JORIE GRAHAM. Pulitzer Prize-winner. Author of 11 books of poetry including,
Sea Change (Ecco, 2008). MacArthur Fellow, Zabel Award recipient, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.
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 attended New York University as an undergraduate where she studied film with Haig Manoogian and Martin Scorsese. It was there 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. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including
Overlord (HarperCollins, 2005);
Never (HarperCollins, 2002);
Swarm (2000);
The Errancy (1997);
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;
Materialism (1993);
Region of Unlikeness (1991);
The End of Beauty (1987);
Erosion (1983); and
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980). She 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 and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in France.
With her many collections of poetry, it is said that Jorie Graham has invented a new poetic language—at once lyrical and analytical, sensuous and philosophical, shifting between acceleration and breaking. 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.”.
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