Poem: ‘On the Virtue of the Dead Tree’
Jorie Graham, 24 June 2010
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...
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.
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...
Of the two dogs the car hit, one, two, while we were talking, and thinking about how to change each other’s mind, the other...
from the cadaver beginning to show through the skin of the day. The future without days. Without days of it? in it? I try to – just for a...
Sunbreak. The sky opens its magazine. If you look hard it is a process of falling and squinting – & you are in- terrupted again and...
After great rain. Gradually you are revealing yourself to me. The lesson carves a tunnel through an occupied territory. Great beaches come into existence, are laved for centuries, small...
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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