The Manipulation of History and Memory in Contemporary American Poetry: A Study of Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Jorie Graham
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31973/aj.v2i111.1596Keywords:
Ekphrasis, History, Memory, Jorie Graham, Contemporary PoetryAbstract
Ekphrasis enables poets to invade the most difficult and sensitive areas of thought without the pressure of direct expression. Ekphrastic poetry has a tendency to draw together contradictions; the work of art acting as intermediary between points of opposition, tension and contrast. The presence of the ekphrastic object in a poem is an acknowledgement of the unbridgeable hermeneutic gap between poetry, history and the real, indeed it often acts as the marker that exposes this gap. Also in a practical way, through both its critical and art-historical backgrounds, the practice of ekphrasis is located very firmly within arguments of a temporal nature; it is important to remember that paintings have a material history as well as a conceptual one, and that contemporary poetry is increasingly taking into account, and even seeking to replicate in some cases, the space of the museum itself as well as the paintings within it.
Therefore, the present paper aims at affording a new study of the poetry of the contemporary American poetess Jorie Graham through illuminating the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, which is meant to verbally represent what is already represented visually, and its relation to presentations of the most perplexing concepts in modern and contemporary literature in general and poetry in particular, namely, memory and personal history. The paper is an attempt to investigate how Jorie Graham uses images from painting, photography and films in her poems to manipulate time and represent personal history through memory which, in turn, leads to a consideration of how she uses ekphrasis to approach the ethics of representing public history, and how she uses the different temporal conventions of each genre to write about the past
Downloads
References
2. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: John Hopkins U.P, 1992), p.266.
3. Ibid. p.287.
4. Ibid. p.xvii.
5. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.5.
6. Ibid. p.6.
7. “Jorie Graham,” http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA149898420&v=2.1&u=oslis&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w, p.1.
8. “Jorie Graham,” http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA16849525&v=2.1&u=oslis&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w, p.1.
9. Bob Perelman, The Future of Memory (New York: Roof Books, 1998), p.78.
10. Thomas Gardner, “An Interview with Jorie Graham,” Denver Quarterly 26, no.4, 1992, p.98.
11. Ibid. p.82.
12. Gardner, “Jorie Graham: The Art of Poetry LXXXV,” The Paris Review, no. 165, 2003, p.96.
13. Gardner, “An Interview with Jorie Graham,” p.83.
14. Mark Doty, Seeing Venice: Bellotto’s Grand Canal (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), p.125.
15. Gardner, “Jorie Graham: The Art of Poetry LXXXV,” p.73.
16. T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp.7, 9-10.
17. Language poetry is a postmodern avant-garde movement in American poetry in the 1960s and 1970s which paid greater attention than before to the importance and power of language in poetry writing.
18. This episode but reminds me of what had happened in the village of Naslawa in Erbil in the reign of the past regime as told to me by a friend in koya city.
19. Michael Kimmelman, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms,” New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2002, http://query.ntymes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501EED8153BF934A15752C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.
20. It is the first day of the Invasion of Normandy during WWII which started on Tuesday, 6 June 1944.
21. William Logan, “The Great American Desert,” The New Criterion 23, 2005, p.81.
22. Jorie Graham, Materialism (New Jersey: The Eco Press, 1993), p.145.
23. Jorie Graham, Overlord (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), p.43.
24. Kimmelman, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms.” P.4.
25. Ibid.
26. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltiomre: The John Hopkins U.P, 1996), p.97.
27. Gardner, “Jorie Graham: The Art of Poetry LXXXV,” p.96.
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltiomre:
The John Hopkins UP, 1996.
Clark, T.J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1999.
Doty, Mark. Seeing Venice: Bellotto’s Grand Canal. Los Angeles: Getty Publications,
2002.
“Ekphrasis,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/.
Gardner, Thomas. “An Interview with Jorie Graham,” Denver Quarterly 26, no.4,
(1992): 79-104.
------------. “Jorie Graham: The Art of Poetry LXXXV,” The Paris Review, no. 165,
(2003):52-97.
Graham, Jorie. The End of Beauty. New Jersey: The Eco Press, 1987.
-----------. Materialism. New Jersey: The Eco Press, 1993.
-----------. Overlord. Manchester: Carcanet, 2005.
“Jorie Graham.” http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA149898420&v=2.1&u=oslis&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w.
“Jorie Graham.” http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA16849525&v=2.1&u=oslis&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w.
Kimmelman, Michael. “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms.” New York Times
Magazine, January 27, 2002. http://query.ntymes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501EED8153BF934A15752C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: John Hopkins
UP, 1992.
Logan, William. “The Great American Desert.” The New Criterion 23 (2005): 76-85.
Perelman, Bob. The Future of Memory. New York: Roof Books, 1998.
W.J.T., Mitchell. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright and Licensing:
For all articles published in Al-Adab journal, copyright is retained by the authors. Articles are licensed under an open access Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, meaning that anyone may download and read the paper for free. In addition, the article may be reused and quoted provided that the original published version is cited. These conditions allow for maximum use and exposure of the work.
Reproducing Published Material from other Publishers: It is absolutely essential that authors obtain permission to reproduce any published material (figures, schemes, tables or any extract of a text) which does not fall into the public domain, or for which they do not hold the copyright. Permission should be requested by the authors from the copyrightholder (usually the Publisher, please refer to the imprint of the individual publications to identify the copyrightholder).
Permission is required for: Your own works published by other Publishers and for which you did not retain copyright.
Substantial extracts from anyones' works or a series of works.
Use of Tables, Graphs, Charts, Schemes and Artworks if they are unaltered or slightly modified.
Photographs for which you do not hold copyright.
Permission is not required for: Reconstruction of your own table with data already published elsewhere. Please notice that in this case you must cite the source of the data in the form of either "Data from..." or "Adapted from...".
Reasonably short quotes are considered fair use and therefore do not require permission.
Graphs, Charts, Schemes and Artworks that are completely redrawn by the authors and significantly changed beyond recognition do not require permission.
Obtaining Permission
In order to avoid unnecessary delays in the publication process, you should start obtaining permissions as early as possible. If in any doubt about the copyright, apply for permission. Al-Adab Journal cannot publish material from other publications without permission.
The copyright holder may give you instructions on the form of acknowledgement to be followed; otherwise follow the style: "Reproduced with permission from [author], [book/journal title]; published by [publisher], [year].' at the end of the caption of the Table, Figure or Scheme.
How to Cite
