Interview: Jorie Graham’s poetry

Possessing a meticulously detailed and layered style, as well as having an exceptional ability to describe nature, Jorie Graham’s poetry is primarily concerned with how we can relate our internal consciousness to the exterior natural world we inhabit.

In 1996, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994, earned Graham the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She is currently the Boylston professor of poetry at Harvard University. Her forthcoming book, Place will be her twelfth collection to date. She spoke to the Spectator about why poetry needs to be reclaimed to the oral tradition, how technology is corrupting our imagination, and why her work is laced with contradictions and paradoxes.

What sort of ideas/ themes are you dealing with in your new collection, Place?


The feeling of being in an uneasy lull before an unknowable, potentially drastic change, charges the poems. What ‘place’ is it we live in now? What do we need to know about our ‘place’ in the order of living things? What ‘place’ shall we come to consider the new normal, the new ‘earth’? So much of what scientists ask artists to do, at present, is to help people imagine the ‘unimaginable’.