Jorie Graham

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Jorie Graham (born May 9, 1950) is an American poet and the editor of numerous volumes of poetry.

Contents 1 Life 2 Books and Awards 3 Poetry 4 Reviews 5 The Foetry.com Controversy 6 Bibliography 6.1 Poetry 6.2 Edited anthologies 7 External links

[edit] Life

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950 to Curtis Bill Pepper, a war correspondent and the head of the Rome bureau for Newsweek magazine, and the sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper (born December 20, 1924, Brooklyn, New York). She was raised in Rome, Italy. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, but was expelled for participating in student protests. She completed her undergraduate work as a film major at New York University, and became interested in poetry during that time. (She claims that her interest was sparked while walking past M.L. Rosenthal's classroom and overhearing the last couplet of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ). After working as a secretary, she later went on to receive her MFA from the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Graham was married to and divorced from publishing heir William Graham, brother of Donald E. Graham, now publisher of the Washington Post. She then married the poet James Galvin in 1983 and had a daughter, Emily Galvin, in 1984. They divorced in 1999. She is currently married to poet Peter Sacks.

[edit] Books and Awards

She 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.

[edit] Poetry

Examples available Academy of American Poets website.

[edit] Reviews

Selected Reviews of Graham's most recent book of poetry, Overlord:

William Logan, The New Criterion, June 2005

Graham has reduced the poetry of meditation to navel-gazing; the minute attention to her nattering thoughts, to the violence of her vision (at one point she gets down to photon level), merely reworks, in stilted fashion, the stream of consciousness Dorothy Richardson pursued in the Twenties. If Graham had concentrated on the accident and contingency of war, had honored the men whose deaths she casually invokes, Overlord might have become the sort of serious meditation that produced Geoffrey Hill’s Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy...Graham’s lack of any sense of proportion reduces the argument of Overlord to something like “On the one hand, my kitty has AIDS; on the other, a whole lot of guys died on Omaha Beach.” (If you think the poet can stoop no lower, that her high-mindedness can’t be more unintentionally hilarious, you haven’t read the poem in which she buys a homeless man a meal and practically kills him.)...Almost everything Graham writes offers the swagger of emotion, pretentiousness by the barrelful, and a wish for originality that approaches vanity—she’s less a poet than a Little Engine that Could, even when it Can’t.

Publishers Weekly (US), 24th January 2005

The title for Graham's best book in at least a decade introduces several obsessions at once: it's the code name for American plans on D-Day, a sign for the absence - or perhaps presence - of an omnipotent God, and a term for arrogant nations (the US among them) who have forgotten, or never learned, the lessons of the Greatest Generation. Graham, who won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for The Dream of the Unified Field, pursues familiar metaphysical questions through the long lines and longer sentences of meditations such as 'Upon Emergence': "Have I that to which to devote my / self? Have I devotion?"; a series of poems with the title 'Praying' take the question to its ends, often ending up angry, guilty or shocked. One anecdotal poem depicts her trying and failing to feed a homeless man; a more abstract effort imagines "a horrible labyrinth, this / history of ours. No / opening." Most striking of all are works closely tied to D-Day, to Normandy (where Graham now spends part of each year) and to servicemen's own testimony, which casts contemporary fears into ironic relief: "Are you at war or at peace," Graham asks, "or are war and peace / playing their little game over your dead body?" The vague, notebook-like qualities of Graham's last few efforts baffled some admirers, who will likely, and rightly, see these clear and powerful poems as a return to form.

Library Journal, February 2005

Graham's ninth poetry collection is arguably her most impassioned, if not anxious, meditation on the nature of human presence and the possibility of belief in a diminished, fallen world where "The aim is to become / something broken / that cannot be broken further." Frenetic, one-sided conversations with a God or gods ("Your god might be the wrong one for the circumstances") sweep across the width of the page in long, self-questioning, and self-answering waves, as if the poet's mind were possessed by a relentless insomnia. Tracing the metaphysical scar tissue between raw desire to locate meaning and validation in the physical universe ("It's me I shout to the tree outside the window / don't you know it's me, a me") and the urge to withdraw ("We can pull back / from the being of our bodies...we can be absent, no one can tell."). But the crisis of selfhood is a difficult subject to manage, and Graham's cascading ruminations can turn too theatrical and self-conscious ("Every morning now I am putting these words down / in the place of other words"), as the poet cannot escape the knowledge that her private Gethsemene is, in fact, a public garden. Recommended for academic library poetry collections.

