510
PARTISAN REVIEW
At the conclusion of "Pollock and Canvas," the longest poem in
her book and a kind of
ars poetica,
Graham presents her brief against
traditional representation in lines that are programmatic for the pro–
ject she has undertaken:
..... The moment
a figure appears on the canvas, she said,
the story begins, the story begins the error sets in,
the error the boredom, she said, the story talking louder
than the paint, she said, the boredom the hurry , she sa id
(without embarrassment, without shame)
(and you must learn to feel shape as simply shape whispered the
wind, not as description not as reminiscence not as what
it will become)
Graham's commitment to "shape as simply shape" issues in a start–
ling formal mannerism, the substitution of blank spaces and alge–
braic values for words, as if to ask, "Dear reader, is it enough for you
that I am thinking of you / in this generic sort of way ...
?"
("Room
Tone"). One cou ld hardly imagine a more austere renunciation of
"description ," of a representational poetics, than what one finds in
such passages as the following (from the opening of "The Veil"):
In the Tabernacle the veil hangs which is (choose one):
the dress dividing us from
; the sky; the real ,
through which the x ascends (His feet still showing through on
this side)
into the realm of uncreated things . .. .
For all its brilliance, however, the poetry generated by Graham's
aesthetic commitments is often argumentative and abstract without
being either intellectually lucid or sensually engaging; her reports on
human experience come to us at times as if prejudiced by obscure
metaphysical preoccupations. Still, her best poems carry the reader
along by their sheer momentum, daring, passion, and assurance ,
making it possible for us to take pleasure in them far in advance of
our comprehension.
Amy Clampitt has been on a trip. She's been to Greece, En–
gland, Italy, and Germany-and, more specifically, she's been to
