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 last year.

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...

Poem: ‘Which but for Vacancy’

Jorie Graham, 31 July 1997

Again today the dream. But of what? The dream like a long slim tunnel we lay ourselves down in – the lilies in the dust, the face that seems to shine in the linoleum – blue – the thing we would strip down to if – the melting snow allowing, the faint falling-sound receding … But the nature of the dream will not appear for us. It lightens the air immeasurably as...

Poem: ‘Underneath (13)’

Jorie Graham, 29 July 1999

needed explanation because of the mystic nature of the theory and our reliance on collective belief I could not visualise the end the tools that paved the way broke the body the foundation the exact copy of the real our surfaces were covered our surfaces are all covered actual hands appear but then there is writing in the cave we were deeply impressed as in addicted to results oh and...

Four Poems

Jorie Graham, 5 July 2001

The Complex Mechanism of the Break

From here, ten to fourteen rows of folding and branching. Up close, the laving in overlappings that pool sideways as well as suck back. Filamentary green-trims where the temporary furthest coming-forward is lost. Suctions in three or four different directions back from pinnacle-point. Encounter of back-suck by the foremost, low-breaking, upstitching really,...

Two Poems

Jorie Graham, 6 January 2005

Praying

(Attempt of 6 June ’03)

I wake and one of them is still there, still talking, sudden jolts of hand as if to slap open the air, garbage waiting at the curb, myself a slave, still, yes, I check, a slave, mist on the hedgerows, stubblefields between. A slave. Beyond, the village still asleep. That I can say the word village. Thorns disappearing now under the last of the blossoming....

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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