SOURCE: Spiegelman, Willard. “Jorie Graham's ‘New Way of Looking.’” Salmagundi no. 120 (fall 1998): 244-75.

In the following essay, Spiegelman discusses Graham's poetics in her earlier books, specifically how she experiments with ways of viewing the world.

“Description is an element, like air or water.” 

—Wallace Stevens, “Adagia”

Wallace Stevens' laconic aphorism might serve as a point of entry into the sternly alluring, fiercely defiant sensibility of Jorie Graham, who may now be the most important poet of her generation. But exactly what kind of poet is she? By turns descriptive, lyric, speculative, and narrative, Graham has forged her career by re-inventing poetic genres, by breaking down and then reforming boundaries. More specifically, Graham has reimagined the very transactions between the poet's eye and the visible world. Whereas the major tradition of poetic description has meant keeping one's sight steadily upon one's subject (the line that runs from Wordsworth through...