"Poetry Like Pasta Fazool:
  Recipies in the Phantom Poetry Zone"

An Interview with Poet Jorley Grahamstein
by Moses O'Shaughnessy

(No, Not Jorie Graham)

Jorley Grahamstein is widely regarded as the premiere Diva of American Poetry. In 1999, her award winning poem, "The Flippancy," was read by her at a White House dinner before the President, First Lady, First Child, and select diplomats from Ireland, Israel, and Amish Town, PA. Ms. Grahamstein prides herself as a "living bridge" between the Jewish and Irish communities, for she considers herself to be an Irish Jew--perhaps a wandering one who looks to the Amish for hope--as she likes to tease us--but nonetheless ... Jorley teaches poetry at Harvard, and has published no less than 38 books of poetry, all of which are carried by the Library of Congress and destined for eternity. A collection of 500 of her poems (among other objects d'art) will be launched in the next NASA probe to Neptune ("The Aldeberan") due to leave this solar system eight years from now, bound for-- as Jorley puts it--the "space of black."

June, 1993: a soon-to-be pregnant Jorley Grahamstein pilgrammaged across country to the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst, Massachusetts. For many weeks before she had been possessed with the need to ask Emily Dickinson a question. Despite Ms. Dickinson's death and subsequent burial in 1886, Ms. Grahamstein persevered till she arrived at the front door to the property.

Before knocking, Jorley Grahamstein recalled the two reasons why she had come: of the women poets who had strongly influenced her work, "All were Jewish, and only a few were Irish, or something else, perhaps Amish, and hoping I was at least Jewish enough--not ever having been told--at least enough to write the kind of poetry I wanted to write. Also, the women poets--Jewish or not--were all childless, all maidens, all of them." Whereas Jorley, married to her high school sweetheart, was ready for children, yet ready for poetry too. "I was frightened, anxious that a pregnancy, the evolution of an embryo into limbs, into a translucent, slight-boned hunger, might suffocate my destiny, my overwhelming need to write poetry that would certainly be known by major critics at Harvard as wondrous, enlightening, and edgy . I thought being a non-Jewish mother might suppress my poetic yearnings, or rather, yearn for my poetic suppressions. I needed Emily to give me a sign, to sign me an Emily, tell me if I were Jewish or not, and child myself I could, or not. "

After she knocked, five yentas answered the door. They wouldn't let me in, they called me a potato head, and said they wanted to de-spud me. I really pleaded with them, again and again to be taken to Emily's writing room. Finally, I threw up on the poorch, and rather than put up with me any longer, they agreed to let me have a peek." Grahamstein continues: "I knew how to find her room. I'd seen the photographs on emilydickinson.com, and when I saw the spot where her desk was supposed to be, it was gone. My eyes hobbled down the wall to the floor, and there was a cradle, and inside it, a dradle--so typical of Emily to answer this way.

The halo of yentas explained that the desk had departed the previous day, and that suddenly, the day before Jorely arrived, so did the dradle inside the cradle, "a Zen-koan by express freight." The minute she saw the dradle in the cradle, she knew she was going to have a baby girl and name her "Emily Basheba Grahamstein," Grahamstein says. "As for how Jewish am I, the answer to that I know. I am Jewish, Irish too, but Jewish. Once I've written enough, the Amish in me might assert itself, I don't know."

Jorley Grahamstein can talk and talk and talk; asking her a question is a little like taking a sip of water from Hoover dam, you are literally crushed by the millions of pounds per ego square inch impacting on your consciousness. The poet's mind leaps through the dimensions, from gnosis to hostess, to history and back. Often she says things you don't understand, that one might believe associated with advanced brain dyslexia, but which you soon realize are simply too brilliant for your ape brain to process. She is fast, very fast. An interminable rehashing of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crash finally culminates on this musing, "Yeats speaks of 'this dying animal' that we each carry around, which in turn reminds me of my dead dog, which in turn forces me to confont America's inability to accept guidance from the spirit world."

