Jorie Graham (; born May 9, 1950) is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation."
Early life and education
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 Pepper. She and her brother John Randolph Pepper were raised in
Rome,
Italy. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, 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 Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Career
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including notable volumes like
The End of Beauty,
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994,
Sea Change,
P L A C E,
From the New World: Poems 1976–2014,
Fast, and
Runaway. She has also edited two anthologies,
Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and
The Best American Poetry 1990. She is widely anthologized and her poetry is the subject of many essays, including
Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry (2005). The Poetry Foundation considers Graham's third book,
The End of Beauty (1987), to have been a "watershed" book in which Graham first used the longer verse line for which she is best known.
Graham's many honors include a
Whiting Awards (1985), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Whiting Award.
won the 1996
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her collection of poetry
P L A C E won the 2012 Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, becoming the first American woman ever to win one of the UK's most prestigious poetry accolades.
was also shortlisted for the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize.
In 2013, Graham became only the third American to win the International
Nonino Prize. In 2015,
From the New World: Selected Poems 1976–2014—a collection from all prior eleven volumes plus new work—was published by
HarperCollins/
Ecco Press. In 2016
From the New World won the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
.
In 2017, Graham received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
About Jorie Graham, Academy of American Poets Chancellor Claudia Rankine said: "Jorie Graham's masterful poems traverse almost four decades of inquiry into what it means to be in relation. Her work pulls forward our mythical, historical, environmental, and personal narratives in order to inhabit our most ordinary and collective experiences. Hers is the patience of the return; repetition in her work unearths the nuances of fundamental desires to live, to love, to be. Clear-eyed and with a scope that encompasses what is both known and unknown, her 15 collections have built towards a brilliant insistence on presence."
She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Graham has held a longtime faculty position at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has held an appointment at Harvard University since 1999. Graham replaced Nobel Laureate and poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston professor in Harvard's Department of English and American Literature and Language. She became the first woman to be awarded this position.[David Orr, "ON POETRY; Jorie Graham, Superstar," 'New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 24, 2005; available at the Time website (accessed March 16, 2008)]
Personal life
Graham was married to and divorced from publishing heir William Graham, brother of Donald E. Graham, the former publisher of
The Washington Post. She then married the poet James Galvin in 1983 and they divorced in 1999. She married poet and painter Peter M. Sacks, in 2000.
[Tomas Alex Tizon, "In Search of Poetic Justice," Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2005. Available at the LA Times (subscription needed). Text is available at New Poetry Review or SFgate (accessed 16 March 2007)]
Poetry competition controversy
In January 1999, she judged the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series contest, which selected the manuscript "O Wheel" from Peter M. Sacks, her future husband, as the first-place winner. Graham noted that at that time she was not married to Sacks, and that while she had "felt awkward" about giving the award to her then-boyfriend, she had first cleared it with the series editor,
Bin Ramke.
[Kevin Larimer, "The Contester: Who's Doing What to Keep Them Clean", Poets & Writers Magazine, July/August 2005. Formerly available at Poets and Writers (page currently offline)] As a result of the critical media coverage
[ Foetry.com archive ][Thomas Bartlett, "Rhyme and Unreason," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 20, 2005, available here (accessed March 16, 2005)][John Sutherland, "American foetry," The Guardian, Monday July 4, 2005 the Guardian] Ramke resigned from the editorship of the series. Graham subsequently announced that she would no longer serve as a judge in contests
although she continued to do so after 2008.
[Graham was selected to judge the 2008 "Discovery"/Boston Review 2008 Poetry Contest , with deadline January 18, 2008; and judged the Baker Nord Poetry Competition in 2011.] Throughout the course of the contest, Ramke had insisted that judges of the contest be kept secret, and until Foetry.com obtained the names of judges via The Open Records Act, the conflict of interest had been undisclosed. A statement now adopted in the rules of many competitions (including the University of Georgia Contest) to prevent judges from selecting students is often referred to as the "Jorie Graham rule".
[Alex Beam, "Website polices rhymes and misdemeanors," Boston Globe, March 31, 2005, available here]
The Foetry site also contended that Graham, as a judge at Georgia and other contests, had awarded prizes to at least five of her former students from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, including Joshua Clover, Mark Levine, and Geoffrey Nutter.
Awards
Publications
Poetry
- Collections
- Anthologies (edited)
- List of poems
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| I catch sight of the now | 2021 | | |
| I | 2021 | | |
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Essays and other contributions
-
Contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West (Gingko Library, 2019).
Critical studies and reviews of Graham's work
-
Helen Vendler. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (1995)
-
Thomas Gardner, Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry (1999)
-
Daniel McGuiness, "Jorie Graham in Stitches" and "The Long Line in Jorie Graham and Charles Wright," in Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary Poetry, State University of New York Press, Albany NY (2001)
-
Catherine Karaguezian, No Image There and the Gaze Remains: The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham (2005)
-
Thomas Gardner (ed.), Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry (2005)
External links
