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 last year.
the river was still widening as it went, as it carried me, thick mists risingoff it all day,was still widening, yes, for a while longer, holdingthe sky in its belly and back,me on my back in the small ofmy boat, rudder jammed, oarlost or is it I tossed itsome long time agowhen I imagined myselfto be free. In the distance I see, reflected in the spooling,a pair of spyglasses liftedby the...
after years of virga, aftermuch almost& much never again, aftercoalescing in dry
lightning & downdrafts & fire,after taking an alternatepath thruhistory & bypassing
us, after the trees,after the gardens,after the hard seedspushed in as deep as
possible & kept alive on dew,after the rutswhich it had once cutfilled in with
dust & moulds – & podsthat...
before the storm isthe storm. Our waiting tunnelling outward, chewing at the as-yet-not-here, wild,& in it thenot-yet,that phantom, hovering, scribbling hints in the dusty airshafts where weawait rain whichonce again will not come, though something we think of as the stormwill. Steeped in no-colour colour. Smothering hopes with falsepromises, as wind comes up and we feel our soul turn...
Then the drone came. A small personal drone. Hung at anintimate height. Hadmuch to say. Hovering,eye to eye, lurching &chattering. Is it your time now, I thought. Thoughtit saidyou should have learned tolove but came upclose, saw it was old, had beenpatched thousands oftimes, maybe more, was medalled with debris,a tin castle, a wooden fish, a rattle – a plasticclock w/one hand...
The American experiment will end in 2030 she saidlooking into the cards,the charts, the stars, the mathematics of it, lookinginto our palms, into all of ourpalms, into the leaves at thebottom ofthe empty cup – searching its emptiness, its piles of deadbodies or is it grass at the edgeof the field where the abandoned radio is cracklingat the winter-stilled waters, the winter-killedwill of...
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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