The Thickness of Being

Jorie Graham and Forrest Gander discuss each other’s recent work.

By Jorie Graham, Forrest GanderMarch 22, 2025

• Poetry

WERE IT MARKED in sedimentary strata, the time span during which Jorie Graham and Forrest Gander realized this conversation—she on the East Coast, he on the West—would be underlain by dark, messy preelection conglomerate and overlain by Trump-red schist. But where the conglomerate and schist thin out, the conversation kept extending, a humus-rich layer of long friendship and attentiveness to each other’s work. Jorie was working nonstop to oversee and help translate a volume of recent—very recent—Palestinian poetry. She was working also on a new book of her own, The Killing Spree, as well as her Selected Prose. Much of the rest of her time was parsed between home and travel to various medical facilities where her testing and treatment continue. Forrest was simultaneously co-editing The Essential C. D. Wright and finishing a translation of poems by Mexican poet Jeannette Lozano Clariond, Even Time Bleeds.

The conversation took place in phone calls and emails. There were several well-conceived questions about the soundscapes of poems, about the ethics of translation, and about writing about mortality, for instance, that went unanswered or simply aren’t included in this, the version they’ve edited to present. And yet, traces of those concerns and others—the nature of the self and of mourning, the relationship between geologic and human time, the actuation of a poem’s mindfulness, the inefficiency of poetry, humility—come to be considered with a freshness, a rawness maybe, that might also speak to, and with, others.

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FORREST GANDER: I remember you telling me once, when you were first waylaid by the serious illness you’re even now managing, that you were very aware of still waking up in your familiar mind. In fact, there’s a talismanic crow that appears to you in your book To 2040 (2023) as a manifestation, you say, of your “singularity.”

JORIE GRAHAM: Yes. It’s not a lonely singularity but it’s one riven by such an acute and weighty sense of accountability that it often shuts me down. But if I pull myself back up from under the appall, I encounter a kind of wondrous vastness that feels like what must be my “imagination.” I use that word a lot though I’m never sure what activity and ability it alludes to or covers. But it’s thrilling—astonishing—when I can rise up out of my psychology, so filled with shame, and roam around in the mystery. It’s filled with astounding minutiae and vast reaches and insights and intuitions and a copresence of so many ancestors, human and not. So it’s able to pull me out of my coiling, inward-facing mortality. But you—in Mojave Ghost (2024)—seem to break free of all those boundaries? Especially psychology!

In my own case, in the wake of the quick succession of deaths of my wife, my father, my mother, and my younger sister, I’ve felt more than ever my lack of singularity. And instead of the comfort of my familiar mind, I wake into a congeries of the minds of my past and present selves, of the dead who are part of me, and of the dreams they once told me, laughing, on mornings that no longer exist but can seem more real than any engagement I’ll have today with someone standing next to me. I found that the point of view in Mojave Ghost kept expressing itself through multiple pronouns. And now, curiously, when I think back on your latest book, To 2040, I remember that even in your identification with the crow—the crow that you start to become in “The VR” when you come to wear its feather—you are doubled. And when you look for your “antagonist” toward the end of the poem, you find it is yourself fighting off “something like me.” So that makes me wonder: is that sense of singularity you reference illusory?

Maybe it’s one of the operative illusions? But it’s a very useful one. It gives one loft—and a runway from which to lift off beyond it. It’s the local wound from which to access the whole body of past and future. I often use the image of a needle as its thread pierces the cloth, a stitchwork that runs through all the temporalities, stringing them together—an essential force without which we are trapped in the present, the incredibly (and increasingly) narrow present. The now—a word I certainly overuse! Though without feeling pinned to the now—in which one feels the horror and tragedy of time slipping inexorably through one (and one through it)—one would never be able to feel that strange singularity, which points at one: you, you, with your one soul and one chance, what have you done? It’s the Old Testament God calling out to Abraham and him having to answer—because what choice do we have? “Hineini hineini”—here I am, here I am.

Is it the antagonist—well, yes. Is it familiar? “Familiar” implies something altogether other, closer to habit maybe—which Beckett points us to so alarmingly (writing on Proust) … But tell me, was there a moment or a vision—because those “congeries” you describe so thrillingly seem like visions or visitations to me—that set this poem, this amazing interlacing of time and place and spirit, in motion? What freed you to write this truly visionary ghost epic?

I was dethroned from myself. The deaths of the people who, in large part, composed me, ruptured the familiar current that delivers my self-perception. The current I’d been tuned to all my life. I felt that current dilate as it took in a surge of ongoing relations and interactions that crossed the boundaries of past and present, here and there. My previous notions of stable identity were upended. I think maybe this surging takes place inside all of us, but we find it more efficient, more practical—“useful,” as you say—to constrict it.

