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The End of Beauty
A collection of poems by "a poet of large ambitions and reckless music. Ms. Graham writes with a metaphysical flair and emotional power."--New York Times Book Review.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
12 people are currently reading
450 people want to read
About the author
Jorie Graham
59 books173 followersJorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her many 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 has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her many 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 has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
May 18, 2011
This podcast (a Q&A between Graham and Silverblatt) helped me tremendously in my reading of Graham: http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/jor...
I love the story in this of Graham's teenage daughter coming to her and saying that she felt "bad." Graham's response: a thesaurus, to look up what exactly she meant by "bad." This idea of expanding our vocabularies to expand both our precision and our possibilities resonates (more on this: Sam Hamill's "The Necessity to Speak"). We must steal our words and definitions, our knowledge, back from the politician's empty, limited, deceptive rhetoric.
The greatest lesson I gleaned from this book: how to create perspectives and embody abstractions. After her orienting titles, she disorients you with strange and stark description. As a reader, you must feel your way into her poems-she often starts a poem on ground-level, as Pound's periplum-then shifts between this perspective and a more knowing, above-ground one. But then further layers a poem by introducing another character and/or unusual perspective, the reader/writer relationship, ellipses ____, and strange time. These many shifts, these elongated times (long takes), I admire because, though demanding, they force the reader to enter and follow the poem on its own terms (a good technique to have in your arsenal for workshop!).
Some questions I'm still asking about this foreboding title in light of the book's form: What is her relationship to fragments? Are they salvaged parts or part of the wreckage? Are they beautiful or a problem for the beautiful?
I love the story in this of Graham's teenage daughter coming to her and saying that she felt "bad." Graham's response: a thesaurus, to look up what exactly she meant by "bad." This idea of expanding our vocabularies to expand both our precision and our possibilities resonates (more on this: Sam Hamill's "The Necessity to Speak"). We must steal our words and definitions, our knowledge, back from the politician's empty, limited, deceptive rhetoric.
The greatest lesson I gleaned from this book: how to create perspectives and embody abstractions. After her orienting titles, she disorients you with strange and stark description. As a reader, you must feel your way into her poems-she often starts a poem on ground-level, as Pound's periplum-then shifts between this perspective and a more knowing, above-ground one. But then further layers a poem by introducing another character and/or unusual perspective, the reader/writer relationship, ellipses ____, and strange time. These many shifts, these elongated times (long takes), I admire because, though demanding, they force the reader to enter and follow the poem on its own terms (a good technique to have in your arsenal for workshop!).
Some questions I'm still asking about this foreboding title in light of the book's form: What is her relationship to fragments? Are they salvaged parts or part of the wreckage? Are they beautiful or a problem for the beautiful?
July 6, 2008
This book was a real discovery for me. It blew apart and redfined what can be used as poetic language. It is full of retellings of classic mythology in very interesting language, and with layers of meanings conveyed through the original imagery. I have worked my way carefully through this book several times. Found it a pure joy and a very very new usage of language.
January 17, 2008
I think my favorite book by Jorie Graham; the first one by her I read. I'm still in love with the first line (from "Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them [Adam and Eve]"):
The gesture like a fruit torn from a limb, torn swiftly.
The gesture like a fruit torn from a limb, torn swiftly.
June 14, 2020
I love poetry like this, that pushes me to dig deep to find meaning.
November 15, 2007
recently, my dog ate this book (with my notes on the text, even!)
he must have sensed that although the poems are luminous, and at times absolutely startling (see "self-portrait as the gesture between them") the "i'm talking about art/movies/physics and giving you a lesson in the meaning of life" device begins to wear thin. which is why her last great work was, in my opinion, her selected ("the dream of the unified field")was really the best.
maybe only sharon olds can get away with the "i am about to tell you something incredible important" because she doesn't examine something outside life, but simply examines life?
he must have sensed that although the poems are luminous, and at times absolutely startling (see "self-portrait as the gesture between them") the "i'm talking about art/movies/physics and giving you a lesson in the meaning of life" device begins to wear thin. which is why her last great work was, in my opinion, her selected ("the dream of the unified field")was really the best.
maybe only sharon olds can get away with the "i am about to tell you something incredible important" because she doesn't examine something outside life, but simply examines life?
