Jorie Graham, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-94. Her other collections include The End of Beauty, P L A C E and Runaway. To 2040 came out last year.
Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms, twelve blossoms on three different branches, which for us, personally, means none this coming spring or perhaps none on just those branches on which just now lands, suddenly, a grey-gold migratory bird – still here? – crisping, multiplying the wrong air, shifting branches with small hops, then stilling –...
One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than ever before in the recording of such. Un- natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body – I look down, can...
Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind. Own what, own
whom. I look up. Own the looking at us
say the cuttlefish branchings, lichen-black, moist. Also
...
After great rain. Gradually you are revealing yourself to me. The lesson carves a tunnel through an occupied territory. Great beaches come into existence, are laved for centuries, small...
Sunbreak. The sky opens its magazine. If you look hard it is a process of falling and squinting – & you are in- terrupted again and...
The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it...
Famous poems, like faces, are a particularly memorable kind of introduction to the person they conceal. Like other kinds of introduction, they are often what we remember a person for, or what we...
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