When I accepted the invitation of Ashwini Bhat, a new immigrant to this country, to hike the roughly 650-mile San Andreas Fault, that tension zone between two active tectonic plates, it wasn’t long before I began to see the parallel between the rift inside and outside of me. I was torn between grief for those I’d lost and my hopefulness for this new relationship I was forging with someone charged with life. Those two states of being scoured each other. Our hikes became for me a secular version of the Stations of the Cross, and I was intently aware, especially in the quiet of the desert, how the past was rising up below my feet, how “now” was submerging. How identities and places and time were mixing in a kind of superposition in my consciousness.

But you also summon a sense of the unreality of the lives we live and our struggle to feel them as “real.” From the opening lines—“Each / thinks the other is a bit emptier, more / cardboard than himself, that he alone / made the necessary decisions. Only / I live the real real, he thinks. I think.”—to the extraordinary “Coda”—“But where / is the human place / in geologic time? Is there / some quality in me that links I am / to the remainder?—to whatever / is left over? Left out. What / in the world / have I left out of me?”—you try to shake that unreality, to wake us up, by forcing consciousness up against the absolutely resistant, physical, often geological, world. I realize the whole poem is undergoing this confrontation, and that it’s been your process from your very first work—but it’s at apogee here.

Can you describe the process of writing this “novel poem.” Is it chronological, for example? Did you find yourself more erased (and more alive for it) as a result of the writing? At what point did your breakthrough vision of our human thinness and unity occur? I ask because it’s such a vital mystical understanding. It’s the kind of understanding that could save us if “we” could hear you … How do we follow your lead here? Where did the poem begin? What took you by surprise?

Although the idea for a long poem only began to take shape while we were hiking that family of faults called San Andreas, the book begins in the Arkansas Ozarks, where I lived with C. D. Wright. It shifts, as my life did, to California and generally follows the trajectory of my hikes with Ashwini from Manchester State Beach in Northern California through Tomales Bay and Bolinas Lagoon, from the sweeping Carrizo Plain into the Mojave Desert. Right to the edge of the Salton Sea. It also registers our detour to Barstow, the impoverished Mojave town where I was born.

But what you say about “forcing consciousness up against the […] geological world” is the very condition of walking the desert. It’s why, I think, there are eons of stories across cultures involving those who set off into the desert seeking vision. The desert disconnects us from our familiar spatial and temporal expectations. No sanctuary in the desert. We can’t help but become increasingly aware of how small, how vulnerable we are in such an immense, severe landscape. We walk across it in what seems like extreme slow motion. Under an oppressive, omnipresent sun. I think that’s why Robert Macfarlane notes that walking is “a way of knowing.” Of knowing self as well as locus. Exposed, trying to navigate a place of dramatically altered attention, you might see mirages in the distance, but you see yourself—both more erased and more alive—very clearly.

You’re moving through a landscape of loss, but the terrain is somehow magnetized by that loss, so that anything and potentially everything might carry or summon a trace of the beloved lost (here wife, mother, ancestors, prior inhabitants, present endangered beings—as inclusive as the vacancy is devastating). So everything hovers into significance, a kind of mystic threshold of hauntings, revisitations grafted onto your own revisiting journey toward home/origin. What might ordinarily be “things” become signs, wonders, Swedenborg-like signatures. Does the everything-potentially-at-once make it hard to select? How does poetic form help? Does it help or does it just augment the magnetic field? How to let go? How to be let go? Does this relate to mourning itself?

Something speaks to us because we’ve looked, we’ve listened, we’ve allowed it our attention. But I’m not sure it’s always a conscious decision to select some particular “beyond us” from what you call the “everything-potentiality.” We’re not always the agent. Sometimes I think we’re called to focus. The gravity of something, its discrete expression, the way light and shadow touch it, the radiance of its form, even the way it conducts the earth’s vibrations, despite that they are too faint for us to consciously sense them, affect us. We cock our ears, peel our eyes, orient our attention toward something that has spoken and so initiates the condition for meaning to stir within us.

That’s beautiful.

In Mojave Ghost, there’s a stanza in which I write of the desert travelers:

           There, where palms sway over a dry spring,
                 they come to encounter themselves
        penetrated by birdsong, standing among trunks
                   and vines risen from the ground
              like the births and messages they are.

Exploring the desert around Barstow, my birthplace, I pulled from the sand an old hand-punched horseshoe. I came across broken, nearly mineralized white-oak wagon spokes discarded, most likely, by early Mormon pioneers. I climbed onto a century-old wooden ore bin at an abandoned gold mine and heard, in my mind, the voices of miners. I knew that beneath the soles of my boots, there were thousands of years of footpaths made by the nomadic ancestors of Mojave and Chemehuevi people. I walked unseeable trails; I thought of those who had passed there before me. At Rainbow Basin, where my mother took strolls when I was a baby, fossils of three-toed horses, birds, and pygmy rhinos have been rising to the surface for centuries.

