Jorie Graham – Late Work

How poet Jorie Graham -living with cancer, reeling from her mother's death, and isolated on an islandwrote one of the finest books of her long career.

- By Kerry Howley. Photograph by Jeanette Montgomery Barron

"To speak into silence is something very dramatic" is something Jorie Graham is given to say, and it is a statement that seems true when she in particular says it. Silence "is the sound of the earth." Silence "does not need you to interrupt it." Interrupting the silence is something one must justify, ideally by becoming the person who can write the book worthy of breaking it. In February 2022, it had been four months since her diagnosis, 15 since her husband was helicoptered to a hospital, two years since she watched her mother die. She lived on an island formed 20,000 years ago by a moving wall of ice.

The day is long, she once wrote. It flirts with nothingness. It always does. The clock in her kitchen read, as it has for many years now, 9:42. She pulled long strands of brown hair off her furniture, a nuisance. She took out a pair of kitchen scissors and cut the rest off her head. The days were diminishing, but they always are. She wrote new poems that felt like the old poems and rejected them. She read others to whom the words had somehow come: Carlo Rovelli, Barry Lopez, Byung-Chul Han, Emily Dickinson; "Always Dickinson." When she was too sick to read, she watched documentaries. The silence was heavy and unyielding. Maybe it's over, she thought. Maybe that's all I was called to do. Every poet, according to Jorie Graham, brings a different quality to silence. "If you read Czeslaw Milosz, the silence he's writing into has history in it," she says, "and if you read Dickinson, the silence has God or his absence in it." Jorie Graham claims she doesn't know what silence she is breaking. But I'm telling you now, the silence has time in it.