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 in 2023.
Again today the dream. But of what? The dream like a long slim tunnel we lay ourselves down in – the lilies in the dust, the face that seems to shine in the linoleum – blue – the thing we would strip down to if – the melting snow allowing, the faint falling-sound receding … But the nature of the dream will not appear for us. It lightens the air immeasurably as...
I can’t really remember now. The soundless foamed. A crow hung like a cough to a wire above me. There was a chill. It was a version of a crow, untitled as such, tightly feathered in the chafing air. Rain was expected. All round him air dilated, as if my steady glance on him, cindering at the glance-core where it held him tightest, swelled and sucked, while round that core, first a...
For Jorie Graham, the teeming possibilities of lyric – tense and mood, syntax and sound crossed with layout and measure – harbour a fullness of time which is neither mere chronology nor novelistic...
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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