SOURCE: Shifrer, Anne. “Iconoclasm in the Poetry of Jorie Graham.” Colby Quarterly 31, no. 2 (June 1995): 142-53.

In the following essay, Shifrer explores the influence of painters—their processes as well as their paintings themselves—on Graham's poetry.

Poems about paintings are abundant in the works of Jorie Graham, especially in her second volume, Erosion, which includes poems about Piero della Francesca's “The Madonna del Parto,” Goya's “El Destino,” Masaccio's “The Expulsion of Adam and Eve,” and Luca Signorelli's “Resurrection of the Body,” to mention but a few of her ecphrastic subjects. Indeed, Bonnie Costello, in one of the best essays written on Graham, suggests that ecphrasis is the “chief rhetorical strategy” of Erosion (374).

Ecphrasis (a term now used to mean a verbal rendering and response to a visual representation, particularly a painting) is also a valuable entrée to Graham's ensuing volumes of poetry, The End of Beauty and...