In the interview in the New Yorker magazine January 8, 2023,
Jorie Graham Takes the Long View, Katie Waldman the interviewer asks this question:
You write so sharply about the way the mind, and your mind, moves. I’m
curious about that poetic mind. Is it the same mind you bring to the breakfast
table or the garden?
JG: The mind is a current—let’s take a river as an example. It not only carries
whatever it picks up by what it traverses (breakfast table, garden), but it is also
changed in its course by what it traverses.Its weight changes, its speed, the
direction in which it was going. Being taken by surprise is one of the fundamental
experiences for any poet writing any poem. You know you are in the grip of a
poem when it—the subject, the terrain you are entering, traversing—reorients you
and puts you before a question that you did not know existed. You are irrevocably
changed. One writes to be so changed. The silence you break to enter the poem is
never the same silence closing over again when the voice reënters the silence.The
poem is an action you have taken and an experience you’ve undergone. You’re not
the same person you were when you undertook that poem.That sensation of
transformation is addictive—spiritually and emotionally.Why else would anyone
attempt this insanely difficult—practically impossible—practice day after day for a
lifetime? One is in it for the conversion experiences.What are the ideals of form
for except to get us into legitimate danger that we may be legitimately rescued,
Frost asks. The key term in this brilliant formulation is “legitimate.”
Graham's poetry with its philosophical questions examines life, human life in an increasingly alarming
world beset by violent storms, floods, wildfire, and rising seas. We know what is happening, and she
describes this as a runaway system, yet we cannot stop. Her consciousness is sharp and clear, and her
voice is powerful.
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/to-the-last-be-human-by-jorie-graham/
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