Regions of Likeness: The Poetry of Jorie Graham, Dance, and Citational Solidarity

Abstract

Relations between dance and language are complex. Yet dance is not pre- or a-discursive; technique—the grammar and vocabulary that make dance go—also organizes interpersonal conversations that support pedagogical and performance communities. Citational solidarity with nonacademic texts, particularly Jorie Graham's poetry, enlarges these conversations, making them available to audiences beyond technique's outsiders. This essay explores the theoretical underpinnings and mechanics of such citational solidarity, as well as the rhetorical utility of the lyric, as these emerge in writing about bodies, sociality, and language.

Keywords:

• Dance
• Jorie Graham
• Poetry
• Lyric Mode
• Citation

Notes

Judith Hamera is Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Theatre Arts and Dance, California State University, Los Angeles. An earlier draft of this essay was presented at the 2001 NCA convention. Correspondence to: Professor Judith Hamera, Departments of Communication Studies and Theatre Arts and Dance, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA. [email protected]

[1] Unless otherwise documented, quotations in the text are taken from field notes.

[2] Other elements of Graham's poem disrupt the beauty of the lyric, at least in the readings of some of her critics. One reviewer of her latest collection, Never, seemed particularly vexed at the abstraction of her language, arguing that her philosophical poems “seem determined to push abstraction to its baroque breaking point,” versus the more conventional lyric that offers “a door to a more acutely felt world” (Palattella 6).

[3] Bahti, who is hostile to the performative dimensions of the lyric generally, calls “linking poetry to music” a “red herring” (2). Yet the parallel vocabularies used to characterize both media, and particularly the emphasis on the solo voice, from Aristotle's “Poetics” on, clearly indicate that, whatever Bahti means by “link,” resonances, including metaphoric ones, can't be dismissed out of hand. In any case, my own connection here is not between “poetry” and “music,” but between two genres sharing the same textual and performance conventions. Vendler implicitly endorses the comparison, as noted below.

[4] Other theorists have postulated a performative notion of the lyric, but they perceive its enactments in narrative terms (see Bahti 261, no. 13).

[5] Elaine Scarry makes this argument about narrative, but her analysis of how Hardy's language leads the reader into “the deep interior of another person at labor” is strikingly resonant with the interiority of the lyric as characterized by Vendler and Bahti (see Scarry, Resisting 3).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Hamera

Judith Hamera is Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Theatre Arts and Dance, California State University, Los Angeles. An earlier draft of this essay was presented at the 2001 NCA convention. Correspondence to: Professor Judith Hamera, Departments of Communication Studies and Theatre Arts and Dance, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA. [email protected]