January 10, 2008
Getting ready to teach this.
November 24, 2023
Listen. Do you hear it at
last, the spirit of
matter, there, where the words end—their small heat—where the details
cease, the scene dissolves, do you feel it at last, the sinking, where the
meaning
rises, where the meaning evaporates, into history, into the day the
mind, and the precipitating syllables are free at last
on the wind, sinking, the proof of god the cry sinking to where it’s
just sound, part of one sound, one endless sound— maybe a cry maybe a
countdown, love—
— —
what a practice in rhythm/clarity/obscurity/omission this collection is. fun to read & quite a unique tone.
last, the spirit of
matter, there, where the words end—their small heat—where the details
cease, the scene dissolves, do you feel it at last, the sinking, where the
meaning
rises, where the meaning evaporates, into history, into the day the
mind, and the precipitating syllables are free at last
on the wind, sinking, the proof of god the cry sinking to where it’s
just sound, part of one sound, one endless sound— maybe a cry maybe a
countdown, love—
— —
what a practice in rhythm/clarity/obscurity/omission this collection is. fun to read & quite a unique tone.
April 27, 2024
The music // form of early Jorie…. There is No Other
“You can still hear them in that phase, the north and/ south laid up against each other, constantly erasing/ each minute with each minute” (30)
“The secret cannot be/
kept.
It wants to cross over, it wants
to be a lie” (41)
“You can still hear them in that phase, the north and/ south laid up against each other, constantly erasing/ each minute with each minute” (30)
“The secret cannot be/
kept.
It wants to cross over, it wants
to be a lie” (41)
October 11, 2024
I used to be totally enraptured by some of the poems in this book, but it didn't quite hit the way it once did. A bit too abstracted for my current taste.
September 24, 2022
I will always love Jorie Graham
January 31, 2012
This book probably deserves more stars. I bought it because when I worked at the Strand, I picked it up and couldn't stop reading it. I brought it home and read it for awhile. Then, I stopped reading it. And since then, I haven't been able to get as into it as I was when I first fell in love with it. It felt very dense and crowded at the end. I liked a lot of the lines, but I felt like I "wasn't getting" it or that things were going over my head because I was reading it too quickly or when I was too tired. So maybe I didn't give the second half of this book enough time, but I'm giving it credit, here. Just because I'm giving it three stars to me doesn't mean that I think you would. You will probably love this book more than I did. It's eloquent and smart. I just didn't have the patience for it's intelligence, only for its beauty.
April 28, 2009
Extremely brainy but intriguing poetry about the spaces between our efforts at communication and our bodies. On the surface confusing, rereads allow for one to plumb the spiritual depths of Jorie's work. Not to mention the chance to see how many weird literary devices she employs per poem.
March 17, 2008
A sophmore effort with a select number of truly arresting sequences and the rest an immature style of her usual pastoral post-modernism.
July 20, 2008
Poetry you can taste.
July 14, 2009
What I learned from this book is how mute and palpable poetry can and must be.
June 8, 2011
Love this poet.
December 31, 2020
** 3 stars **
I can appreciate from a poetic standpoint what Jorie Graham is doing in this collection, I just don't personally love it. Graham is like the Jackson Pollock of poetry here - in fact, there is even a poem toward the end of the collection called "Pollock and Canvas" - she's giving you non-representational art that seems random but actually has been constructed with care. She writes poetry with beautiful words that purposefully fail to cohere around a single narrative or image. She stops right before you can begin to construct a narrative around what's going on in the poem. While her poems often feature the lyrical 'I,' we as the reader know very little about who 'I' is (sometimes not even the gender) or what is going on in their life.
To her credit, many of Graham's poems in this collection are helpful in understanding what she is doing. Take, for instance, this line from the aforementioned "Pollock and Canvas":
"Oh but we wanted to paint what is not beauty, how can one paint what is not beauty...?" (84)
And these lines from "Pietà":
Do you hear it at
last, the spirit of
matter, there, where the words end - their small heat - where the details
cease, the scene dissolves, do you feel it at last, the sinking, where the
meaning
rises, where the meaning evaporates, into history, into the day the
mind, and the precipitating syllables are free at last (72)
In other words, The End of Beauty paints "what is not beauty" by refusing to give the reader enough details to make sense of the scene so that we can only appreciate the words themselves rather than the image or narrative that they construct.
