In this blue light
    I can take you there,
snow having made me
    a world of bone
seen through to. This
    is my house,

my section of Etruscan
    wall, my neighbor's
lemontrees, and, just below
    the lower church,
the airplane factory.



Jorie Graham's website

Jorie Graham at the Academy of American Poets

Jorie Graham at Poetry Foundation


Rumpus interview with Jorie Graham:

Rumpus: I’m also curious why some poems have arrows between words...Did you just decide to use arrows?

Graham: Actually, they came about as an accident. One day I made a dash and accidentally followed it with a “greater than” sign on the keyboard. And they joined up, and I thought, wow, what is that! Because the arrow it made suddenly vectored forward. The dash creates a pause, a slight waiting, a paced sense that the next thing said is equally distant in time from the prior one. But the arrow! It just hurried every felt and said and seen and experienced event into every next one—no time to pause, catch breath, hold the experience up outside of time for an instant—something a lyric poem loves to do. No, the arrows force every experience to be over almost too fast, force an expendability onto sensation and emotion, override each new instant with each next new instant. I didn’t use them often, but when I did it was as if I was trying to get words to hold still between them. Sometimes it felt as if they were developing a life of their own, trying to override all that could be said by a human voice in words. So they came to act as further agents of the machinic, the post-human, the force we live in now rushing-past-the-human to erase it. There were times where they actually seemed to interrupt what I was trying to say. They developed a seductive power. In some way they became markers of the limits of the will. As well as markers of the limits of human power, or agency, or capacity. It was amazing to feel the words “survive” them. To realize feeling would re-coalesce… that the human voice fights back to be heard, to reach out.