Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Fast (2017) and the career retrospective From the New World: Poems 1976-2014 (2015). Other books include P L A C E (2012), Sea Change (2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Award in Poetry. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003 and has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.
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The Dream of the Unified FieldSelected Poems 1974-1994From"Imperialism"
There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
The Dream of the Unified Field:Selected Poems 1974-1994 -
The Dream of the Unified FieldSelected Poems 1974-1994From"The Hiding Place"
In the cell we were so crowded no one could sit or lean.
People peed on each other. I felt a girl
vomiting gently onto my back.
I found two Americans rounded up by chance,
their charter left that morning they screamed, what were they going to
do?
Later a man in a uniform came in with a stick.
Started beating here and there, found the girl in her eighth month.
He beat her frantically over and over.
He pummeled her belly. Screaming aren’t you ashamed?
The Dream of the Unified Field:Selected Poems 1974-1994 -
The Dream of the Unified FieldSelected Poems 1974-1994From"Short History of the World"
Tap tap.
A blue sky. A sun and moon in it.
Peel it back.
The angels in ranks, the about.
Peel it back.
Tap tap the underneath.
Blood where the sky has opened.
And numbers in there – god how they sing – tap tap –
and the little hammer underneath,
and a hand holding the lid true.
What are you building little man?
What’s it like, what’s it for?
The Dream of the Unified Field:Selected Poems 1974-1994
“Jorie Graham’s intricate, sophisticated, and mercurial poems have long been one of the splendors of contemporary American literature. In her latest book, she turns her attention to death, and the result is perhaps her finest collection yet.” —The Village Voice [on Sea Change]
" . . . for 'swarm,' in other words . . . read 'be born again.' Graham is writing about a spiritual turning point, a new beginning . . . Beauty—that is, the pure sense-perception which has long been a concern for Graham—is no longer the most important criterion. Now goodness is . . . [and] the idea of submission, of obedience, without understanding: one must 'yield' before 'hearing the reason' for yielding." —The New Republic [on Swarm]
“A recent profile of Graham in The New Yorker places her in the lineage of Eliot, Bishop, and Ashbery rather than William Carlos Williams or Robert Creeley, but it might be posited that her capacious talent now draws on all these examples: the bodiless virtuosity of formal mastery has met the flexibility and passion of the mind and eye at liberty. The Errancy is what might be called, among the quakers, a leading: Graham shows us a future direction in American poetry, and that future is a welcome place.” —Harvard Review
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