SOURCE: Gardner, Thomas. “Jorie Graham's The End of Beauty and a Fresh Look at Modernism.” Southwest Review 88, nos. 2 & 3 (2003): 335-49.

In the following essay, Gardner focuses on three modernist poems by Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot, and the ways that Graham engages them in the poems in The End of Beauty.

In a 1987 interview given soon after the publication of her breakthrough book The End of Beauty, Jorie Graham spoke about her interest, in that volume, in the moment when the mind realizes it's not yet able to shape, and thus is forcibly awakened to, the larger world surrounding it. Referring to her poem “Pollock and Canvas,” she describes that moment in spatial terms: “In the Pollock poem, it's what is seized in the space between the end of the brush and the canvas on the floor beneath him … I really feel that what Pollock was...