[To] The Last [Be] Human

By Jorie Graham and Robert Macfarlane

[To] The Last [Be] Human collects four
extraordinary poetry books—Sea Change, Place, Fast, and Runaway—by
Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham.

From the introduction by Robert Macfarlane:

The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at
373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per
million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The
body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those
eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written
from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife
with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful
to experience … Graham’s poems are turned to face our planet’s deep-time
future, and their shadows are cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But
they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they are
very far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as warning: to
preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when
‘the future / takes shape / too quickly,’ when we are entering ‘a time / beyond
belief.’ They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form….
Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing
language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift
of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a ‘whirling robe
humming with firstness,’ there to ‘greet you if you eye-up.’

I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for
presentist consolation; the situation has moved far beyond that: ‘Wind would be
nice but / it’s only us shaking.’ … To read these four twenty-first-century
books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns
forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within
themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that
joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the
last book:

   
The earth said

   
remember me.

   
The earth said

   
don’t let go,

 

   
said it one day

   
when I was

   
accidentally

   
listening…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781619322592

Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham is the author of fourteen collections of poems. She has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the International Nonino Prize. She lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard University.

Book preview

TO THE LAST BE HUMAN

The earliest of the poems in this tetralogy were written at 373 parts per million of atmospheric CO2, and the most recent at 414 parts per million; that is to say, in the old calendar, 2002 and 2020 respectively. The body of work gathered here stands as an extraordinary lyric record of those eighteen calamitous years: a glittering, teeming Anthropocene journal, written from within the New Climatic Regime (as Bruno Latour names the present), rife with hope and raw with loss, lush and sparse, hard to parse and hugely powerful to experience.

Recently, Graham said that she has begun to imagine her poetry as something that might be dug up from rubble in the future, a message sent forward to whatever or whomever comes next, part of a huge amalgam of leftover signals held together by chance. This image of her poems existing as future relics, close-read by distant beings, recalls to me the research field of nuclear semiotics which flourished in the US in the early 1990s. In those years, as the issue of the long-term burial of mid- and high-level nuclear waste pressed with increasing urgency, the question emerged as to how to warn future generations of the great and durable radioactive danger that would lie below-ground. The US Department of Energy commissioned a Human Interference Task Force to devise a marker system which would deter intrusion for at least 10,000 years at the deep repositories for nuclear waste then under construction at Yucca Mountain in Nevada and Carlsbad in New Mexico. Among the proposals developed by the Task Force (none has yet been implemented) were passive institutional controls such as concrete pillars with jutting spikes; pictograms and petroglyphs conveying horror; and information chambers built of granite and reinforced concrete, carrying engraved warnings in numerous languages.

Graham’s poems are likewise turned to face our planet’s deep-time future, and their shadows are also cast by the long light of the will-have-been. But they are made of more durable materials than granite and concrete, they are very far from passive, and their tasks are of record as well as of warning: to preserve what it has felt like to be a human in these accelerated years when the future / takes shape / too quickly, when we are entering a time / beyond belief. They know, these poems, and what they tell is precise to their form. How they swarm, beautifully and bee-like! They settle upon surfaces of time and place and seethe there, their long lines susurrating together as tens of thousands of wings do, intensely, intricately. Sometimes they are made of ragged, hurting, hurtling, and body-fleeing language; other times they celebrate the sheer, shocking, heart-stopping gift of the given world, seeing light, tree, sea, skin, and star as a whirling robe humming with firstness, there to greet you if you eye-up. I have found myself speaking some of these poems aloud in order the better to enter them: sounding their humming, their murmuration, in the Earth’s air as well as the mind’s ear. I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for presentist consolation, though; the situation has moved far beyond that: Wind would be nice but / it’s only us shaking.

