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Poet
ACT Theatre, Monday, April 1, 2002
Biography
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Jorie Graham, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor, was born in
1950 and raised in Rome, Italy. As a teenager she helped out on the sets
of Antonioni films, which inspired her interest in the medium of film.
She went to French schools and to the Sorbonne, but was expelled for taking
part in student protests. She transferred to New York University, where
she studied film with Haig Manoogian and Martin Scorsese. It was at NYU
that her passion for poetry was sparked after walking past a classroom
taught by M. L. Rosenthal. The teacher was reciting a snippet of “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T. S. Eliot: “I have heard
the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think they will sing to
me.” Graham was struck by how much the words moved her and since
then, she has immersed herself in the writing and reading of poems.
With her
nine collections of poetry, Jorie Graham has invented a new poetic language—at
once lyrical and analytical, sensuous and philosophical, shifting between
acceleration and breaking. “[She] stands among a small group of poets
(Dickinson, Hopkins, Moore),” wrote The Nation, “whose
styles are so personal that the poems seem to have no author at all: they
exist as self-made things.” Rejecting the conventional lyric, Graham
creates poems that range across the page and across human experiences,
dramas of faith, perception, and emotion. Her poems press language to
the breaking point, but out of the ruins emerges a startling new world.
As she puts it: “the infinite variety of having once been, / of being,
of coming to life, right there in the thin air.” Graham received
the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her collection The Dream of the Unified
Field.
Her many other honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship
and grants from numerous foundations. She has taught at the University
of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric
and Oratory at Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Selected
Works
Erosion (1983)
The End of Beauty (1987)
Materialism (1993)
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (1995)
The Errancy (1997)
Swarm (2000)
Never (2002)
Web
Site Links
Biography
on the Academy of American Poets' Web Site
Featured poet in Ploughshares
Photo:
Jeanette Montgomery Barron
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