School of Distance Education

Fast 
by Jorie Graham 
Hailed by Poetry Foundation as one of the most 
celebrated poets of post war generation, Jorie Graham, is 
the author of 
Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts 
(1980), 
Erosion 
(1983), 
The End of Beauty 
(1987), 
Region of 
Unlikeness 
(1991), 
The Dream of the Unified Field: 
Selected Poems 1974-1992 
(1995) winner of the Pulitzer 
Prize for Poetry, 
Never 
(2002), 
Sea Change 
(2008), 
Place 
(2012), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for 
best collection, 
From the New World 
(2015), 
Fast 
(2017), and most recently 
Runaway 
(2020) .She is 
famous for her deep interest in history and language. 
Mythology history and philosophy forms the center of 
her works. The subjects of poetry has always been large 
such as, myths, war, god et cetera. Graham was 
influenced by European visual art as well as the poets 
W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, John Milton, 
and Emily Dickinson. Graham experimented with form, 
constructing subtle, sometimes inaccessible poems 
divided into series of short, numbered stanzas with 
missing words. Her poems open out on an experience, in 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
22 
the mind, and she has perfected a kind of syntax that 
stays true to the mind’s weird reasoning, justifications, 
leaps of imagination. 
The title of the poem suggests, ‘Fast’, holds in 
tension the senses of reckless speed (“too much”), 
sought-for stability (“not enough”), and involuntary 
abstinence (“starve”). The death of the poet’s father, her 
mother’s dementia, her own body’s cancerous mutiny, 
ecological “systemicide,” the erosion of humanity, these 
misfortunes molded her poetry. Fast is full of unmarked 
questions. Here she imagines an experience she has 
never had and never could have.Graham converses with 
a 
bot,
observing, “. . . here’s the heart of the day, the 
flower of time—talk—talk—,” temporality remaining 
the 
inescapable 
substrate of 
communication, 
a 
communication which blooms inevitably with an ever-
increasing freight of technology that invades our most 
intimate spaces, literally delimiting time and everything 
else. The thoughts emerging in the poem is purely 
personal. The ever present question ‘what is human’ 
takes on a new import in the face of a forever empty bed 
or a loss of mental health. The poem addresses a bigger 
concern that of running out for each of us. 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
23