Any geologist knows you never let go of the past. It’s the upwelling broth of the present. And you don’t necessarily want to let it go, to “move forward,” as they say. Neither do you want it to overwhelm you, to shut you off in solipsism. I suppose most of us struggle at some time in our lives to find a way to survive and outlive our pasts even while we nurture or at least continue to carry them, out of fidelity, within us.

The plurality of the “you,” the addressee—can you distinguish among them? Should the reader distinguish them? And how is the reader included in those ongoing apostrophes? Is this plurality matched by a multiplication of “selves” undergoing the journey? You’re accompanied by ghosts or spirits, but, perhaps more interestingly, it’s as if you are amplifying your own consciousness or subjectivity by seeing and listening through and with their added senses. Are there limits to such, or any, attentiveness? Do they correspond to the limits of language?

I think there are moments we experience with others that, though they seem in their enactment utterly ordinary and they signal none of their durance, are packed with resonances too rich to be fully lived-through in the time they transpire.

That’s so interesting …

They can come back almost theatrically years later—especially when griefs have lowered your guard—and play through you again and again.

Maybe it’s not relevant to try to assign biographical figures to the pronouns of the poems. Is the “you” my late poet-wife, my sister who died of ALS, my mother, myself, my artist-beloved? Sappho—in Dan Beachy-Quick’s translation—wrote, “[M]y mind is two minds.” The words that we ostensibly aim toward a very particular “you” take on a life of their own and address others as well. Which is the gift of language.

And then, language itself is a gift passed forward to us from distant people we never knew and can’t imagine. Our grammar and words came from their mouths. Our language is chock-full of others who, when they uttered “you,” were inevitably also addressing us. Despite that we think of ourselves as unified and whole, aren’t we ourselves always a collaboration of voices and conflicting points of view?

Ah. Well, yes … One more feature of this augmented mindfulness is that it not only exceeds any one mortal individual, including the dead, but also extends across time in ways that match the geology of the desert landscape—(“desert” in the sense of deserted as well). In what ways did you need a geological consciousness, not just a geological landscape? Did you feel somehow connected to the desert origin of so many religious experiences? Did writing this poem change your sense of what an afterlife may be?

I like that the philosopher Will Durant supposedly said that “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”

In the desert, I’ve found it easy to lose my sense of personal importance to the magnitude around me. And in that humbling, it becomes easier for me to sense my connection to the inhuman. The quiet compels me not so much to listen as to listen into.

I think there are intuitions and insights only revealed by a long contemplative gaze. To enter the desert seeking visionary experience as humans have done for thousands of years is to repeat an act of vulnerable attentiveness, an act of taking perception, query, and understanding as events involving place, memory, and porosity. What we see on the surface doesn’t account for all that is going on below. That’s as true of geology as it is of ourselves.

As for my sense of an afterlife—it seems that may be the empty center around which much of our conversation is taking place. As you wrote in “On the Last Day”:

This is being
remembered. Even as it
erases itself it does not
erase the thing

it was. And gave you.

Nice connection … But why—how—does poetry or poetic language differ from prose in this regard? Is it more haunted, does it have more layers? Is this a matter of vocabulary, diction, cadences, allusion to other preceding voices, or a matter of lineation, form?

Your poetry answers that question better than any response I could formulate. Can we agree that conventional prose cultivates the kind of proficiency that allows characters to develop, plots to move forward, and sentences to minimize a reader’s distraction from the story? Conventional prose, like technology, tends to channel efficient transmissions of message.

Fair enough. Beautiful. Yes …

But your poetry is dramatically inefficient in that regard. You include all the noise along with the message. By noise, I mean the richness of nonsemantic information: your poems are dramas conducted as artful modulations of tone, inflection, emphasis, accent, phrasing. You slow down the action to micro-increments. You intensify the sensual particularity, and the voices in your poems whisper, stammer, howl, and interject. You feel your way into the music of your poems as though you were playing (as you write in “Day”) “a small golden trombone,” working the slide to adjust rhythmic pulses, emotive tones, vowel echoes, silences, intonations, cessations, and crescendos. You blow into your poems the whole sensuous and sonic field of language, gifting us with a concentrated performance of our sensate, thinking, carnal life.

I think both you and I are trying, in our own ways, to get at the thickness of being. The momentous depths of human experience and its immediacy. Neither of us is much interested in the skinny version.

But poetry is full of space, which scares some people. There are silences in those white spaces, but like negative spaces in sculpture, they, too, speak. Poetry, however it may take place at the margins of popular culture, has always been the high-wire act of the language arts.