This is poetry for fellow poets and artists or for those who study poetry. It's not a collection for novices. In fact, the first time I read this collection a number of years ago in grad school, I hated it. Now, I appreciate more of what Graham is doing (hence the 3-star rating), but I'm still not wild about it because the reading experience feels like I've just acted out Waiting for Godot through poetry.
I can appreciate from a poetic standpoint what Jorie Graham is doing in this collection, I just don't personally love it. Graham is like the Jackson Pollock of poetry here - in fact, there is even a poem toward the end of the collection called "Pollock and Canvas" - she's giving you non-representational art that seems random but actually has been constructed with care. She writes poetry with beautiful words that purposefully fail to cohere around a single narrative or image. She stops right before you can begin to construct a narrative around what's going on in the poem. While her poems often feature the lyrical 'I,' we as the reader know very little about who 'I' is (sometimes not even the gender) or what is going on in their life.
To her credit, many of Graham's poems in this collection are helpful in understanding what she is doing. Take, for instance, this line from the aforementioned "Pollock and Canvas":
"Oh but we wanted to paint what is not beauty, how can one paint what is not beauty...?" (84)
And these lines from "Pietà":
Do you hear it at
last, the spirit of
matter, there, where the words end - their small heat - where the details
cease, the scene dissolves, do you feel it at last, the sinking, where the
meaning
rises, where the meaning evaporates, into history, into the day the
mind, and the precipitating syllables are free at last (72)
In other words, The End of Beauty paints "what is not beauty" by refusing to give the reader enough details to make sense of the scene so that we can only appreciate the words themselves rather than the image or narrative that they construct.
This is poetry for fellow poets and artists or for those who study poetry. It's not a collection for novices. In fact, the first time I read this collection a number of years ago in grad school, I hated it. Now, I appreciate more of what Graham is doing (hence the 3-star rating), but I'm still not wild about it because the reading experience feels like I've just acted out Waiting for Godot through poetry.
Read
August 13, 2025i am lost to the understanding of movement that jorie graham works with in her poems. it is similar to the language of a dream that you try hard to remember. reading these poems all together in their rightful collection there is a moment of waking where you remember what she was saying. the end of beauty as a waking into love, not with another, but with what could be yourself. “all arms, all arms extended in the / piloting sticky heat, fan on, overhead on, all arms no face at all dear god, all arms—“ love as finality, love as a room with a lock.
May 2, 2021
Not my favorite work of Jorie Graham's but it has some important poems of hers. The best ones are the most personal ones without the trappings of classical mythology or highminded ekphrasis. The last poem in the book, "Imperialism," might have been my favorite.
July 6, 2021
There are some dazzling moments in this book, but on the whole I felt it was trying too hard. Often while it made me think at least somewhat deeply intellectually, too infrequently did it make me feel with my heart.
March 6, 2025
My most cherished poet. It took me awhile to crack these poems, but once I fell into her cadence I found I couldn’t escape it.
September 25, 2010
I really wanted to like this book, as much of the other Graham that I have read I have liked. It is highly possible that I just didn't get it, or didn't spend enough time with it. It would be very hard for me to summarize this book or analyze it, so I'm instead going to go on a tangent about the subset of contemporary poetry that is, oh, indeterminate/opaque/uninterested with meaning as a primary vehicle by which to experience the poem.
So. I was taught to write with the goal of clarity. I was taught to analyze poems from probably a Symbolist perspective--meaning is there, and it's up to you, as a reader/critic, to find those meanings and articulate them. So my education has perhaps primed me with the desire to write with an attempt to communicate, and to see as "right" those poets who do attempt to communicate. Sounds basic, no? Cue my surprise when, as a wee poet in her early twenties in New York, I learned that there is a large segment of poets whose main goal is not communication. I never took a class on Modernism or Postmodernism during college, so I was not really up-to-speed with the whole "let's fragment meaning cuz that's fun" school (yes, I'm being glib). I just thought it was silly, and irritating, and pointless. The world is confusing enough, and if our writers--those with the ability and desire to articulate, and to touch others with the "human pang"--refuse to illuminate, elucidate, and empathize, then they are enacting a self-indulgent aesthetic that serves to alienate people, not bring them together.
