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.
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...
parched, on tight, questioned, invisible, full of so much evolution, now the moment is gone, begin again, my skin, here, my limit of the visible me, I touch it now, is spirit-filled, naturally-selected, caught in the storm here under this tree, propped up by history, which, I don’t know which, be careful, you can’t love everyone –
brought to you by Revlon, melancholy,...
Today on two legs stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades, and greens, and shades of greens, lobed, and lashing sun, the fig that seemed to me the perfect one, the ready one, it is permitted, it is possible, it is
actual. The VR glasses are not needed yet, not for now, no, not for this while longer. And it is warm in...
May I help you. No. In the mirror? No. Look there is still majesty, increase, sacrifice. Night in the flat pond. Moon in it/on it disposing entirely of mind. No. Look there is desert where there was grassland there is sun-inundation like a scrupulous meditation no message just mutter of immensity where it leaks into
partiality. Into you/me. Our boundaries now in the epic see-through, how they...
here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole hill-sweeping grove down, its mile-long headfuls of leaves upswept so the whole valley shivers its windy silvers,
watery … A strange heat is upon us. Again. That was you thinking that. I
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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