Jorie Graham

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 RunawayTo 2040 came out in 2023.

Poem: ‘Thinking’

Jorie Graham, 20 March 1997

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...

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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...

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Accidents of Priority

John Redmond, 22 August 1996

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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