Jorie Graham (; born May 9, 1950) is an American poet. The
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation is an American literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism in the wider culture. It was formed from '' Poetry'' magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist ...
called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation."
She replaced poet
Seamus Heaney as
Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher l ...
, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position.
She won the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for ''The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994'' and was chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreac ...
from 1997 to 2003. She won the 2013
International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Books and awards
Jorie 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 Award
The Whiting Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and ...
(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
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headq ...
and the Whiting Award. ''The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994'' won the 1996
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her collection of poetry ''P L A C E'' won the 2012
Forward Poetry Prize
The Forward Prizes for Poetry are major British awards for poetry, presented annually at a public ceremony in London. They were founded in 1992 by William Sieghart with the aim of celebrating excellence in poetry and increasing its audience. The ...
for best collection, becoming the first American woman ever to win one of the UK's most prestigious poetry accolades.
''P L A C E'' was also shortlisted for the 2012
T S Eliot Prize
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Priz ...
. In 2013, Graham became only the third American to win the International
Nonino
Nonino is a small Italian company that is a producer of grappa. Nonino is also the name of the family that owns and runs the brand Nonino Grappa. The first Nonino distillery was founded by Orazio Nonino in Ronchi di Percoto, in the Friuli region in ...
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 ''LA Times Book Award'' for poetry''.''
In 2017, Graham received the Wallace Stevens Award from the
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreac ...
.
Given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, recipients are nominated and elected by a majority vote of the Academy's Board of Chancellors. She won the 2018
Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
The Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry is awarded biennially by the Library of Congress on behalf of the nation in recognition for the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two y ...
for ''Fast''.
About Jorie Graham, Academy of American Poets Chancellor
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine (; born September 4, 1963) is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.
Her book of poetry, '' Citizen: An American L ...
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
The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreac ...
from 1997 to 2003.
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. She and her brother
John Randolph Pepper
John Randolph Pepper (born 1958) is a photographer and theatre director.
Biography
Pepper was born in Rome, Italy in 1958 to Curtis Bill Pepper, a war correspondent and the head of the Rome bureau for ''Newsweek'' magazine, and the sculptor ...
were raised in
Rome,
Italy. She studied philosophy at the
Sorbonne
Sorbonne may refer to:
* Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities.
*the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970)
*one of its components or linked institution, ...
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 famed
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. The writer Lan Samantha Chang is its director. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Wr ...
at the
University of Iowa.
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)
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 th]
LA Times
(subscription needed). Text is available a
New Poetry Review
o
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 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.
As a result of the critical media coverage
[Foetry.com archive](_blank)
[Thomas Bartlett, "Rhyme and Unreason," ''Chronicle of Higher Education,'' May 20, 2005]
(accessed March 16, 2005)[John Sutherland, "American foetry," ''The Guardian'', Monday July 4, 200]
/ref> 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 200]
"Discovery"/Boston Review 2008 Poetry Contest
, with deadline January 18, 2008; and judged the Baker Nord Poetry Competitio
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
/ref>
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
Joshua Clover (born December 30, 1962 in Berkeley, California) is a writer and a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Davis.
He is a published scholar, poet, critic, and journalist whose work has been ...
, Mark Levine
Mark Andrew LeVine is an American historian, musician, writer, and professor. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
Education
LeVine received his B.A. in comparative religion and biblical studies from Hunter ...
, and Geoffrey Nutter. Graham's reply to this was that over years of teaching she has had over 1400 students, many of whom went on to continue writing poetry, that no rules had prohibited her from awarding prizes to former students, and that in each case she claims to have selected the strongest work.
Awards
Bibliography
Poetry collections
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Edited anthologies
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*Contributor to ''A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West (''Gingko Library, 2019).
Selected scholarship
* 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)
References
External links
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Profile and poems at Poetry Foundation
Profile and poems written and audio at Poets.org
Profile at The Whiting Awards
*
Documents obtained by Foetry.com regarding the Graham/Sacks/Ramke collusion in pdf format
Graham reading at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 20, 1999.
Video (49 mins)
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20080408150414/http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/351-04012008-1512367.html An interview with Jorie Graham phillyBurbs.com, April 2008
Jorie Graham Resists Classic Pleasures Like Closure, a Concept Anathema to the Poet and Her Country
{{DEFAULTSORT:Graham, Jorie
1950 births
Living people
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Italy
American women poets
Harvard University faculty
Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty
MacArthur Fellows
The New Yorker people
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners
Tisch School of the Arts alumni
University of Iowa alumni
University of Iowa faculty
Writers from New York City
20th-century American poets
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American poets
21st-century American women writers
Poets from New York (state)
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters