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.
speaking to. What is that listening tous. I’d like to know whom to address. In this we callthe physical world. Is there another where the footfalls gofrom this stony path as it grows granular. They dis-
appear. The silence is ruinous. It seems there could be thunder hidden in this blazingblue, but it’s just dry wind reaching the field. I’d like to know again whom toaddress. To...
Can this write the future, its ooze and stiffening. With
whom am I speaking. It sounds like a receiver off the hook
a long time. It’s weeping. And you can’t say please stop to the future, it will not
stop, it will not stop listening to you as you approach it,
always clearer always louder – please stop listening future, but no it does not
speak, it just leans in a...
stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light. Over but not on magenta. Of. Of dahlia-heads. Of serrated leaves trimmed gold. Plush stalk lost-still in non-moment. All awake but no wakefulness. Low. Small. Snug in flooding light. Unwilled. No speed of anything, no, no motion on surface because suddenly no
surface, all a mechanism yes but now neither on nor off,...
lie down on this floor, unnotice, try to recall, stir a little but not in heart, feel rust coming, grass going, if I had an idea this time, if I could believe in the cultivation, just piece it together, the fields the sky the wetness in the right spot, it will recline the earth it does not need your map, the rows you cut into it make their
puzzled argument again, then seed, spring has a...
After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on. You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips. The tipping-down of the branches, the down, the exact weight of those drops that fell
over the days and nights, their strength, accumulation, shafting down through the resistant skins, nothing perfect but then also the exact remain of sun, the sum
of the last not-yet-absorbed, not-yet-evaporated...
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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