Paying Attention to the Earth: The Development of Ecological Poetics in Jorie Graham's Materialism

Abstract

Abstract

The article examines Jorie Graham’s 1993 collection, Materialism, as a pivotal transitional moment in the development of her ecopoetics. It argues that the collection marks a discernible shift from the central experiences of virtuality and alienation characterised in Region of Unlikeness (1991) towards a decisive and sustained engagement with physical matter. Perceptual attention to physical particulars becomes a central means of bridging the divide between the human condition and the non-human world, and through this movement, Graham composes a new, personal “American” political and ethical contract. The article highlights how the compositional process used here, particularly through “Adaptations”, treats borrowed historical texts as tactile matter with which to build new authorship out of challenges to heavily embedded tradition. It analyses how Graham’s sequence of “Notes on the Reality of the Self” reads the natural landscape as a model for selfhood defined by Leibnizian “compossible experience” and immersion in mutability. Crucial to this adaptation, however, are underlying historical and political traumas. Poems such as “Manifest Destiny” and “Concerning the Right to Life” see the poet juxtaposing the stillness of matter with the violent interruption of historical events. Ultimately, the article situates Materialism as a key moment in the ongoing development of Graham’s “ecological attention”, defining her distinct “ecological materialism” here as a framework where human history and unstable physical environments co-constitute a single ecosystem. The article concludes that Graham’s final vision represents a utopian reach for a larger grammar where culture, language, and the material world coexist through and despite the threats of human-driven environmental collision.