Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham (born May 9, 1950) is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation calls her "perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation". She was the 1st woman to be Boylston Professor at Harvard. She won the Pulitzer Prize, and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Jorie Graham. Courtesy NNDB.

Life

Youth and education

Graham was born Jorie Pepper in New York City to Curtis Bill Pepper, a war correspondent and the head of the Rome bureau for Newsweek magazine, and the sculptor Beverly Stoll Pepper.

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 Master of Fine Arts from the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Career

Graham has held a longtime faculty position at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has held an appointment at Harvard University since 1999. She replaced Nobel Laureate and poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston professor in Harvard's Department of English and American Literature and Language, the first woman to be awarded this position. She sits on the contributing editorial board to the literary journal Conjunctions.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Sea Change (Ecco, 2008). She has also edited 2 anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 great poems of the English language (1996) and The Best American Poetry, 1990.

Graham was married to and divorced from publishing heir William Graham, brother of Donald E. Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. She then married poet James Galvin in 1983; they divorced in 1999. She married poet Peter M. Sacks, a colleague at Harvard, in 2000.

Controversy

Her relationship to Sacks was briefly a source of controversy. In January 1999, she judged the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series contest, which selected the manuscript "O Wheel" from Peter Sacks as the first place winner. Graham noted that, at the time she and Ramke awarded the prize, she had not yet married Sacks, and that while she had "felt awkward" about the award, she had first cleared it with the series editor, Bin Ramke, who made the actual award. As a result of the critical coverage from Foetry.com and elsewhere, Ramke resigned from the editorship of the series. Graham subsequently announced that she would no longer serve as a judge in contests, although as of 2008 she continues to do so.

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. The University of Georgia Press now discloses the names of its poetry judges, who "are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds.". 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".

The Foetry site also contended that Graham, as a judge at Georgia and other contests, had awarded prizes to at least 5 of her former students from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 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.

Writing

Graham is widely anthologized, and her poetry is the subject of many essays, including Jorie Graham: Essays on the Poetry edited by Thomas Gardner (2005).

Recognition

Her honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected poems, 1974-1994 won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

Publications

Poetry

• Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
• Erosion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• The End of Beauty. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1987.
• Region of Unlikeness. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1991.
• Materialism: Poems. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1993.
• The Dream of the Unified Field: Poems, 1974-1994. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995.
• The Errancy. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1997.
• Photographs and Poems (With Jeannette Montgomery Barron). New York: Scalo, 1998.
• Swarm. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 2000.
• Never: Poems. New York: Ecco Press, 2002.

Edited

• The Best American Poetry 1990 (editor, with David Lehman). New York: Scribners, 1991.
• Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1996.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

Jorie Graham reads San Sepulchro

• The Hiding Place (audio recording). Washington, DC: Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, Library of Congress, 1995.
• Karen Alkalay-Gut and Jorie Graham Reading Their Poems in the Montpelier Room, Library of Congress, October 19, 1995 (sound recording). Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1995.
• Jorie Graham and James McMichael Reading Their Poems in the Mumford Room, Library of Congress, March 12, 1998 (sound recording). Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1998.

  

  Jorie Graham Reads "Later in Life"

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

• Jorie Graham: Essays on the poetry, edited by Thomas Gardner. 2005
• No Image There and the Gaze Remains: The visual in the work of Jorie Graham, by Catherine Karaguezian. 2005
• Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining contemporary poetry, by Thomas Gardner. 1999.
• The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham, by Helen Vender. 1995.

External links

Poems

• "Salmon"
• "Sundown"
• Jorie Graham profile & 7 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Jorie Graham b. 1950 at the Poetry Foundation

Prose

• Introduction to Best American Poetry 1990

Audio / video

• Jorie Graham at YouTube
• Graham reading at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 20, 1999. Video (49 mins)

Books

• Jorie Graham at Amazon.com

About

• Jorie Graham Official website.
• Thomas Gardner (Spring 2003). "Jorie Graham, The Art of Poetry No. 85". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/263/the-art-of-poetry-no-85-jorie-graham. 
• Documents obtained by Foetry.com regarding the Graham/Sacks/Ramke collusion in pdf format
• "Rhyme & Unreason" from the May 20, 2005 cover story in the Chronicle of Higher Education
• An interview with Jorie Graham, phillyBurbs.com, April 2008