Jorie Graham Talks Fast at The Rumpus

Jorie Graham discusses her new collection (her first in five years), Fast (Ecco, 2017), with Erin Lyndal Martin at The Rumpus. "Here, she confronts her father’s death, his Southern roots, her mother’s dementia, and her own cancer diagnosis and treatment. Though these issues are personal, she writes about them as only she can, never losing sight of the eternal and the ever-weighty now," writes Martin. An bit from their conversation:

Rumpus: Fast has two self-portraits in it, picking up a thread from your other books. Do the self-portraits have any continuity from one to the next for you, or are they more like snapshots?

Graham: Well it’s very hard to look in a mirror and see anything which resembles what one feels one’s self to be. I think that discomfort, that dislocation, disintegration—that raw lack of feeling whole—that dysmorphia—is a very good place, in this moment, to hunt for the kind of experience which really requires the means of poetry to be grasped or felt. I think most people would agree that in our current historical and political extremity it has become unprecedentedly hard to look in the mirror.

Rumpus: In “Self-Portrait at Three Degrees,” one line reads “define human.” In the second part, we get “The Post-Human,” which is about death. “The Medium” has the passage about taking of shoes, heart, skin, palm, etc. The third section has a lot to do with the body, questioning corporeality and image. Were you thinking of all the different ways to be post-human while writing this?

Graham: Yes—all the states towards which we are morphing quickly now—the virtual, the robotic, the cyborg, the barbaric—but also other post-human conditions: my father’s body lying there on “his” bed after he is “gone”—what is it? My mother’s body after her mind goes. My father’s being when I use a medium to contact him—in what “other” world—and he “communicates” with me through her. As well as the world without us in it. The seabed, for example, long after we as a species are gone—what will it still be undergoing. That mutter. Or our human trace on the so-called “holy” shroud. What is left of us? Why does the trace have power? How far do we want to stray from what we still know to be the human? How far? Really, how far? Are we prepared for what we are encountering? Do we like the face that stares back at us—even now, culturally, politically—saying Hi, this is you, this is what you have become. Everyone okay with this?

Check out the full interview here.