Jorie Graham, holder for the second time of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and Harvard University’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, maintains a busy practice online as a poet on the ideal model of Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry”: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Professor Graham’s daily legislations there are typically reposts dealing with a current event: global warming, environmental pollution, whatever people are talking about on campus today. Read off campus, the reposts don’t show any demonstrable expertise. In themselves, they offer us no reason to read them. But they have been compiled to be read in campus mode on social media, and what the act of reading does there is the social. Don’t believe me, it says. You don’t have to, and in any case language teaches you that you can’t. You can’t believe me, but — see! here on the screen! — you are me.

A recent Jorie Graham repost, for instance, looks in its entirety like this.

For some time, attributive adjectival tags such as “American Jew Rabbi” have been standard syntax in the language of social media. I’d guess that the practice dates back at least as far as Newt Gingrich’s lists of pejorative words recommended for use against Democrats, but as of 2024 it’s simply a part of communication’s background noise. Qua noise it communicates nothing: nothing about what Yaakov Shapiro believes or says or is; just nothing. Replacing a name, Yaakov Shapiro, with a nametag, jewrabbi, noise makes it inaudibly unnecessary. The name’s former space in the electromagnetic spectrum  is now only a rature. Layered over it is a coded statement about identity. Wave the code transmitter and that will turn itself on.

The transmission says Yaakov Shapiro is an American Jew rabbi. Having received the transmission, you have received everything that transmission can communicate. Professor Graham, notable for playing campus politics with poetry at Harvard, plays it briskly and lucidly here, as a repost of what oh everybody knows. Everybody knows: this is this.

But when the language of Jorie Graham’s own poetry speaks through her, she doesn’t sound  like that, with a one-word vocabulary, this. Her this repost lies flattened on its prose page, but her multi-word efforts to mean originate in a body-round prosodic force which creates not from the oh everybody knows of words in synonymy but from the never yet definable emptinesses where words are not.

If Professor Graham could find words to speak that language about Yaakov Shapiro, then and only then she might assume the poet’s Shelleyan role of teaching us what Yaakov Shapiro is. But in its repost mode, all that her language expresses is a sound without reference: jew. In poem language, which is noun language, “Jew” does have reference. It is rich and complicated, modulated by an ever-changing flow of connotation. I sometimes get complicated with myself that way, the way I suppose all of us do on the occasions when we think of ourselves as sharing a complicated being. But repost language retranslates every complication back to a single-meaning simplicity. It says to Yaakov Shapiro, in the words of the language recycler Jorie Graham:

“You’re a POJ. It’s that simple. You’re a POJ. You’re a POJ.

“What else do I have a computer for, hunh?”