Jorie-isms

Digging 'round in my old notebooks I found a few nuggets on writing from Jorie Graham that I copied out. The first echoes Stevens, the poem resisting intelligence. The last three all circle around the same idea of positing a listener to guide and shape your voice or voices. I get a lot more mileage out of her thoughts on writing than her writing itself these days.

1. You want to not understand your poem for as long as you can, because as soon as you start understanding it, all you can do is shape it into the simplest form of your understanding. You end up writing a poem that is an interpretation of the original poem.

2. If I am talking specifically to my mother, or to the butcher, or to Emily, I have a complete voice governed by vocabulary, tone and range of references … totally woven into each other by the fact that the listener is constant and imaginable.

3. Too general a sense of audience and the poem wavers between different registers of your own voice.

4. To write differently, posit a different listener, in order to expand the range of experiences that come into the poem. I have to speak to someone I not have spoken to before.


I was torn between which photos of her to use (there are so many). I skipped all the "chin in hand" (too yearbooky) photos and went with these which range from stormy Jorie to blue Jorie to fiery Jorie.