Jorie Graham famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesnâ€™t â€˜soothe.â€™
-- Jorie Graham
The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.
-- Jorie Graham

#Responsibility #Creative #Age
If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.
-- Jorie Graham

#Taken #Voice #Poetry
Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.
-- Jorie Graham

#Beautiful #Drama #Brilliant
The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.
-- Jorie Graham

#Eye #Storm #Trying
I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.
-- Jorie Graham

#Writing #Thinking #Other Worlds
There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heavenâ€”
-- Jorie Graham

#Giving #Heaven #Moments
Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter.
-- Jorie Graham

#Taken #Want #Changed
A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.
-- Jorie Graham

#Stories #Matter #Confession
Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills.
-- Jorie Graham

#Book #Perception #Veils
The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.
-- Jorie Graham

#Way
I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.
-- Jorie Graham

#Writing #Thinking #Other Worlds
I wanted to pack a lot into the lyric, but not go beyond its bounds. Some have written that I wanted to expand what the lyric could do. I just want the hugeness of experience-which includes philosophical discursiveness-to move at a rate of speed that kept it (because all within one unity of experience) emotional. Also, often, questions became the way the poems propelled themselves forward It brings the reader in as a listener to a confession[.] A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.
-- Jorie Graham

#Philosophical #Moving #Emotional

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