After my first year of my MFA program, I am not so quick to jump on poets who lurve to obscure meaning. I have a higher tolerance; nay, I can even express an appreciation for the different goals of poets (in other words, I can appreciate that my poetic goals don't have to be everybody else's poetic goals). However, there is still part of me that strongly reacts to an anti-communicative poetic stance. Why withhold so much? Who or what does it serve when your poetry is total sheen, or wordless vibe, or a tapestry made entirely of glimpses? I do wonder at the proliferation of this kind of poetry. Don't we, as writers, have some sort of responsibility to welcome others onto our page? I think maybe we do. Or I think that maybe I want to. The world is lonely enough without our poets kicking us out of their creative universes.
Tant (tangent plus rant) over.
So. I was taught to write with the goal of clarity. I was taught to analyze poems from probably a Symbolist perspective--meaning is there, and it's up to you, as a reader/critic, to find those meanings and articulate them. So my education has perhaps primed me with the desire to write with an attempt to communicate, and to see as "right" those poets who do attempt to communicate. Sounds basic, no? Cue my surprise when, as a wee poet in her early twenties in New York, I learned that there is a large segment of poets whose main goal is not communication. I never took a class on Modernism or Postmodernism during college, so I was not really up-to-speed with the whole "let's fragment meaning cuz that's fun" school (yes, I'm being glib). I just thought it was silly, and irritating, and pointless. The world is confusing enough, and if our writers--those with the ability and desire to articulate, and to touch others with the "human pang"--refuse to illuminate, elucidate, and empathize, then they are enacting a self-indulgent aesthetic that serves to alienate people, not bring them together.
After my first year of my MFA program, I am not so quick to jump on poets who lurve to obscure meaning. I have a higher tolerance; nay, I can even express an appreciation for the different goals of poets (in other words, I can appreciate that my poetic goals don't have to be everybody else's poetic goals). However, there is still part of me that strongly reacts to an anti-communicative poetic stance. Why withhold so much? Who or what does it serve when your poetry is total sheen, or wordless vibe, or a tapestry made entirely of glimpses? I do wonder at the proliferation of this kind of poetry. Don't we, as writers, have some sort of responsibility to welcome others onto our page? I think maybe we do. Or I think that maybe I want to. The world is lonely enough without our poets kicking us out of their creative universes.
Tant (tangent plus rant) over.
December 20, 2007
I'm sort of reading this. Noncommittal as yet. I will read it at some point. But is this the point?
Jorie Graham's poetic project is something I rather have to wrench my minds towards. I gather that she's interested in a philosophic level of discourse--i.e., not precisely the real things, but what she would perhaps argue is more real, the ideas that govern how we see the real things. Applied on top of real things--for characteristically she is looking at something--the discourse creates a strange effect for me, in that I am always trying to see the real things. I feel frustrated by the obscurity of the real. I don't think I've quite figured out how to read her, is the upshot here. Ideas?
Okay, update. This has become my light rail book, so I'm committed now. But--I don't know whether I just reached the critical stage or what--but it all seems a bit familiar. Oh, yeah, the tragedy of the object. The type of thinking she's doing here is the kind of thinking that we live in in the present-day art world. So. I'm waiting to see what she does with all this. I mean, what can we do about the tragedy of the object?
Gack. Now I am bored. I don't know what place I'd have to be in to get into this. The approach of Christmas sure doesn't help.
Done. Yes, something rather startling happens at the end: the tragedy of objecthood becomes the medium of love. Rather amazing. I don't know. I have to read it again to know how I feel. . .
Jorie Graham's poetic project is something I rather have to wrench my minds towards. I gather that she's interested in a philosophic level of discourse--i.e., not precisely the real things, but what she would perhaps argue is more real, the ideas that govern how we see the real things. Applied on top of real things--for characteristically she is looking at something--the discourse creates a strange effect for me, in that I am always trying to see the real things. I feel frustrated by the obscurity of the real. I don't think I've quite figured out how to read her, is the upshot here. Ideas?
