Jorie Graham

Poet

• Born: May 9, 1951
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

AMERICAN POET

Biography

Jorie Graham is a cerebral and complex American poet, whose early poems deal with philosophical questions, such as the nature of reality and the divisions between mind and spirit and between spirit and body. Her later poems are no less complex, showing a greater interest in myth and history. Most critics believe that Wallace Stevens has been her greatest poetic influence, although many have also seen touches of Rainer Maria Rilke in her poems.

Graham was raised in Italy, although she was born in New York City. Her parents, sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper and war correspondent and Newsweek bureau chief Curtis Bill Pepper, were Americans. She attended a French school in Rome and, later, the Sorbonne in Paris. She is trilingual, and in one of her early poems, she speaks of needing three different words to name a chestnut tree.

Graham returned to the United States in 1969 to complete her university education, and she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University (NYU) in 1973. At first a film student, she was drawn to poetry when she heard M. L. Rosenthal, then a professor at NYU, read a T. S. Eliot poem aloud. She then received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa’s renowned Writers’ Workshop. She has taught at Murray State University in Kentucky and California’s Humboldt State University, and has been a professor of English at the Writers’ Workshop and Harvard University. She received several awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1990) and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award (1992) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Graham was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1996 for her collection The Dream of the Unified Field (1995). Her other accolades include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry for Sea Change: Poems (2008), the T. S. Eliot Prize for P L A C E (2012), and the 2017 Wallace Stevens Award.

Graham’s first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), was published in 1980. The work's title is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s definition of human beings, and a number of the poems deal with the divided human condition. For example, “The Geese” contrasts the instinctual and determined pattern of the flight of geese with the very different pattern of spiders weaving a web. Both of these are then contrasted with humans, whom the narrator sees as being in an uncertain state of “delay” rather than completion. Critics have noticed Graham’s desire for a Platonic ideal, a desire “to catch the world as idea,” but she turns away from the ideal to the body. Although she deals with philosophical ideas, her structures are not logical but associative and epigrammatic.

Graham’s second book of poems, Erosion (1983), is no less complex, although the swerve to the body is more prominent. The poem that most clearly defines her point of view is “At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body,” which deals with Signorelli’s painting of the Resurrection; Graham lived in Italy in her early years, and references to Renaissance painters are common. The assumption of the body at the Resurrection is a perfect example of her thought. After describing the Resurrection in the painting, she focuses on the autopsy that Signorelli did on his son to gain knowledge of the body so he could render it faithfully. Graham asserts that only accuracy in art can “mend” the wounded mind, as it does for Signorelli. Beauty is, as she claims, a “contained damage.”

Many of the poems in The End of Beauty (1987) are based on stories from the Bible and Greek mythology, showing a significant change in focus for Graham. There are, for example, poems on Adam and Eve, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Apollo and Daphne. The Adam and Eve poems are especially interesting since they focus on the moment of change. This once again represents a shift from an unchanging spirit to an all-too-human body. It is also a movement into history or narrative in which nothing is planned or determined. This concept is especially important to Graham, as she focuses on gaps and indeterminacies rather than resolutions. “Hurry and Delay” portrays the weaving and unweaving of Penelope in the Odyssey, and it is a perfect metaphor for Graham’s own poetic practice. Another poem describes the creative method of Jackson Pollock as working from chance to pattern; no matter how random the creation may seem, pattern and form emerge. However, Graham refuses closure and sees those patterns as less than complete; she ends the poem with an ellipsis rather than a period.

Region of Unlikeness (1991), Graham’s fourth book of poems, shows a definite movement into the problems of history. One poem is, in fact, called “History”; another, called “From the New World,” deals with the Holocaust. Many of the poems in this book do not have a definite closure and include gaps within lines. In addition, Graham uses one-line stanzas that conflict or contrast with the other numbered stanzas. The structure mirrors the complexity and indeterminacy of her thought.

In Materialism (1993), Graham’s style and structure remain challenging. As the title suggests, the poems focus on the material nature of humankind and the physical world. Graham sees humankind’s material nature as surrounded by limitations, as she contrasts it to a “bush.” She changes from a poet who longed for a Platonic ideal to one who limits her poetic analysis to the material.

The poems in The Errancy (1997) derive from the notion that “erring” offers an opportunity to learn from mistakes, and thus, “errancy” promotes movement, change, and discovery. Swarm (2000) marks a turning away from mythological and biblical themes, although some critics felt that Graham had not yet found an adequate replacement metaphor. Thus, her opacity of style overwhelmed the content of the poems. The poems in Never (2002) are preoccupied with concerns for nature, the environment, and warnings of global disaster. One reviewer noted the influence of A. R. Ammons in Graham’s structure, especially the use of the colon as a fulcrum dividing her lines.

Graham continued to write poetry prolifically throughout the twenty-first century. Her poetry collections include: Overlord (2005), Sea Change (2008), P L A C E (2012), From The New World: Poems 1976-2014 (2015), Fast (2017), Runaway (2020), [To] The Last [Be] Human (2022), and To 2040 (2023). Graham was also contributor to the essay collection A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West (2019). Graham continues to be an essential contributor to the contemporary literary period with her work in the New Yorker, including two articles, "Death" published on April 1, 2024, and "The VR" on March 20, 2023. A 2024 article in The Point Magazine, praised Graham's poetry and her ability to weave in contemporary themes, such as technology and global climate change. Graham remains the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, the first woman to hold the position.

Bibliography

Casper, Robert N. "About Jorie Graham." Ploughshares, vol. 27, no. 4, winter 2001-2002, pp. 189-193.

Gardner, Thomas. Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.

Graham, Jorie. "The Art of Poetry No. 85." Interview by Thomas Gardner. The Paris Review, no. 165, spring 2003.

Graham, Jorie. Interview by Ann Snodgrass. Quarterly West, vol. 23, 1986, pp. 151–64.

Graham, Jorie. “Some Notes on Silence.” 19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate. Edited by Philip Dow. San Diego: Harcourt, 1984. 409–15.

Jorie Graham, www.joriegraham.com. Accessed 8 July 2024.

“Jorie Graham Latest Articles.” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/contributors/jorie-graham. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Kreitler, Brandon, et al. “Doom Scroll.” The Point Magazine, 23 May 2024, thepointmag.com/criticism/doom-scroll. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry after Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Spiegelman, Willard. “Jorie Graham’s ‘New Way of Looking.’” Salmagundi Fall 1998: 244–75.

Spiegelman, Willard. “Repetition and Singularity.” Rev. of The Seven Ages, by Louise Glück, and Never, by Jorie Graham. Kenyon Review, spring 2003, pp. 149–68.

Vendler, Helen. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Vendler, Helen. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.