Donna Seaman, Booklist Starred Review

In her previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dream of the Unified Field (1995), Graham explores the divide between perception and reality. In her stunning ninth collection, she is still an agile metaphysician, but her poetic self now kneels with her face in her hands, humbled by illness, war, and the ravaged earth. Forthright, compassionate, and ironic, Graham has crafted poems of lyrical steeliness and cauterizing beauty. The book's title refers to "Operation Overlord," the Allied offensive that culminated in the landing on Normandy's Omaha Beach, and that, for Graham, inspired exquisite and devastating tributes to soldiers. She then links the past to the grim post-9/11 present, where one god is pitted against another, a taxicab ride reveals a tangle of cultural conflicts and personal tragedies, and environmental decimation looms. Graham writes with breathtaking precision about the helplessness one feels in the face of suffering, but because "we cannot ask another to live / without hope," and because the poet's "great desire to praise" remains undaunted, Graham takes up the pen not only to eulogize but also to express "gratitude for the trees / and the birds they house."

Selected reviews:

'There is a buoyancy in Graham's poetry, a freshness of vision which is rare in contemporary poetry.' Roger Caldwell, Times Literary Supplement, 27th June 2003

'After each new book by Graham, I wonder what she will do next. Her courage in remaking her style over the years is exemplary.' Helen Vendler, London Review of Books, 23rd January 2003.

'...one of our most highly imaginative and innovative poets. Her speculative and sensual poetry echoes an aesthetic and cultural past but is, truly, like nothing we've seen before.' David St. John, The Los Angeles Times, 1996.

[edit] The Foetry.com Controversy

Through using search engines to track connections between contest judges and contest winners, members of the controversial website Foetry.com, led by Portland Community College librarian Alan Cordle, the husband of poet Kathleen Halme, frequently accuse Graham of favoritism in judging poetry contests, awarding prizes and publication to acquaintances and former students based on personal relationships. Foetry implies literary merit is not Graham's primary criterion in these selections, but has yet to substantiate that claim (Graham argues that she only chose former students in those contests where this was not expressly prohibited, and only because their work happened to be of the highest literary merit in said contest).

An Open Records Act request forced the University of Georgia Press to provide documents to Foetry.com that the revealed that Graham judged the 1999 University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series contest and encouraged series editor and poet Bin Ramke to select Peter Sacks as the winner. According to Foetry, Sacks had not formally entered the contest and his manuscript was selected to win the contest before Ramke had screened all paid entries (Foetry claims that Ramke wrote a letter to the editor of the University of Georgia Press noting the selection of Sacks as the winner and also noting that he had read only "half" of the contest entries, despite the fact that the remaining manuscripts were paid entries). The significance of Sacks as winner is that Graham had chosen Peter Sacks, whom she would later marry (in 2000). The controversy may have been responsible for the retirement of Bin Ramke, editor of the Contemporary Poetry Series 2, and the Series' discontinuation.

Foetry.com has leveled similar attacks on such figures as the poets C.D. Wright, Mark Strand, and Janet Holmes.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry

• Overlord (2005)
• Never (2002)
• Swarm (2000)
• Photographs and Poems (1998; with Jeanette Montgomery Barron)
• The Errancy (1997)
• The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (1995)
• Materialism (1993)
• Region of Unlikeness (1991)
• The End of Beauty (1987)
• Erosion (1983)
• Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980)

[edit] Edited anthologies

• Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1997)
• The Best American Poetry 1990 (1990)

[edit] External links

• Graham's poem "Salmon"
• LiteraryHistory.com bibliography "A selective bibliography of open access internet articles on Jorie Graham"
• Photos of Graham at Blue Flower Arts