“Understanding Jorie Graham” by N. S. Boone

In Understanding Jorie Graham, (South Carolina Press, 2025), N. S. Boone presented an in-depth view of Jorie Graham’s background and a detailed view of her poetry. Extremely well-researched, this author also utilized personal phone interviews with Graham and quoted what others have said or written about her poetry. With Graham’s books for reference, N. S. Boone should be a tour guide leading the reader into the time period in which the poet wrote, an examination of the influences upon her writing, and an exploratory tumble into the caverns of her complex work.

Certainly, she had influences, her mother, an artist; and her father, a journalist for Newsweek; both providing Graham exposures to people with creative backgrounds. Her mother, travelling with her to various cultures, allowed Graham real life learning opportunities. She had Montessori hands-on schooling in early childhood, plus she attended the Lycee Chateaubriand, where she remembered reciting hundreds of lines of French poetry on a daily basis. Her father’s office, located in Rome, where they lived during her adolescence, provided in itself a springboard toward the field of literature. She also had the opportunity to study sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. Ultimately, she found her own way of exploring her various interests and endeavors, as each experience fed into the next with an exciting culmination of her talent in poetry.

In her life detours, Graham seemed to always push forward in highly stimulating directions. At the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied sociology, she was asked to leave after being arrested for involvement in a protest. After she enrolled in New York University, Graham pursued classics and film. Perhaps because of an independent nature, she did not enjoy the collaboration involved in filmmaking. She married into a family of The Washington Post in her union with Bill Graham, but after six years, she did not feel she was living the right life, and they divorced. However, during the marriage, while living in Washington, DC, she took a class at American University, studying the complete works of W. B. Yeats. She began an MFA program in creative writing at Columbia, where her innate ability combined with experience began to emerge. She subsequently taught poetry at Murray State University in Kentucky, following poet friend, James Galvin. Later, when she taught at Humbolt State University, where she published her first book, Galvin followed her there. Graham taught briefly at Columbia University before she accepted a chance to teach with Radcliffe College, then began living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having applied to Iowa State Writers Workshop, she and her partner, James Galvin, taught there together, and she eventually became mother of a baby girl, Emily. She led the poetry side of the workshop and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dream of the Unified Field. After a divorce from James Galvin, Harvard University offered her the Boylston Chair of Rhetorical Oratory. She was the first woman awarded this position, a professor in the department of English and American literature.

 Understanding Jorie Graham, part of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature Series, previously featured various well-known poets and authors. As a continuation of this series, N. S. Boone delved into creating the first extensive view into Graham’s life and works. In this book, the author examined the themes and strategies within Graham’s fourteen books of poetry, providing context, and showcasing the intensity of her unique and experimental forms. Some topics her writing centered around were human experience, philosophy, history, nature, metaphysical awareness and exploring the relationship between human activity, language and the environment. Her final three books centered around personal loss. She wrote about her parents’ lives as they went into their nineties and passed away. She also wrote about her own cancer diagnosis. The author said, “Nothing in Jorie Graham’s poetry is simple,” and quoted her from an interview that, “poetry doesn’t simplify us…. its job is to recomplicate the oversimplified thing.”

According to Boone, “Besides the awards, besides the hundreds of articles and reviews that praise her work, besides the successes of students she has taught and mentored, Graham’s major accomplishment can be distilled into how she has stretched the form of the lyric poem, and in doing so, deepened its resources.”

Comparing her in many ways to W. B Yeats, Boone added, “Graham may be considered the greatest poet of her generation.”

N. S. Boone

N. S. Boone teaches literature and writing at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. He has published widely in journals on literary topics ranging from Homer’s Iliad to the book of Revelation to the novels of D. H. Lawrence to the poetry of William Carlos Williams. He has also published poems in outlets such as Teleios, Georgetown Review, St. Austin Review, and Slant. He is the author of Biblical Proportions, a book of poems (forthcoming from Kelsay Books). He is also the co-author of Call Me Buf, a memoir-biography of his grandfather, James Buford Smith.