Okay, update. This has become my light rail book, so I'm committed now. But--I don't know whether I just reached the critical stage or what--but it all seems a bit familiar. Oh, yeah, the tragedy of the object. The type of thinking she's doing here is the kind of thinking that we live in in the present-day art world. So. I'm waiting to see what she does with all this. I mean, what can we do about the tragedy of the object?
Gack. Now I am bored. I don't know what place I'd have to be in to get into this. The approach of Christmas sure doesn't help.
Done. Yes, something rather startling happens at the end: the tragedy of objecthood becomes the medium of love. Rather amazing. I don't know. I have to read it again to know how I feel. . .
December 23, 2013
Her third collection, the one that followed Erosion (a book I liked.) Here in TEOB, she left behind most of the things that worked well in Erosion, and replaced them with new things that for the most part don't quite. TEOB is more interested in narrative shapes than Erosion was, but not in narrative cohesion. The narrators often address the reader directly but not strikingly. A surprising amount of heavy lifting is asked of empty blanks and variables. The poems often seem not to take their own premises seriously—it's like Graham's playing poker with someone else's chips. There are some good lines, of course, and even a few great ones. But.
Some favored bits:
The End of Beauty, Jorie Graham – The Ecco Press, 1987
momentarily angelic, the instant writhing into a shape
“Self-portrait as the Gesture Between Them”
You could live in that gap, in that listening.
“Eschatological Prayer”
each new possibility molting off the back of the one motion, creation
“Self-portrait as Demeter and Persephone”
I can see the wind in the hair of the shadow.
“Imperialism”
Some favored bits:
The End of Beauty, Jorie Graham – The Ecco Press, 1987
momentarily angelic, the instant writhing into a shape
“Self-portrait as the Gesture Between Them”
You could live in that gap, in that listening.
“Eschatological Prayer”
each new possibility molting off the back of the one motion, creation
“Self-portrait as Demeter and Persephone”
I can see the wind in the hair of the shadow.
“Imperialism”
January 4, 2008
you'd think i would enjoy a book of poems so intimately concerned with the orpheus & eurydice story and bird imagery. but it feels too vague for me, sort of 'pronouncement from on high.' for instance, in "what the end is for", i liked "Unbodied it sings" but then the last line sounds like uppercase-Poetry. i guess it boils down to these pieces sounding self-consciously poetic to me and i just prefer poems that don't seem to be so caught up in their own status as Poem. liked "eschatological prayer" very much. the ellisions and gaps and dashes did not invite me to fill in the blanks, rather they irritated me. likewise, not engaged by such a barrage of questions. and i'm not quite sure why the latter poems started spottily including fragments of old english poetry.
the overall imagery of the collection is cohesive and interesting, but not much stands out from the mass of it. it's all very nice, but doesn't grab me.
the overall imagery of the collection is cohesive and interesting, but not much stands out from the mass of it. it's all very nice, but doesn't grab me.
May 28, 2015
Quasi-profound questions: "Where does the air end? Where does the sky begin?"
Numbered sections within individual poems that seem arbitrary.
Portentous diction about nothing much at all or something the speaker won't share with us.
Lots of references to "plot" and "story" as well as more specific references to mythology: Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice.
"x" and "y" and "______" show up regularly.
Favorite line (taken from "The Lovers"): "They have been staring at the end of each other for a long time now."
Numbered sections within individual poems that seem arbitrary.
Portentous diction about nothing much at all or something the speaker won't share with us.
Lots of references to "plot" and "story" as well as more specific references to mythology: Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice.
"x" and "y" and "______" show up regularly.
Favorite line (taken from "The Lovers"): "They have been staring at the end of each other for a long time now."
April 26, 2007
I strongly disliked this book to begin with. After reading through the entire volume, however, it started to settle in and I got a sort of emergent feeling of wholeness, that was rather satisfying. That said, if I hadn't had to read it for class, I probably wouldn't have pressed on long enough to get to that place of enjoyment.
October 27, 2018
Even after/becuz I wrote about this book for my MFA exam, it is one of my favorites. Humblling, deep, and awesome.
October 21, 2008
a bit dissapointing
October 2, 2011
Ms. Graham is too verbose for my tastes. She is something of a Diva in the poetry world and I think I detect she is too aware of her talent.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews