W.S. Graham’s blanks

Abstract

ABSTRACT W.S. Graham has long been seen as a poet overly preoccupied with the unruly, wayward behaviour of poetic language. His two final collections of poetry – Malcolm Mooney’s Land and Implements in Their Places – have in particular been read as being overtly ‘absorbed into their own processes of utterance’, endlessly meditating on what Graham, in THE CONSTRUCTED SPACE, refers to as the ‘caught habits of language’. This paper traces the contours of how Graham imagines the materiality of these ‘caught habits’: namely, the interaction between the poet as note-maker, the alphabetic characters he inscribes (whether through pen-strokes or typewriter hammers), the blank paper on which these inscriptions are made, and the reader who may, or may not, be there. Rather than see Graham’s obsessive figuration of these material circumstances as a lament for what poetry cannot accomplish – that is, a meaningful encounter between living human beings – I argue that it is an attempt to foreground poetry as an endless mediation between writing and blankness. Poetry, for Graham, may not communicate, but it still has a physical presence.