An interview with Jorie Graham following her winning the Forward Prize!

The great thing about winning the £10,000 Forward Prize for the best poetry collection, says Jorie Graham, is that a poet writes in silence, so 'an award is like getting a "Message received". It's moving and inspiring.'

The prize, awarded on Monday for PLACE, her twelfth collection (the first time to an American woman), was a bright moment in an otherwise tough year. After being told in March that she had breast cancer, she has had surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, has 'a very good doctor', and is under observation to check that the cancer hasn't metastasised.

'I don't want people to feel I am special-pleading,' the 62-year-old Pulitzer prize-winning poet says. 'There are so many people struggling with it.' She is on an extended leave of absence from Harvard University where she is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, felling 'fine in a medical sense but in a planetary sense, not.' Graham's advocacy for the environment was central to previous collections such as Sea Change (2008). In PLACE (as it's written in the book) she interrogates our responsibility not only to the planet but to future generations. One poems ends: 'How we came to keep living/but to no longer be/inhabitants.'

The title comes from 'displacement and replacement': our place in relation to the planet and the notion of place itself. Graham, who is also nominated for this year's T.S. Eliot prize, says that we need to 'readjust our sense of place and develop a humility we haven't had.

'Bee populations are declining, the first of the wars about water scarcity has taken place in Darfur', crops aren't growing correctly, 'birds are migrating miles off course'. The words 'too late' are too difficult to look at 'when you have children' (Graham has a daughter, Emily, 29). She recalls just after giving birth, sneaking outside to look at the stars: 'I thought, "Now I'm part of nature"'

Poetry can be a 'force for change', Graham argues, bridging our 'desire to turn everything into information' and conceptual intellect 'where paradox and complexity turns into knowledge'. Specific images - like a bird sitting on a railing outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts - lead to observations of the planet, the way we live, our moral universe.

Born in New York and raised in Rome, Graham's precise word-craft comes from her father, a journalist, her more ethereal self from her artist mother. Inspired by Antonioni, Graham intended to become a film director, but heard a New York University lecturer, M.L. Rosenthal, reading 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and attended his classes, going on to teach and write poetry herself. She won the Pulitzer in 1996 for her collection, The Dream of the Unified Field, Graham was pilloried when her third husband (then her partner) Peter Sacks won a poetry competition that she helped to judge and when former students of her were awarded prized in other contests that she judged.

I never did anything except abide by guidelines and, as requested, from the anonymously screened short stack of books put before me, pick the best one, the one I felt would further poetry,' Graham says. 'As for the personal attacks, it was early days in this kind of craziness the internet can give rise to and foster, and I was simply unable to comprehend that people shielded by anonymity could say whatever they wished. I was amazed no one could tell from the tone it was vitriol and fiction. But it was. Now the whole culture can see through the madness of attacks on the internet. And even I would react differently now. Suffice it to say, I did nothing unfair, illegal or immoral. At this point I'd rather let it all pass us by. I assume some people, however misled regarding my actions, felt they were acting in good faith.'

'It would be a bit much', she says, to go on to win the T.S. Eliot award. Anyway, 'prizes don't make the blank piece of paper any less blank'. She hopes to return to Harvard in January. 'There are good and bad days, days when I feel frightened and days where I experience things - like seeing all the leaves on a tree - more vividly than I ever imagine I could.' She sits awaiting treatment with fellow cancer patients. 'It's not touchy-feely, often we don't talk, but we "feel" each other. It makes me ashamed to say it, but it's taken a medicial diagnosis to wake me up. We should be awake all the time.'