Jorie Graham Quotes

• What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

  Jorie Graham

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• A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

  Jorie Graham

  Stories, Matter, Confession

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• I 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 Graham

  Writing, Thinking, Other Worlds

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• The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

  Jorie Graham

  Eye, Storm, Trying

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• There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

  Jorie Graham

  Giving, Heaven, Moments

  Jorie Graham (1996). “The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• The 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 Graham

  Responsibility, Creative, Age

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• Oh how we want
  to be taken
  and changed,
  want to be mended
  by what we enter.

  Jorie Graham

  Taken, Want, Changed

  Jorie Graham (1983). “Erosion”, p.10, Princeton University Press

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• We have to find a way to not refuse to see where we are, what we are doing, and yet we must still live. And making sure to live - to go through life not around it - was always hard. Making sure to be in the vale of soul - making - as John Keats put it. Now it's insanely hard.

  Jorie Graham

  Soul

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It'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

  Mean, Thinking, Feelings

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

  Jorie Graham

  Writing, Thinking, Other Worlds

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• 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 Graham

  Taken, Voice, Poetry

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• I 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 Graham

  Moving, Philosophical, Emotional

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• Water 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 Graham

  Water, Miracle, Honor

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

  Jorie Graham

  Way

  Jorie Graham (2011). “Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts”, p.3, Princeton University Press

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• Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills.

  Jorie Graham

  Book, Perception, Veils

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• These 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 Graham

  Powerful, Passion, Writing

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• Brilliant, 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 Graham

  Beautiful, Drama, Brilliant

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