There is no one in the world of poetry who hasn’t read her, formed an opinion of her, heard or told or recast a story about her. Each of her 15 books feels radical within the context of American poetry, none more so than her latest five, which are startlingly accessible and immediate, written as if for a person impatient to understand the nature of matter. The strength of Graham’s influence can be felt across the thousands of students who have passed through her classroom, the prestige of a position at Harvard formerly occupied by Seamus Heaney and John Quincy Adams, a solid set of major awards (Guggenheim, MacArthur, Pulitzer) bestowed upon her. It’s too alone, she wrote in 2020’s Runaway, a book full of long fast lines, a work that manages to convey the feeling of time while existing as a person on the internet, overcome, targeted, whelmed by information that never reaches the status of knowledge. Listen it’s trying / to make a void again. In which to hear itself. It is Graham’s unearthly self-possession in the presence of mystery that renders her poetry so strange. There are many writers with righteous self-assurance, and many comfortable with bewilderment, and they are only rarely the same people. It is a nakedness from which story will not appear to save you. But I’m telling you now, the silence has time in it.Ī Jorie Graham poem is a deep burrow into a position from which one can gather nothing but the sense of being terribly alive.
“If you read Czeslaw Milosz, the silence he’s writing into has history in it,” she says, “and if you read Dickinson, the silence has God or his absence in it.” Jorie Graham claims she doesn’t know what silence she is breaking.
Every poet, according to Jorie Graham, brings a different quality to silence. She read others to whom the words had somehow come: Carlo Rovelli, Barry Lopez, Byung-Chul Han, Emily Dickinson “Always Dickinson.” When she was too sick to read, she watched documentaries. She wrote new poems that felt like the old poems and rejected them. The days were diminishing, but they always are. She took out a pair of kitchen scissors and cut the rest off her head. She pulled long strands of brown hair off her furniture, a nuisance. The clock in her kitchen read, as it has for many years now, 9:42. She lived on an island formed 20,000 years ago by a moving wall of ice. In February 2022, it had been four months since her diagnosis, 15 since her husband was helicoptered to a hospital, two years since she watched her mother die. Silence “is the sound of the earth.” Silence “does not need you to interrupt it.” Interrupting the silence is something one must justify, ideally by becoming the person who can write the book worthy of breaking it. To speak into silence is something very dramatic” is something Jorie Graham is given to say, and it is a statement that seems true when she in particular says it.
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