"And always an audience / for all this slaughter and laughter--"

Since I signed up for a class on the poet Jorie Graham, I've gotten pretty much obsessed. She says she comes from Wallace Stevens, yet her images have more of a solid foundation in reality. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and absorbed Derrida's postmodern philosophy into almost all of her poetry. Given that, even a cursory glance at Omaha will reveal double meanings and oppositions that are not too opposed--"...always an audience / for all this slaughter and laughter," for one. So, I've got a couple of opinions about Omaha, but I hope it just gets the ball rolling. Not that everything here has to be war poetry.

The constant play on the theater of war is the most politically potent message. Even in the title, Omaha, there is the sense of being far removed. Omaha, in the center of the United States, was also the name of the center of the bloodiest scene in World War II--Omaha Beach, the site of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. At once, it is so far removed and yet inextricable from the violence. The phrase "balconied gods" evokes the indifference of those higher up, and she pulls us into the current time with "As I tell you this / the stage grows very dark." The next lines reverse the balcony/stage metaphor, putting the violence at the upper floor of an American city. The powerlessness of those below suddenly becomes the powerlessness of those above, and there are then her true feelings--that even the "balconied gods" cannot get the killing to end.