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Questions: 1. In I Watched a Snake, Graham compares the movements of the snake to work and the passionate/desirable qualities of work.

For example, in stanzas 4 and 5 reads This must be perfect progress where movement appears to be a vanishing, a mending of the visible by the invisible--just as we stitch the earth, it seems, to me, each time we die, going back under, coming back up.... Do you think the snake is metaphorically mimicking the pattern of life? Is there a dual meaning to the snakes movements, such as biblical references? 2. In Jorie Grahams At Luca Signorellis Resurrestion of the Body Graham looks at Luca Signorellis painting the Resurrezione della carne. Graham talks about the spirits in the painting hurrying to merge with the bodies to become flesh and how she cautions these spirits because they will never be at rest in flesh. Graham uses the current day flooding of people outside the Orvieto Cathedral to compare what is going on in the painting with what is happening in real life.

3.Jorie Graham creates an image beyond comprehension yet she embeds the meaning through metaphors in her poetry. In Wanting A Child (page 35), she describes the process of childbirth in a metaphorical sense using rivers and the thrashing of tides The tide is always pulsing upward, inland, into the rivers rapid argument, pushing with its insistent tragic waves-the living echo, says my book, of some great storm far out at sea...- Similarly, Graham characterizes childbirth as a process that moves forward pushing the child into a new world Ill come this far from home merely, to dip my fingers in this glittering, archaic sea that renders everything identical. Graham uses sea and rocks harsh movements as an analogy to create the complication of body nature during childbirth. Do you think Graham usage of metaphor encompasses the hectic feeling of childbirth, at the same time, appreciating the complexities of human nature and Mother Nature? Why or Why not?

4.In "San Sepolcro" there is a painting by Piero della Francesca of a girl unbuttoning her blue dress
before going into labor. Graham describes the "birth of god", and "an assembly line of bodies and wings to the open air market" and her dress as "opening from eternity to privacy". Do you think this painting is a metaphor for an eternal afterlife with god? Or that the man/woman in the poem simply doesn't believe in religion, and thinks that death is a "present moment" to which all living must enter?

Claim:

In Wanting A Child, Graham writes in a metamorphic manner emphasizing the difficulties in childbirth by ending the poem with so erosion is its very face(35). San Sepolcro is another poem that focuses on maternity and labor and concludes the poem with last two stanzas Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever still bornsomething terribly nimbled-fingered finding all the stops (21-22). It seems that Graham penetrates a painting and invisibly shapes the restrictions that goes beyond the beauty of maternity but towards oblivion.

Connection Thought: In At Luca Signorellis Resurrestion of the Body Graham seems to be contemplating body vs soul and which is to be preferred. At the time Signorelli created the painting the church likely saw the body as sin and Signorelli wanted to use his painting to celebrate the beauty of the human body.Graham looks at the body and suggests that caution be used when considering the perspective of flesh. Marie Howes poetry provides evidence to support Graham in the idea that the body brings considerable sorrow. Although, there is joy in the idea of possibilities of being embodied there is sorrow in the idea of never knowing what we are meant to do without our presence.

Notes:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F07E3DD103EF937A15757C0A9639C8B63&p agewanted=all Wanting a Child http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/09/nick-laird-poems-baby In Jorie Graham's "Wanting a Child", the bare metaphors of a river, rocks and the sea interact in complicated analogies; the river cuts "deep into the parent rock, / scouring and scouring / its own bed", and the poem ends by describing how the tide (the want for a child?) is always pulsing upward, inland, into the river's rapid argument, pushing with its insistent tragic waves the living echo, says my book, of some great storm far out at sea, too far to be recalled by us but transferred whole on to this shore by waves, so that erosion is its very face.

childbirth in poems written by women often surfaces as a form of oblivion, effacement, erosion San Sepolcro temporality-> (Christianity / Ecclesiastical Terms) (often plural) a secular possession or revenue belonging to a Church, a group within the Church, or the clergy This is a dark, sunny, scary, seductive poem, with brilliant sensory particulars in such fine details as milk on the air and ice on the oily lemonskins. The metaphysical, mystical core of the poem is like a lizard that flicks just out of reach beyond your eyesight there is a delicious sense of a mystery that has been invoked but not defined, touched but not imprisoned. It is a subtle effect also found in some of Ashberys best poems. In her earlier poems Jorie shows true orphic fire sometimes, by saying more than she knows, like the old Greek Delphic oracles through whom spoke the gods even they could not fathom. By opening up a mystery, her best earlier poems counteract nihilism. San Sepolcro is also a poem which is referring back to European memories, Italian landscapes, and further, to European art history. I could argue that the basic voice and sensibility one finds in this poem, is not necessarily a voice and a sensibility that is going to translate well into and be entirely happy and at home living in Iowa or Kansas. There is just something too chic, sophisticated and to my mind, European about it. http://books.google.com/books?id=cYvliea97TUC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=Graham+San+Sep olcro&source=bl&ots=pMsFQCTSBV&sig=Mztkk93qonhWSxp4zaZ0kR1N8ao&hl=en&ei=n3KU TvzDPKqN0AGtvq2qBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBw#v= onepage&q=Graham%20San%20Sepolcro&f=false I Watched a Snake http://showyourworkings.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/jorie-graham/ In I watched an snake Th image that symbolizes linear succession in her recent poetry here represents an admirable quality. she associates the snakes hunting with work, and work, like the making of art, is related to desire and passion. Graham has always shown a gift for moving facilely. Among large abstractions, defining them in almost believable ways or in ways we might wish to believe. Having taken her moral from the snake, she writes Passion is work... At Luca Signorellis Resurrection of the Body Desribes Luca Signorelli dissecting th body of his dead son. Reviews

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40549078.pdf?acceptTC=true

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