Jorie Graham's ___s (Absence of language in poetry)

Jorie Graham's blanks offer the chance to see how lyric intersects with the historical vicissitudes of material culture. The word-length line segments in Graham's poems function as both a graphic representation of lyric and as a reflection of late-twentieth-century material culture, a way of writing the surfaces and textures of everyday life. While reducing to the simplest expression the alienating distance that gives the lyric I its definitive privacy, the blank also replicates the nebulous substances of late-century technology - latex, spray paint, Formica. Such substances become a material idiom of mediation, a repertoire of images that shape our understanding of interpersonal relationships, which in contemporary culture are both void of definition and thick with significance. While much lyric criticism defines the genre in terms of transhistorical rhetorical patterns, the example of Graham's blanks suggests that lyric must also be considered as an intimate material history.