to experience the pain, keep empathy alive, allow outrage to linger in our senses… I hope this is true. Art has, as it always has, its work cut out for it. The demands seem ever more urgent. The forces one is up against—in the case of your question, the destructive characteristics of the very technology one has been made to rely on—ever more formidable…

Are there any poets you suggest we turn to?

Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Akhmatova, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Anna Swir, Mahmoud Darwish, Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Nâzim Hikmet, Yannis Ritsos, Yehuda Amichai, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Serhiy Zhadan, Refaat Alareer, Raúl Zurita, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ilya Kaminsky. So many others. Carolyn Forché’s anthology of the poetry of witness, Against Forgetting, is a good place to start.