The titles and tones of the four collections tell a story in their (ecological) succession. Sea Change: richness and strangeness; a phase-shift happening; quickening and deadness; the need, the obligation, to keep eyes open, pearl-less. Place: at once verb and noun; to locate what is lost and to reach sure footing, to ground a thing well; to find one’s place but also to be put in it. Fast: swift but so too stuck; fleet and fixed; steadfast but also bedfast and cragfast, unable to move up or down, on or back; caught in the torrent; made fast (secure), but thus also beyond adaptation or adjustment. And Runaway: a fugitive, a juggernaut; unfindable, unstoppable; faster than fast; also an order—flee! Get gone!

The subjects—though that is not quite the right word for what is contained here, what happens here—of the four collections also shift across their courses, mapping and tracking life and lives as they radiate, pulsate, and tangle. The tetralogy as a whole restlessly pries at the same ancient ethical question in its modern context: What has it been given us to do when we have been given a life to live?

Sea Change (2008) was written when Graham was resident in Normandy, where she experienced the canicule (heatwave) of 2003, the hottest summer on record in Europe since at least 1540. Rivers dried to their beds, crops failed, whole woodlands perished. France alone recorded nearly 15,000 deaths, Europe as a whole around 70,000. For two months, the continent glimpsed a future that—two decades on—the temperate zones already inhabit near-permanently: one of wildfires, brutal heat and drought, charred air, humans and creatures gasping for breath. I think of this collection as a meteorological journal, written at the point it became no longer possible to separate weather from climate. Many of the poems begin quietly, almost classically, with the calm field-note placements I associate first with T’ang and Sung dynasty verse: Waning moon; After great rain. Summer solstice; Nearing dawn; Midwinter. Dead of. From the first pages, though, nature is out of joint, displaced. A new wind blows: Un- / natural says the news. Also the body says it. A new tune plays: We have other plans / for your summer is the tune. Also your winter. Parts of these poems—with their long weaving lines, sending the shuttle back and back again across the loom of the page—almost yearn for the luxury of a lapse into nowness, the absolution of the utter instant. But this is understood to be an abrogation of responsibility; the lyric cannot love itself into evaporation in the time of The Great Dying. And so on the poems rush, faster and faster, tracing both damage and the indrifting of us / into us, barely a full stop present, but instead an ice-slide of dashes and ampersands. I tried to read Futures aloud, but I ran out of breath.

Place (2012) seems to fall between storms, in an uneasy lull that is both an aftermath and a prequel. Time in its pools is briefly more available here, allowing a sinking into the dreamlife not only of the vast network of blooded things, but also of vine, stone, grass, grain, hedgerow, bloodless but still animate. These inquiries can feel ceremonial and medieval (On the Virtue of the Dead Tree), recalling Aquinas and Julian of Norwich, and above all Hildegard of Bingen’s lush and nourishing meditations upon viriditas: greenness, growth towards truth. Always, though, these slower poems are pressed by what is imminent, a slicing in which even the / blade is / audible. An endnote to the original collection identifies the double-margin arrangement used by most of the poems (one left justified to the edge of the page, one left justified almost to its center) as a means of bringing the reader to feel the vertiginous double-position in which we find ourselves, constantly looking back just as we are forced to try to see ahead. Form, here, is forged by crisis. In the summer in which I wrote this foreword to Graham’s tetralogy, a heat-dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, destructive wildfires burned from Arctic Canada to Lake Tahoe, flash floods devastated Tennessee, and Hurricane Ida collapsed the power grid in New Orleans and drowned people in their New York basements. All of this in North America alone, in three months. Yet still power-wielders refuse to recognize that apocalypse is not an indefinitely deferable singularity but an always-somewhere-present experience, unevenly distributed across the contour-lines of existing inequalities.