For most of the last quarter-century, the Iowa Workshop had been Grahamstein's base of power. She earned an M.F.A. there in 1986. She quickly built an architectured mythos about herself by means of personal appearances, hundreds of glamor pics, and new age anecdotes of "higher plane" visitations. This was the place where poet John Berryman taught poet Don Justice, who taught Bob Trimble, who taught Marty Schwartz, who taught the Grahamstein. She considers herself the latest, and perhaps most important addition to this royal poet line.

In her pulitzer winning collection, Incohate Dreams of The Usual Field, Jorley Grahamstein's poetry seems to reflect not only her book jacket blurbs, but her own press releases as well, i.e., that true and pure poetry evolves from a mystical inner process, one that stirs within the poet amorphous thoughts of profound insignificance connected in ways incomprehensible. "In poetry," Jorley says, "you have to stop reporting experience and become the experience, and then instead of reporting that, you become that, and well, you know . . . I guess it never ends."

We next asked Ms. Grahamstein about her thoughts on nature. "Being around rocks and stuff is really different than being around people," she said. "Politics I need, or philosophy to make any sense out of all those trees, rocks, and crows. Once I understand how indifferent to me they are, the knowledge I press down, deep inside, till finally it becomes incohate, and then I can write a poem about it. If I take a crow and place it in a field of dead people, I am making a statement. The pen is my walking stick." On the beach, she studies the soggy, post-lunar, intertidal fringe. "This is where the pen really gets to be a pain cause it won't stop sinking in the sand, as soon as I put a little weight on it." To write poetry, "I need to hear the music of my own spheres, but first I must empty myself of thought." She never knows where she is going to start. Often there's a scuttling, crab-like sound, or an image that brays, or perhaps an Amish quilt-maker pushing needles into a pet turtle. "I wait till I feel something incohate, mystical, spiritual ... perhaps with teeth, or beak, at my emptiness pecking ... near the pallid bust of Pallas, above my chamber door."

The literary critic who has written most extensively on Grahamstein is Boston University Professor Meagan Grendel, Ph.D. '70. Her 1994 book Slacking On Substance treats O'Doole, Schwartz, and Grahamstein. "A remarkable body of writing, because I can't understand any of it," says Grendel. One of her most famous poems, "Bugs Good, Rock Band" from Anti-Wabbit-Da-Vita-Loca, (1993), illustrates Grahamstein's magical synthesis of incohate notion and intellect at work. The speaker sits on her back steps, looking down at a red ant mound near her feet. She imagines the clucking mandible sounds of the worker ants as they tote larva, and at the same time, she hears a rock band in the garage next door, banging out their ska-punk version of Ina-Gadda-Da-Vida. The band is seen as a monstrous collective thing, like a jellyfish on acid, but the ants are unware of the punk band, they can only vibrate, meaninglessly, in rhythm to each bass chord. "It's about the self as an animal able to hear stuff, the ants and bass, only that, because we're able to inhale just so much through our access pores. But you can see one of the chords being really strong, and the ant just bites through the larva in reaction to the chord. It's like childhood's end, punk rock baptism causing the death of innocence. It's all so vita loca!"

Ms. Grendel is on the whole responsible for Grahamstein's meteoric rise in the American poetry consciousness. Ms. Grahamstein refers to her as "my fairy godmother." We asked her how she first met Meagan Grendel. "On the beach, on my knees I was, pawing at the intertidal fringe, digging for meaningful sand crabs, when Ms. Grendel appeared waving a wand of driftwood and descending from the crest of a nearby dune, as if she were floating, magically." Waving and lowering herself on air, she sang to Jorley Grahamstein: "Alakazoo, loca ballyhoo, and flippity floppity goo, put 'em together and whaddya got, poetry like pasta fazool!" The experience changed Ms. Grahamstein forever. It was like amore! Bells did ring, ring ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling, and they both sang, "Vita bella." And it's been vita bella ever since for Jorley Grahamstein. To this day, and despite being an Irish Jew with Amish leanings, she dreams in Italian. "It all started when I was in France, toppling Charles De Gaule. In the jail house there was a woman in my cell, crooning in Italian. Afterwards I knew I would dream of Italy, and since I don't live there, I dream in Italian. Scusa me but you see, I'm in ole Napoli!"

