Harvard Prof Prays Through Poetry

sor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham seemed reluctant to begin reading her newest work before an audience of scholars, students, and Cantabrigians last Friday night in the Adams House Common Room. Although she is one of Harvard’s foremost poets, the esteemed writer appeared nervous, slightly fidgety and out of breath, explained as a result of the presence of many colleagues and friends. While clutching her necklace, she dove headlong into reading six poems of her intensely personal and most recent book, Overlord.

Graham, a professor in Harvard’s English department since 1999, was the second reading of The Grolier Poetry Series, co-sponsored by Adams House and The Grolier Poetry Shop of Cambridge. The 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner for Dream of the Unified Field is the author of ten collections of poetry and a former John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. Since joining the Harvard faculty, she has offered extremely popular poetry classes to graduate and undergraduate students.

Graham addressed the limitations of reading from her book, a collection of poems mainly located on Omaha Beach, the site of Operation Overlord, beginning the so-called liberation of Europe by Allied forces during World War II. First issuing a disclaimer to audience members to not read along, as she tended to make mistakes, Graham also confessed that these words were not meant to be read from a podium. She had not even intended for them to become poems at all.

The collection of poems speaks in a mixture of the poet’s own voice and the voices of soldiers of the high-casualty invasion; Graham passed over sharing poems from a perspective other than her own, claiming that she “finds it problematic to speak in a different voice.”

Graham’s own voice is a difficult one to follow, as the stream-of-consciousness poems are truly written prayers. Graham’s fascinating method of writing these poems manifests itself in the free-flowing spoken form: she would wake up in the middle of night and write poetry in the darkness until the first light of day. She shared with the audience her belief that the best poems were lost, as she wrote over lines in the obscurity of early morning.

She advised that it was necessary to read the book in its entirety to comprehend the larger picture. Touching on both the personal, political, and historical, Graham’s chronology of prayers (she shared such poems titled as “Praying June 6, 2003” and “Praying May 9, 2003”) build on one another and offer an insight into the poet’s mind.

While Graham addressed the universality of the act of prayer, “what we’re all going through in an attempt to stay sane,” listening to the poems, one had a sensation of being lost in private words and myriad details. As she slipped between spiritual trance, dream, and actuality, the process of creation was made evident, but the saturation of ideas was largely inaccessible upon first hearing. It was hard not to become enraptured with Graham’s prayer, as her voice is so compelling and forceful, yet to understand her personal catechism, it is likely necessary to actually read Overlord.

—Staff writer Kristina M. Moore can be reached at moore2@fas.harvard.edu.