GRAHAM, JORIE

born May 9, 1951, New York, N.Y., U.S. American poet whose abstract, intellectual verse is known for its visual imagery, complex metaphors, and philosophical content. Graham grew up in France and Italy. After attending the Sorbonne, she continued her education at New York University (B.F.A., 1973) and at the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1978). She taught in Kentucky, California, and New York City before returning to Iowa as a faculty member in 1983. In addition to her interest in European art, she was influenced by the poets W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, John Milton, John Berryman, and Emily Dickinson. Graham began publishing poems in 1977. Her first volume of verse, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), features compact, intricate poems that explore death, beauty, and change. Erosion (1983) examines the connection between the body and the soul in such poems as "Reading Plato," "I Watched a Snake," and "The Sense of an Ending." In The End of Beauty (1987), Graham experimented with form, constructing subtle, sometimes inaccessible poems divided into series of short, numbered stanzas with missing words and lively enjambment. Region of Unlikeness (1991), which is annotated to explain textual obscurities, furthers her exploration of philosophy and religion in such poems as "The Tree of Knowledge," "The Holy Shroud," and "Chaos." Later collections by Graham include Materialism (1993), The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994 (1995; Pulitzer Prize), and The Errancy (1997); she also contributed to several anthologies.