The eclectic Ms. Grahamstein doesn't neglect to machete down to size the big issues of philosophy, religion, history, and politics: Region of Hackney, for example, opens with 10 epigraphs, including four from Gnostic radical, Basilides, and three from philosopher Kant. "People don't read this stuff anymore, " she says, "So maybe they'll read it if I publish it." In "Two Women by Moustafa Lafa," from Give me Frisson, or Give Me Meth, Grahamstein explores the Holocaust. "You see, nice words like Treblinka, Buchenwald, the Nazi's just ruined them. It's infuriating! "Blown to Little Pieces," from the same collection, incohately describes a hibiscus bush with a Nazi grenade in it. A child found the grenade and was told it was a potato masher. She gave it to her father and he tried to mash potatoes with it. "I come from people who were blown up by potato mashers, and other people who didn't have enough potatoes," Grahamstein says. "It's all so troubling."

Such cosmically vast and universally relevant themes do not fit easily into the short formats of lyric poetry. "It's nearly impossible for Jorley to insert her epic perceptions into a lyric moment," says Grendel, whose formidable critical intelligence is utterly baffled by Grahamstein's conundrums. "I say, I don't get it, I just don't get it. But it's a turn on." Readers stunned into stupor by the power of Grahamstein imagery find it difficult to follow the startling, nonsensical leaps of her thought. "Poetry in any era, is beyond sense," Grahamstein explains. "Good poetry is ambiguous, puzzling, incomprehensible. That's how it should be. Poetry is a way of saying something you can't say because you can't say it--yet you have to say it anyway. Life, like poetry, is like a phantom limb, which in turn is like a poem. The more you feel it, the more it ceases to exist. That's the effect I'm looking for. I exist in the phantom poetry zone."

The Storm

Beneath pruned hawthorn, where I am
			Twisting up, tight-knotted, down-thrusting,
hearing a rivering of loosened eternity--or a pattering--no, it is eternity--
almost-knowable, not glassy or dimmed from attention--I say irridescent

			and mean it's raining.
The sensation of a meadow and pulling (or clicking?) with an opening-out then a closing-in, an 
				umbrelled weight.  It has a hole in it.  Is this broken?  
	Feather. Wicker. Broom.  Stick.  All too "thick" 				
				or filled-up with dark "glaze."  

Eyes open now, a dash, bump, fling, and something visibly busted, something inaudible 
		trembling.  Here we go--a slowed-down permanence tugs, ripples, accumlates 
                                                   and all at once 
				To my left

Something mounting, resembling--
				Does this have a top?
Not only where I concentrate.  But in the way the thing is seen.  Or is it seeing? 
Two or three gazes rush past below me. Even then, the form takes on familiar "limbs" or "spokes"--
		Featherlace.  Raggedness of inward representation.  Or just a heaping--

Gone round, now thumb-pushing, forcing: upthrusting, down-pointing, just-sticking, grunting--
(there is an underneath if you wish--I wish--) overreaching and changed in flight. 
			Lean into it and learn its rearrangements, its mind-cracks--no, spokes--
Precision of access in the bodywidth has accomplished nothing, is stuck edge-wise in--

			Where none of the openings are.  
I ruffle it down, shove it up, resettling the integrated inwardness--
		Don't look at it. It is vinyl and windy and from a place where we do not 		
	resemble ourselves.  

Suddenly, blown inside-out, and something lining my inwardness 
			with a translucence, I am absorbing the manifest until sated--
It has to happen this way--all water-vectored, washed over, tinted,  and soaked--
 And, like that other place where millions have laid down (there should be a difference)--
all wet.

			Jorley Grahamstein