LETTERS FROM HOME: ROOT, ROOT -- WE'RE ROOTING FOR THE HOMETOWN POET

May 4, 2000

Dear Ken,

When I was living in Northern California many years ago, someone called from the local university asking me to interview a visiting poet from Oregon. I went to the caller's house and talked to the poet, whose name was Sondra something. Her poetry was good but she was shy. Fortunately, the woman who'd called me, a poet herself, kept offering insights about Sondra's writing that Sondra couldn't.

Perhaps it was her remarkable intelligence and maybe her extremely good looks that made me remember her name and not the Oregon poet's. Her name was Jorie Graham.

Years later and far away, my eye landed on that same name while browsing the poetry section of a bookstore. The book was a collection of Graham's poetry. I opened it and read a few verses. Whatever she was writing about remained a mystery to me. The poetry was too intellectual for me.

But that didn't prevent me from tracking her literary progress, as a fan might follow a hometown baseball player who'd broken into the professional leagues.

A few years ago I saw that she was teaching at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers Workshop.

In 1996, her "The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994," won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

A few days ago in the public library I saw Graham's name again on the spine of her newest collection of poetry, titled "Swarm." The biography on the dust jacket said she was recently appointed the Boylston Professor at Harvard University.

Here is a poem from "Swarm" titled "Prayer":

"What of the quicksand.

My desperate eye looking too hard.

Or of the eye of the world

looking too hard

for me. Or, if you prefer, cause,

Looking to take in

what could be sufficient --

Then the sun goes down and the sentence

goes out. Recklessly towards the end. Beyond

the ridge. Wearing us as if lost in

thought with no way

out, no eye at all to slip through,

none of the hurry or the between-

hurry thinkings to liquefy,

until it can be laid on a tongue

oh quickness -- like a drop. Swallow.

Rouse says the dark.

Iowa Writers Workshop, Pulitzer and Harvard put a poet into the Hall of Fame. Now if I could just figure out what she's talking about.

Love, Sam