'Prayer Found Under Floorboard' and Its Right-Margin Entity"

April, 2023

Jorie Graham’s poems tend to exist outside the “real,” but even her most abstract and existential works cannot help but write in conversation with our knowledge of the Anthropocene. Graham explicitly states in an interview with Carcanet Press that her poem “Prayer Found Under Floorboard” is set in a post-apocalyptic future, in which humanity and planet Earth itself have undergone irreparable changes across an uncertain amount of years. Situated in Part II of Graham’s 2020 poetry collection, Runaway, “Prayer Found Under Floorboard” is one of the few poems to be justified on the right margin. In conversation with the poem’s topics of time’s passing, Anthropogenic forces, and human actions, the one-stanza poem seems to battle with the right margin bound. In the interview, Graham also states that she envisions right-aligned poems as running into a “wall,” a concept which can be used to understand “Prayer Found Under Floorboard” and its poetic devices of varying line lengths, sentence fragments, and metaphor. Together, the poem’s right-aligned form converses with its fragmented subject matter to produce a desperate prayer to the mind’s fallibility—a prayer that ultimately was unanswered.

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While line lengths in traditional, left-aligned poems may represent the length of thoughts or ideas, Graham’s right-aligned line lengths run into the aforementioned “wall,” presenting the illusion of a thought cut off arbitrarily rather than stylistically. Thus, as “Prayer Found Under Floorboard” features lines of differing lengths like many other poems, their alignment on the right margin redefines the lines’ effect on the reader: in the poem’s opening lines, Graham writes “The desperation re” (Graham, line 8), a seemingly incomplete thought. Reading this line in conversation with its preceding lines creates the illusion that there is more to the line, stretching past the right-margin wall, invisible and potentially containing meaning. Within a poem that contemplates inevitability and failure, the unpunctuated “re” stands alone within many potential meanings: is it the prefix to a word like “repeats” or “restarts,” or does it simply reference the prefix meaning “again”? Either way, Graham’s isolation of “re” exposes the specter looming over the poem: cyclicality. This theme also surfaces in broken lines affected by the right margin, in which the speaker questions the longevity of the human mind: “pray for us we are destroyers— / pray we fail—the mind must fail—” (Graham, lines 30-31). Here, Graham’s enjambment involves full words, using dashes to break up the speaker’s thoughts—highlighting the irony that the only thing which can conceive of a mind failing is the mind itself. The poem’s right-alignment also interacts with this stylistic choice to create a force stronger than the mind: the illusory “wall” determining when each line must end. In this way, Graham enables “Prayer Found Under Floorboard” to transcend human construction, appearing as a poem written against a larger prevailing force.

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Sentence fragments are another stylistic feature used throughout Graham’s poems, and like varying line lengths, their unpredictable constructions create unique tones to alter the reading experience. These deviations from the normal grammatic flow in “Prayer Found Under Floorboard” syncopate the speaker’s introduction in its opening lines: “We gather in the eardrum of. / The scaffolding grows. / As if the solution. / There is not a soft part of us. / Except for the days in us” (Graham, lines 1-5). Though there are two grammatically complete sentences in this excerpt, their juxtaposition with overtly incomplete sentences denoted by periods placed in front of the “wall,” suggesting that the speaker or poet has cut these lines off with a knowledge of the right-margin limit. This larger force at play produces a constrained expression of ideas, resulting in a partial image like the aforementioned “re,” hinting at an industrial landscape. As the poem shifts from the collective “we” to the lyric “I,” there are fewer sentence fragments, but they resurface towards the end as Graham writes “Without / taking. To touch. To not take away / any sensation any memory. To come to / the feeling-about at the edge of the object / and stay” (Graham, lines 54-58). Unlike the poem’s opening sentence fragments, each of these complete and incomplete sentences stretch across multiple line breaks, the periods having no correlation to any line breaks. Here, the right-margin illusion works in tandem with Graham’s unpredictable enjambment to generate a frenzied crescendo before the poem’s closing lines, representing the theme of “desperation” established in the poem’s opening lines. As each thought forgets the right-margin wall, bumping up against it and quickly jumping back to the left, the speaker seems to be actively crying “mind sick” (Graham, line 37), in the process of realizing that they are “huge.”

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Both varying line lengths and sentence fragments provide greater context for the metaphors central to “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” which relate to the invisible, overwhelming force created by the poem’s right alignment. Graham gestures at this entity through her use of “it” as a stand-in for the indescribable throughout the poem, mentioning “it” in multiple contexts. Its first introduction features a grouping with “nothing”: “I have seen / nothing. It is deafening” (Graham, lines 13-14); “it” is also something the speaker is part of: “let me / who am part of it & must fail” (Graham, lines 32-33). As one of the vaguest words in the English language, “it” can be read with an infinite number of meanings depending on its surroundings, but in “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” the word suggests something that exists outside the collective consciousness—like the right-margin wall. If “it” is both something the speaker can alienate themselves from but still be part of, the metaphorical focus shifts to the “I” present from line 12 through line 61—the speaker’s lyric voice. While “it” is described as many things (“It is lean this unfolding of” (Graham, line 42)), “I” bears only one characteristic: “I am huge” (lines 47 and 61). As “I” is used interchangeably with “we” elsewhere in the poem, it is plausible to read “I” as the product of minds that refuse to fail, the human coming to terms with its impact upon the world. Whether this impact is ecological or existential is left as an exercise for the reader, but in the end, both “I” and “it” play with the reader’s understanding of speaker and subject, like right-alignment plays with the reader’s perception of line breaks and sentence fragments.

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“Prayer Found Under Floorboard” is a poem whose many secrets will probably never see the light, but it seems to function more like a thought experiment than a concrete narrative, challenging the reader to think of themselves within its post-human framework. Graham’s decision to align the poem on the right margin goes hand in hand with its concern of things bigger than the self, producing new effects in conversation with her signature poetic devices of varying line length and sentence fragments—all of which concern the poem’s central metaphors of “it” and “I.” Much about “Prayer Found Under Floorboard” is indeterminate, but given its form and content, Graham writes of a futuristic epiphany of a distinct Anthropogenic consciousness—one traumatized by its own unwitting existence as a “destroyer.”