Metamorphosis: Jorie Graham’s Transformative Turns

The poetic turn—a significant shift in the rhetorical and/or dramatic trajectory of a poem—is a considerably under-recognized aspect of poetry. Despite being a crucial element in the working of so many poems, no large-scale critical conversation on the turn, such as a monograph or a collection of essays, exists. Despite its supposed innovations, the criticism of and about hybrid poetry has done little to change this. While many accomplished poets, including a number of hybrid poets, are alert to the structural dynamics of their poems—that is, they are aware of and significantly engage turns in their work—hybrid poet Jorie Graham is relatively unique in that her poetics and poems foreground turns to an extent and in ways that few others do. Specifically, Graham tropes the turn so that it represents even as it enacts transformative power. Such troping is at work in much of Graham’s oeuvre; however, it reveals itself especially clearly in her most recent collection, To 2040, in which the turn itself becomes one more natural, if sublime, element that is being lost to the ravages of unremitting environmental degradation. In To 2040, the turn becomes a hopeless craning—“we feel our soul turn frantic/in us, craning this way and that”—a desperate gesture that is ultimately empty as it has no safe place to land, no alternative position on which to rest or from which to relaunch. This powerful, if frightening, trajectory in Graham’s work can be difficult to recognize, especially given hybridity’s continued missing of the turn, but it is important to see: doing so can help to recenter the turn in discussions about poetry while also leading to an improved comprehension of Graham’s prophetic, apocalyptic vision.