Reading “Why” by Jorie Graham

Poetry Lunch S6E1

Reading "Why” by Jorie Graham from To 2040, Copper Canyon Press.

//

I like the simple language in this poem, and the way it speeds up but stays anchored outdoors, and that it doesn’t attempt to answer any of the whys. Instead the world itself gets to answer in the form of a small stone that’s also equated with personal luck — personal to the asker of why.

I get confused of who is speaking to whom for a moment in the middle of the poem but I don’t mind being turned around. It makes me want to go outside and let my own self ask all the whys and let them air out. Let them be rained on. Let them stay while I go and vice versa.  

//

Link to purchase

Get the book: To 2040.

//

About the Author

Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop as well as served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. You can learn more about her on her website, here.