The concept of modernism that dominates the genre of poetry in the Twentieth Century is dedicated to the proposition that experience is the doorway to self-actualization. Experience can be a peculiar thing though. When it is stripped of conventional constraints such as historical reference and structured form, experience becomes organic. In this amorphic shape poetry reveals a paradox. If experience is organic as modern poetry leads us to believe, then how can a poet assign words, man-made constructs, to convey an idea that has no rational bounds? This is the question Jorie Graham address in her “Introduction” to The Best American Poetry 1990. Graham understands that “poetry can… be difficult…because much of it attempts to render aspects of experience that occur outside the provinces of logic and reason, outside the realm of narrative realism.” It is the melding of the “brilliant Irrational” and visceral experience that poetry finds a medium. Graham states, “Poetry describes, enacts, is compelled by those moments of supreme passion, insight or knowledge that are physical yet intuitive, that render us whole, inspired.”Moments that are both “physical yet intuitive” in poetry are composed of two elements; the actual physical construction of words and phrases “which by their nature move horizontally through time, along the lines of cause and affect” and poetry’s intuitive tendency “to leap, to try to move more vertically.” The two elements of “physical yet intuitive” moments can be found in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Loving you less than life, a little less”, Wallace Steven’s “The Idea of Order in Key West”, and Jorie Graham’s “Noli Me Tangere”.In Millay’s “Loving you a little less than life, a little less”, the speaker opens the poem by trying to...
