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: ‘Employment’

Jorie Graham, 8 September 2011

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...

Poem: ‘Torn Score’

Jorie Graham, 17 March 2011

I think this is all somewhere inside myself, the incessant burning of my birth             all shine             lessening as also all low-flame             heat of love: and places loved: space time and people heightening,...

All around in            houses near us, the            layoffs,            the windows shine back            sky, it is a            wonder we...

And that you hold the same one hawk each day I pass through my field             up. And that it             may choose its             spot so freely, from which to scan, and, without more than the wintry beguiling...

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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