And in that high-wire act, is there some kind of narrative, or change of spiritual venue, implied by the changes of form? For example, when you come to a sequence of very short lyrics—how do these function? They are very surprising, intriguing …

The series of short, interconnected poems at the end of Mojave Ghost feel notably different in form from the rest of the book and—because of their spareness, I think—manage to convey the sweeping desert landscape.

In that sequence, I wanted to render the words quieter, smaller, to surround them with a vastness of white space. And to slow down the pace of the reading. To build in longer moments of resonance. The structure of those centered poems, with their adjacent lines sliding past each other, might be imagined to enact the horizontal movement of a transform fault. Also, I thought that turning the page to find only a few words and then turning the page again might give the reader a sense of journeying, of what it’s like to hike from one point to another in the desert. Lifting your eyes, reading the space, lowering your eyes.

Ah …

Throughout the book, there’s an asterisk that hovers over each poem. To my mind, it serves as a sort of star, maybe the first star of evening. A wishing star. An intimation of hope. Instead of a reader-orienting title, the modest star hovers over the poem outside of language. I think of it as initiating a new beginning with each poem while, at the same time, it connects the poems, linking them under one sign, suggesting that there are no clear beginnings or endings, but only a continuous sequence in which past and present, self and selves, cycle through each other.

If I were to guess, that star would be Venus. But, before we let this go, what or who are the ancestors of this poem? From Dante to the Eliot of Four Quartets—did you feel a prior structure for “quest” or for shamanic spirit journey?

Mallarmé’s notes on his young son’s death—assembled long after Mallarmé’s death into the book A Tomb for Anatole (1961)—stay with me. I’m marked by the emotional nakedness of his address and the spare, impulsive jumps between short phrases and fragments.

In the great, visionary Bolivian poet Jaime Sáenz’s masterpiece, The Night (1984), Sáenz addresses a “you” that is at once the reader, the beloved, the city of La Paz (which Sáenz rarely left), and the figure of Death. I can’t forget that ampleness of address, even more capacious than Whitman’s.

Though it still feels so fresh that I’m surprised to realize it was published back in 2021, Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Nick of Time is more close-relative than ancestor. Besides including poignant laments for her husband Keith and for dear friends—Edmond Jabès, Barbara Guest, and Robert Creeley, among others—the book is a prolonged meditation on, and staging of, the incestuous relationship between language and time.

And then, I had been translating It Must Be a Misunderstanding (2018) by the Mexican poet Coral Bracho before I began Mojave Ghost. Bracho’s lifelong interrogation of our conceptual relation to space (not outer space) and, in this book, her focus on the tenderness of her bond with her mother as she dies from Alzheimer’s (the same disease that killed my mother) were still echoing (and still echo) through me.

Can you say something about the “tone” of the book? For example, the balance of grief and possible elation? Of need/desire/thirst and patience? Humility and yet one’s “heightening.” Humility taking us to the ground, the humus of “human”—did you come to a different sense of your own physical, not just mental, relation to the very ground you were covering, the earth? And how is this affected by a wider sense of ecological threat, loss? How to face it? How to bear it?

Grief and elation. Like a river whose surface is moving in one direction while its undercurrent moves in another.

I don’t know how to bear the losses or the bleak prognosis. But in “On the Last Day” from To 2040, you ask “How do I / find sufficient // ignorance.” And later, in “The Quiet,” you ask again to be taught “sweet ignorance.” I take you to mean that you long to look away from the grief and shame, from all that’s docked and measured, all to which we’ve assigned fixed meaning and place. You want to acknowledge what St. John of the Cross calls the “realm of […] unknowing.” Even in your awareness that when you do look away from what you fear is coming, you still may not be able to stop imagining it.

The world and its uncounted species will suffer our apocalyptic depredations, and then, perhaps, they will begin to recover without us. In geologic time. When our time means nothing. For now, I want my art to address the major concerns of my moment here, but I also want to write into the very personal, the “particular” (toward which your “heart // leaps” in your recent poem “The World”), those endlessly upwelling dimensions of intimacy and astonishment that fill us with the joy of being alive. I often remember Lao Tzu’s alert: “Those who are not in constant awe, surely some great tragedy will befall them.”

If this is indeed a kind of quest, what is its object? If there is one, did it change?

To listen into, to go on risking my exposure to an expenditure at a loss, to take another step toward the potential to love, to find some place where there and here begin to constitute each other. For me, it’s more query than quest. I want to lay myself out like photographic paper, to stay as open as possible to what is occurring within and without me. To find my way back into the community of others by trying to come to grips with our material environment. To hear more intensively the rumble of the living, the vibrancy of inert things, the whispers of the dead.