If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.
Jorie GrahamThe primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.
Jorie GrahamI think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.
Jorie GrahamWater is a miracle - it takes so many forms - is the core of life - is holy. So it becomes important to pay utmost attention to the holiness which is this planet's life - blood, which we are destroying. I always look for it in a poem. I honor it. I pay it mind.
Jorie GrahamWhat poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’
Jorie GrahamI think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.
Jorie GrahamThese are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.
Jorie GrahamI wanted to pack a lot into the lyric, but not go beyond its bounds. Some have written that I wanted to expand what the lyric could do. I just want the hugeness of experience-which includes philosophical discursiveness-to move at a rate of speed that kept it (because all within one unity of experience) emotional. Also, often, questions became the way the poems propelled themselves forward It brings the reader in as a listener to a confession[.] A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.
Jorie GrahamBrilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.
Jorie GrahamA poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.
Jorie GrahamIt's very hard to look in a mirror and see anything which resembles what one feels one's self to be. I think that discomfort, that dislocation, disintegration - that raw lack of feeling whole - that dysmorphia - is a very good place, in this moment, to hunt for the kind of experience which really requires the means of poetry to be grasped or felt.
Jorie Graham