Jenny Factor

As the Gesture Between Them: Sound and Silence in Jorie Graham
Saturday, December 9, 2023, 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.  

Jenny Factor

"Each poem," Jorie Graham writes in the introduction to The Best American Poetry 1990, "is an act of the mind that tries – via precision of seeing, feeling, and thinking – to clean the language of its current lies, to make it capable of connecting us to the world."

Yet for a poet who describes poetry as an act of connection to the world and of saying, so much of the strength of Jorie Graham’s work comes from her ability to pen silence, to write an expressive textured non-speech onto the page. Renowned literary critic, Helen Vendler first discovered Jorie Graham through three poems published in the American Poetry Review. She thought, “It's like hearing a new sound, like hearing Shostakovich after Tchaikovsky."

In this seminar, we will focus particularly on sentence structure in Jorie Graham’s poetry, emphasizing three poems from her 1994 Pulitzer-winning book of selected poems, The Dream of the Unified Field, and one more recent poem. Together we will explore Graham’s sounds and stratagems: how hers is a philosophical poetry, suffused with history and myth, a poetry of cinematographically-resonant syntactic invention and risk, always less from the id than from the idea. Above all, we will look at her strategies of supercision and silence—at how she uses words and space to keep the direct (and necessarily unsatisfying) expression of the unsayable off the page in favor of the more ineffable. 

In order to facilitate close reading of the poems, there will be a suggested reading methodology handout in the Reader with some particular tips.

Required Reading (in Reader):

Please read the Reading Guide and Timeline. Then read the poems in this order:

Graham, Jorie. “Salmon.” The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, Ecco Press, 1995.

Available online at: https://poems.com/poem/salmon/

---. “At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body.” The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, Ecco Press, 1995.

Available online at: https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=2&poet=660&poem=6741

---. “What the End is For.” The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, Ecco Press, 1995.

Available online at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47186/what-the-end-is-for

---. “Mother and Child: The Road at the End of the Field.” Place: New Poems, Ecco Press, 2012.

Recommended Reading:

Graham, Jorie. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. The Ecco Press, 1995.

Graham, Jorie. “Imagining the Unimaginable.” 2008. Interview by Deirdre Wengen. Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, 21 Feb. 2014. 

Available online at: https://poets.org/text/imagining-unimaginable-jorie-graham-conversation