Fast (2017) opens in apparent stasis—Manacled to a whelm.—but within seconds is off on its headlong rush (everything transitioning—unfolding—emptying) that will hardly pause for the collection’s duration. Long poems here are set rigorously to the left-hand margin, hard justified for the hard-to-justify: trawling-nets bycatch poison ghostfishing. New forces and harrowings emerge: cancer, the death of a father, the decline of a mother, and all are set within the webwork of the wider illnesses—the new maladies of the soul, as Kristeva named them. Online surveillance and data-harvesting, the Syrian war, ecological devastation on land and at sea: We are in systemicide. But don’t cry(o): do something! New non-human voices speak through these lyrics, become strange attractors around which the language spins: the ocean floor, chatbots, the singing magnetic field of an MRI scanner. Mass surveillance, mass infection, mass injustice. A new punctuation mark appears here, too: the arrow, an em-dash tipped with an angle bracket. These arrows leave the reader trapped in a flow-diagram, compelled causally ever-onwards at speed, at weapon-point: this leads to that leads to this, burning off nuance, hastening us remorselessly into an end time that will be a surrender. Struggling against this piercing and disempowering teleology, though, are the out-of-time energies of love and compassion. A poem about Graham’s dying father, The Mask Now, contains one of the most affecting lines I know in the modern elegy. He was a settler in that flesh, that I could see. / Not far from breaking camp.

A beautiful becalmedness starts the still-point poem that opens Runaway (2020): After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on. What I take to be the chief task of the poems here is declared early: trying to make sense of the normal, turn it to life, more life. I hear an echo of Prior Walter’s rallying cry in Angels in America: still bless me anyway. I want more life. Kushner’s masterpiece arose out of the AIDS epidemic, Graham’s was published in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both share urgings against immiseration and extinction, towards love, kindness, and the kin-making powers of true empathy. We must be unafraid to live in the raw wind, writes Kushner, and a raw wind blows through all four of Graham’s volumes too, stirring soul, shivering skin, keeping us awake. The wind’s enemy is the depletion of life’s diversity, because in that diversity lies the vital replenishing possibilities of sympoesis, the epigenetic making-with that is the engine of life on Earth. Reduce the totality of life’s forms, and future creation is itself constrained: I won’t live long / enough to see any of the new / dreams the hundreds of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals shouldering their / demise without possibility of re- / generation.

Emergence is the term given in biology, systems theory, and beyond for the properties or behaviors of an entity that its parts do not on their own possess. Graham’s poetry is strongly emergent, its effects irreducible to the sum or difference of its components. It shoals, schools, flocks, builds, folds. It has life. To read these four twenty-first-century books together in a single volume is to experience vastly complex patterns forming and reforming in mind, eye, and ear. These poems sing within themselves, between one another, and across collections, and the song that joins them all is uttered simply in the first lines of the last poem of the last book:

The earth said

remember me.

The earth said

don’t let go,

said it one day

when I was

accidentally

listening

—Robert Macfarlane, September 2021

SEA

CHANGE

I

SEA CHANGE

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than

ever before in the recording

of such. Un-

natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look

down, can

feel it, yes, don’t know

where. Also submerging us,

making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an

unnegotiable

drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing

itself. Also sustained, as in a hatred of

a thought, or a vanity that comes upon one out of

nowhere & makes

one feel the mischief in faithfulness to an

idea. Everything unpreventable and excited like

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future

takes shape

too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving

nothing in the way of

trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life, & it

fussing all over us, like a confinement gone

insane, blurring the feeling of

the state of

being. Which did exist just yesterday, calm and

true. Like the right to

privacy—how strange a feeling, here, the right—

consider your affliction says the

wind, do not plead ignorance, & farther and farther

away leaks the

past, much farther than it used to go, beating against the shutters I

have now fastened again, the huge mis-

understanding round me now so

still in

the center of this room, listening—oh,

these are not split decisions, everything

is in agreement, we set out willingly, & also knew to

play by rules, & if I say to you now

let’s go

somewhere the thought won’t outlast

the minute, here it is now, carrying its North

Atlantic windfall, hissing Consider

the body of the ocean which rises every instant into

me, & its

ancient e-

vaporation, & how it delivers itself

to me, how the world is our law, this indrifting of us

into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the

intermingling of us lacks in-

telligence, makes

reverberation, syllables untranscribable, in-clingings, & how wonder is also what

pours from us when, in the

coiling, at the very bottom of

the food

chain, sprung

from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in-

dispensable

plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north,

spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such

that the hatch will not survive, nor the

species in the end, in the the right-now forever un-

interruptible slowing of the

gulf

stream, so that I, speaking in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one, am suddenly

