It was this thwarted knowing that I kept encountering in Graham’s poems as I read them that semester, noting how the largeness of her poems were coincident with the largeness of the poems she admired. Where in Bishop I had admired how painstaking description finally arrived at an understanding of some kind, in Graham’s work there was only the painstaking process of description. Where in Bishop I saw how the objectivity of any described thing ultimately crystallized in the light of the poet’s subjectivity, in Graham the competing subjectivities within any one consciousness themselves became the poem’s subject. Graham’s poems may have begun with the ordinary flower — or the errand to fetch a leotard, or the noise of traffic heard from a window — but they ended up in the spin of a metaphysical vertigo:

Here, in the opening passage of her poem “Opulence,” Graham proposes that the rhythms of mind — of thinking — generate a gorgeously sweeping music. With their volatile thrusts, hesitations, and reconsiderations, Graham’s is a poetry of new duration. In “Opulence,” it is not so much that an amaryllis is ushering its blooms into flower, but that a viewer’s mind has been ignited into actively inquiring desire. And it is a desire, moreover, that is willing to sacrifice the formalizing conventions of writing in order to follow, to wherever it may go, the path of the original ignition. Not that Graham’s poems are without form; rather, their forms have been distressed and made to accommodate the energies of thought. Syntax, line, stanza, shape: it is all newly reconfigured. “No genuine form occurs,” Graham said in an interview, “without the honest presence of chaos (however potentially) in the work. Form, when it has power, is form wrenched from its opposite. I happen to favor work in which the potential (or posited) power of chaos is great. Because I believe it is so in the world.” Which means that, in the imperceptible progress of an amaryllis blooming, even silence has its own roaring: “the four of them craning this way then that according to the time / of day, the drying wrinkled skirts of the casing / now folded-down beneath, formulaic, / the light wide-awake around it—or is it the eye— / yes yes yes yes says the mechanism of the underneath tick tock—.”

4. Beauty in Photography

In one of his essays on photography, Robert Adams asks the question: “Are all important pictures beautiful?” Then he brings forward an example, by way of getting to an answer: “For instance, there is Robert Capa’s photograph of a Spanish loyalist, fatally wounded a moment earlier, falling to the side of the 35-mm frame. It is as vivid a synopsis of violent death as has been produced in our century. But is it beautiful?”

The Capa photo is iconic. On the left side of the frame is the soldier in a white shirt and light pants, his body flung back just at the moment of the shot’s impact. His rifle is still in his right hand, but is already slipping away from the relaxing hand. The soldier’s chest — a vulnerable expanse of whiteness — is thrust out as the force of the shot pushes him backwards. His body is in the middle of a wrenching governed by the laws of physics. He is wearing something that looks like suspenders, with packets of ammunition attached to them. We cannot fully see his face, given the tilt which his head has taken in his backwards fall. The composition of the photograph is undeniably beautiful. The right side of the photo and the sky above are filled by a moody cloudiness. The light on the hillside, where the soldier is falling, is strongly slanted: it is late in the day or early in the morning. If the photo were in color, that hillside would be the color of gold.

Adams says that to judge the Capa photograph purely on its compositional beauty is a “distortion” of the value of the image, which is to record a man’s death. Adams then says: “What Capa’s photograph shows is a truth — a common, terrible, and therefore important truth. But again, does this mean the picture is beautiful? Is Truth Beauty and vice versa? The answer, as Keats knew, depends on the truth about which we are talking. For a truth to be beautiful, it must be complete, the full and final Truth. And that, in turn, leads me to a definition of Beauty linked unavoidably to belief. For me, the truth of Capa’s picture is limited; it deserves, therefore, some lesser adjective than ‘beautiful,’ some word suggesting the partial truths occasionally recorded by heroic journalists.”

I’m with Adams, but only up until the last few sentences of the above passage, when he begins to slip into a murky conceptual soup that seems to place the Capa image into a lesser category of accomplishment because Adams sees only a “limited” truth in the photo. In Adams’ line of thinking, the photograph — the product of a journalistic moment’s unplanned opportunity — is less beautiful for having been unplanned. It is maddening, that the language Adams brings to the Capa photo distorts the complexity of the image, a complexity clear enough to anyone who looks at the photo for even two minutes. The photo is viscerally powerful and also aesthetically superb, both. And so you have to ask, what does Adams mean by the limited truth found in the photograph? Isn’t every photograph necessarily a limited composition, a limited truth, taken from the world? When, later in his essay, Adams speaks glowingly of a New York evening scene by Stieglitz and a pastoral scene by O’Sullivan — seeming to privilege these images over the photo by Capa — Adams’s categorizations come undone. Having taken the difficult trouble of using Keats’s terms to help him, Adams only ends up tying himself into knots — one more adventurer helplessly tangled in Keats’s impossible conjecture.