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.
The blades like irises turning very fast to see you completely – steel-blue then red where the cut occurs – the cut of you – they don’t want to know you they want to own you – no – not own – we all mean to live to the end – am I human we don’t know that – just because I have this way of transmitting – call it voice – a...
Ode to Prism. Aria. Untitled. Wait. I wait. Have you found me yet. Here at my screen,...
One bird close up by the house crow makes the wall’s temporariness suddenly exist one call into the arrival of the storm the announcing by flocks and...
It is entirely in my hands now as it returns like blood to remind me – the chains so soft from wear, in my right, in my left – the first time I, trying for perfection, of balance, of symmetry, strap your twenty-two pounds of eyes, blood, hair, bone – so recently inside me – into the swing – and the sun still in the sky though it being so late as I look up to see...
Listen the voice is American it would reach you it has wiring in its swan’s neck where it is always turning round to see behind itself as it has no past to speak of except some nocturnal journals written in woods where...
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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