aware

of having written my poems, I feel it in

my useless

hands, palms in my lap, & in my listening, & also the memory of a season at its

full, into which is spattered like a

silly cry this in-

cessant leaf-glittering, shadow-mad, all over

the lightshafts, the walls, the bent back ranks of trees

all stippled with these slivers of

light like

breaking grins—infinities of them—wriggling along the walls, over the

grasses—mouths

reaching into

other mouths—sucking out all the

air—huge breaths passing to and fro between the unkind blurrings—& quicken

me further says this new wind, &

according to thy

judgment, &

I am inclining my heart towards the end,

I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm, hurling myself,

wiry furies riding my many backs, against your foundations and your

best young

tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the sill.

EMBODIES

Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms, twelve

blossoms on three different

branches, which for us, personally, means none this coming spring or perhaps none on

just those branches on which

just now

lands, suddenly, a gray-gold migratory bird—still here?—crisping,

multiplying the wrong

air, shifting branches with small

hops, then stilling—very still—breathing into this oxygen which also pockets my

looking hard, just

that, takes it in, also my

thinking which I try to seal off,

my humanity, I was not a mistake is what my humanity thinks, I cannot

go somewhere

else than this body, the afterwards of each of these instants is just

another instant, breathe, breathe,

my cells reach out, I multiply on the face of

the earth, on the

mud—I can see my prints on the sweet bluish mud—where I was just

standing and reaching to see if

those really were blossoms, I thought perhaps paper

from wind, & the sadness in

me is that of forced parting, as when I loved a personal

love, which now seems unthinkable, & I look at

the gate, how open it is,

in it the very fact of God as

invention seems to sit, fast, as in its saddle, so comfortable—& where

does the road out of it

go—& are those torn wires hanging from the limbs—& the voice I heard once after I passed

what I thought was a sleeping

man, the curse muttered out, & the cage after they have let

the creatures

out, they are elsewhere, in one of the other rings, the ring with the empty cage is

gleaming, the cage is

to be looked at, grieving, for nothing, your pilgrimage ends here,

we are islands, we

should beget nothing &

what am I to do with my imagination—& the person in me trembles—& there is still

innocence, it is starting up somewhere

even now, and the strange swelling of the so-called Milky Way, and the sound of the

wings of the bird as it lifts off

suddenly, & how it is going somewhere precise, & that precision, & how I no longer

can say for sure that it

knows nothing, flaming, razory, the feathered serpent I saw as a child, of stone, &

how it stares back at me

from the height of its pyramid, & the blood flowing from the sacrifice, & the oracles

dragging hooks through the hearts in

order to say

what is coming, what is true, & all the blood, millennia, drained to stave off

the future, stave off,

& the armies on the far plains, the gleam off their armor now in this bird’s

eye, as it flies towards me

then over, & the sound of the thousands of men assembled at

all cost now

the sound of the bird lifting, thick, rustling where it flies over—only see, it is

a hawk after all, I had not seen

clearly, it has gone to hunt in the next field, & the chlorophyll is

coursing, & the sun is

sucked in, & the chief priest walks away now where what remains of

the body is left

as is customary for the local birds.

THIS

Full moon, & the empty tree’s branches—correction—the tree’s

branches,

expose and recover it, suddenly, letting it drift and rise a bit then

swathing it again,

treating it like it was stuff, no treasure up there growing more

bluish and ablaze,

as the wind trussles the wide tall limbs in-

telligently

in its nervous ceaselessness—of this minute, of that minute—

All the light there is

playing these

Reviews for [To] The Last [Be] Human

[bilgeone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Poet Graham defies comparisons.
This book is a compendium of her last four where she justifies
her vast international reputation.

Measuring degrees of empathy
found in lions, politicians, pandas and poets,
Jorie Graham stands alone.

But if message were measured on
optimism-trepidation, be prepared
for Heart of Darkness Redux.
But her empathy, pessimism struggles
enlighten the contemplative reader.

"Non solus" -- Elsevier.