The Impact of the Butterfly Effect Concept on Jorie Graham's Selected Poems

Abstract

The butterfly effect states that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil causes a hurricane in Texas. It is the main concept of chaos theory that is developed by the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Besides, it is a term used to explain the high sensitivity of nonlinear dynamical systems to their initial conditions. The study applies the concept of the butterfly effect to the poems of the American poet Jorie Graham. It analyses two collections of her poems, Erosion and The End of Beauty, where the main purpose is to prove that every minor change in a chaotic poem, whether in the external form or in the content, leads the reader to order in one way or another. In other words, from the middle of the chaotic poem emerges a small part that restores order to the whole poem. The poet’s seemingly disordered techniques employed in her poems are strategically used to create the sense of order in the middle of chaos.