The Trouble with Talking to God: Devotional Address in Jorie Graham’s Prayer Poetry

Abstract

At the turn of the millennium, Jorie Graham began to pray. Appearing in the op-ed section of the New York Times on December 31, 1999, “Prayer” opens on a speaker who stands at a dock, watching a school of minnows swim with the current. As she follows the movements of the fish, the speaker observes that the minnows cannot “create current,” nor affect the “water’s downdrafts and upswirls,” but they can do something the current cannot: make that movement visible. In moving so, the minnows reveal the “motion that forces change,” the current that moves unbidden. Reflecting on this observation, the poet turns inward to muse on the limit of humanity in the currents of time. “This is the force of faith,” she concludes, as the world turns over toward a new millennium, “Never again are you the same.” Change is the morning’s lesson, and there is a bare freedom in being changed by the invisible forces that surround human experience like the current surrounds the minnows. Despite its title, “Prayer” (later printed as “Prayer (Minnows)” in Graham’s 2002 collection Never) is not obviously a prayer. The poem does not begin with an invocation – there are no “Dear Fathers” here – nor does it end with “Amen.” In fact, there is nothing in the poem which clearly suggests that it is addressed to God at all. Graham is certainly capable of writing traditional prayers, and her poetry is often full of references to the Psalms and other scriptures, or devotional texts such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Raised by an Irish Catholic father and a Jewish mother, Graham is undoubtedly familiar with the prayers of both religions, but this poem does not follow a clear tradition. Rather, upon first read, “Prayer” presents as a traditional lyric, with an unnamed “I” speaking in the first line (“Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows”) expressing an inward state of mind (“I look in and say take this”), addressed to a universal “you” (“Never again are you the same”). We might dismiss the title as a flourish – Calvin Bedient writes of Graham’s work that “it hardly matters what the title is” (“Infected by Time”) – but taking this position diminishes the precision of the poet’s language, overlooks the seriousness with which Graham considers her poetics. An underestimation of Graham’s intention to pray overlooks the repeated and