Interview to Listen to

https://www.gracecavalieri.com/images/jorie_graham.mp3

December 30, 2018
Listening to Grace Cavalieri's Interview with Jorie Graham (by Nin Andrews)

I love this interview with Jorie Graham. I think it’s oddly seasonal, a perfect podcast to listen to now in the darkest time of the year, in the season of myth and magic. I love how Jorie Graham, like Philip Brady, thinks in terms of our cultural beliefs.

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, at least listen to the opening when Jorie Graham describes how she imagines, when writing a poem, that she is trying to get the attention of an unwilling listener, or “a person such as a God who has heard every prayer already, every request, every outraged voice and is tired of humanity, and has turned his back or her back." She explains that “there is such a moment in the Bible that used to terrify me when I was younger, when Moses hides in a cleft of a rock and watches God’s back go by. And I used to think, God’s back? He turns his back on us?”

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Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including the Forward Prize-winning and T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated Place (Ecco, 2012), From the New World: Poems 1976-2014(2015), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (HarperCollins, 2005); Never (HarperCollins, 2002); Swarm(2000); The Errancy (1997); The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Materialism (1993); Region of Unlikeness (1991); The End of Beauty (1987); Erosion (1983); and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980). She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her newest collection of poetry, Fast, released from Harper Collins in May 2017, received the Bobbitt Award from The Library of Congress.

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2018/12/listening-to-grace-cavalieris-interview-with-jorie-graham-by-nin-andrews.html