SOURCE: Casper, Robert N. “About Jorie Graham.” Ploughshares 27, no. 4 (winter 2001-2002): 189-93.

In the following essay, Casper provides a short profile of Graham through a discussion of several of her books.

Jorie Graham is the kind of poet whose life is nothing less than cinematic. She was born in Rome in 1950 and grew up there. Her father, Bill Pepper, was the head of the Newsweek Rome bureau; her mother, Beverly, is a sculptor famous for her totemic structures. As a child, Jorie hid inside old churches; she helped out on Antonioni films as a teenager. She went to French schools, and to the Sorbonne, but was expelled for taking part in student protests. So she transferred to New York University, where she studied film with Haig Manoogian and Martin Scorsese.

It is there that Graham's attentions turned, literally, to poetry. Passing a class taught by M. L. Rosenthal...