Award-Winning Poet Jorie Graham to Read at Smith

The Poetry Center at Smith College will host poet Jorie Graham at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14, in Wright Hall Auditorium.

Widely recognized as a leading voice in American poetry today, Graham is celebrated for her astonishing philosophical tapestries and intensely individual style.
"She provides," writes The Nation, "all the satisfactions we expect from poetry -- aural beauty, emotional weight -- along with an intellectual rigor we don't expect."

Born in New York City, raised in Italy and educated in French schools, Graham studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and filmmaking at New York University before turning to poetry in her mid-20s. Since 1983 she has been on the permanent faculty of the renowned Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and recently succeeded Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor at Harvard University (the first woman to hold this position).

Graham's numerous collections of poetry include "The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems" (winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize), "The Errancy" (named by the New York Times as one of the "Notable Books of 1997"), and, most recently, "Swarm."

To "swarm," Graham notes, is to "leave the original body and go forth to found a new colony or community." By leaving the original organism -- a hive, a country, a sense of one's body, a stable hierarchy of values -- one attempts to form a new stability. This fractured, fragmentary sense of swarm shapes Graham's poems.

Critic Helen Vendler, whose essays on Graham's work helped make it accessible to a wider audience, has said that when she first saw three of Graham's poems in The American Poetry Review, she thought "'What's happening here?' It's like hearing a new sound, like hearing Shostakovich after Tchaikovsky." Graham herself describes in similar terms the transformative moment decades ago when she heard a fragment of T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in a film school hallway: "It was like something being played in the key my soul recognized."

Recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, Graham was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1997. In addition to her own volumes of poetry, she has edited two anthologies, "The Best American Poetry" (1990) and "Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language" (1996).

The reading will be followed by bookselling and signing. For more information, contact Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413) 585-3368.

Contact: Marti Hobbes, mhobbes@smith.edu, (413) 585-2190

October 25, 2000