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: ‘Siri U’

Jorie Graham, 13 August 2020

see me what did u see did u scrape what I asked u for asked u to make me into asked &asked there is a name in the body of this blood-rush which u parse in-correctly, I know u think u connect the dots of my inquiry the date of the last revolution thepressure cooker the flesh the right temperature whom do u have locked away in the

basement this time – it is always the same answer they...

Poem: ‘Thaw’

Jorie Graham, 7 May 2020

There is a plot in the back of my building.Not the size of the asteroid.Not what fourhyper-crenellations of a reef would have held when there werereefs. It’s still here. I must notget the timeconfused. The times. There is a coolness in it which would have been newSpring. I can’t tell if it’ssmell, as of blossoms which would have been just thenbeginning, or of loam. Through...

Poem: ‘Whom Are You’

Jorie Graham, 10 October 2019

speaking to. What is that listening tous. I’d like to know whom to address. In this we callthe physical world. Is there another where the footfalls gofrom this stony path as it grows granular. They dis-

appear. The silence is ruinous. It seems there could be thunder hidden in this blazingblue, but it’s just dry wind reaching the field. I’d like to know again whom toaddress. To...

Poem: ‘Intimation’

Jorie Graham, 15 August 2019

Can this write the future, its ooze and stiffening. With

whom am I speaking. It sounds like a receiver off the hook

a long time. It’s weeping. And you can’t say please stop to the future, it will not

stop, it will not stop listening to you as you approach it,

always clearer always louder – please stop listening future, but no it does not

speak, it just leans in a...

stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light. Over but not on magenta. Of. Of dahlia-heads. Of serrated leaves trimmed gold. Plush stalk lost-still in non-moment. All awake but no wakefulness. Low. Small. Snug in flooding light. Unwilled. No speed of anything, no, no motion on surface because suddenly no

surface, all a mechanism yes but now neither on nor off,...

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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