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.
A hand or something likea handappeared in the uppersky & Isaw what must have beenits fingers un-furl & drop two ice-whitedice which begantheir slowtumbling each over eachdown till they turnedto wings draggedby the weight oftheir bodies down & thenall the new &improvedviruses shook out theirmutationsas they fell, as theysprinkled down & dustedus – in-candescent –...
If I bring this voiceIf I came backagain when Icome backagain if again it ispossible required withthis voice still this voice so narrow itspassage still untrustworthy, too deep therequest, too slippery theladdering of –what was the tongue –cold – arrowing – may it notbe English – if they inviteme back – some morninglike thisafter historyif they drag meback...
burns its small holein the tentwhere 3 lines on paperhave just been written down,
the pen is lifting offas the missilehits, the zero pointwhere you call
into the face ofyour childwhich does not move,the zero
of its lid you’re pushing up
seeking the gaze –just lookat me, lookback at me its father is
screaming, the zerowhere he only findsa hand, a partof the arm, where he picks them up...
of my own died. Idid not die. Mylove did not. Is intact. Ichecked. Beloveds
were not dragged
into the net ofthe eye ofthe drone, were not dis-membered into
instant ancestors –not even memories, toofast, too torn, no. Screams. Wewoke. The sun
came first inveins of red then rips,pinks, then rose asusual. We
didn’t look up, atefast, were late, the day filledup, we askedall our
questions...
The spacesbetweenthings beganspeaking. So it was
I understood Iwas nowto remainsilent. Saw how
we were allplungedinto this new strengtheningsilence. Was it
vision was it
catastrophe. This
first personI use hereas a way of referringto my being in
abeyance – to myunknowing –though who are we kidding,it was not of the radiant kind
where we wait in linewillinglyeyes closedfor the tap on the...
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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