A Body Of Work

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Jorie Graham

Miller, who is a long-time friend and colleague of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (they attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop together, where Graham is now a permanent member of the writing faculty), will introduce Graham at tonight's reading.

Arizona Daily Wildcat Where It's At Poet Jorie Graham reads tonight in the Modern Languages Auditorium at 8 p.m. Admission is free.

Graham, a native of New York who attended New York University as an undergraduate, is one of the preeminent voices of contemporary poetics. She is the author of six books including The Errancy (Ecco Press, 1997),The Dream of the Unified Field and Selected Poems, 1974-1994 (Ecco Press, 1995), which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Graham's long list of awards includes a MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Her qualifications are impeccable. So is her poetry. Graham's work is a dense, lyric movement of the mind through the modern world. "The reason confiscated. The reason nowhere to be/found. Blowing this very paper now/out of my hands/if I would/let it go," Graham writes in the poem "Little Requiem" from her most recent collection, The Errancy.

Graham's musicality in language is one of the most engaging facets of her work. Many readers, however, find the density of Graham's lyricism and associative sensibility difficult to penetrate. Graham uses film-like techniques in her imagery (she studied film as an undergraduate) in an attempt to reconcile the phenomenal world with the sublime, inner-life of the mind.

"I think she [Graham] writes poems that reside somewhere between the lyric and the meditation," said Alison Deming, Director of the UA Poetry Center. "A great deal is often left out [of the poems] as far as a traditional, linear narrative," Deming also remarked, adding that "hearing the poems read aloud allows the music of the poem to open up a way to experience the poem through the body."

The body, as a means of knowledge, is addressed by Graham in a recent interview with Mark Wunderlich (former Interim Director of the UA Poetry Center) in the Associated Writing Program's publication The AWP Chronicle. Graham says, "If I have a wish, it is that the body's (the heart's) knowledge be trusted again, that the fear of the body - certainly understandable in the age of AIDS and the plague-like virulence of our instant information technologies - decrease, and that the senses be used again in our poetry, that real images be felt, written, and most importantly, understood for the knowledge they contain."

Bring your body (and, preferably, your intellect) to the Modern Languages Auditorium tonight at 8 p.m. for a lush, musical ecstasy (as in out of body experience). Admission is free and there will be carrot cake and brownies. Graham's books will be available for purchase before and after the reading, compliments of the UA Book Store, and if you're nice, you might even get Ms. Graham to sign your copy.