"Retracing Walt Whitman's Steps Through Brooklyn and Manhattan"
"In fact, Whitman saw 'Leaves of Grass,' the poetry collection he first published (on his own dime) in 1855 and spent the rest of his days revising and expanding, as a great equalizer, a bridge between North and South and a place to sing not only of white folks but of Black Americans, too. His radical inclusivity has inspired poets from John Ashbery to June Jordan, and continues to shape literature to this day."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
James Shea on Yam Gong's "Startling Hair"
"My co-translator Dorothy Tse and I, however, took a small gamble by shifting to present tense for the speaker’s memories. We felt there was an opportunity to signal the fluid sense of past and present in the Chinese, so we used an em dash to prepare the reader for a shift in temporal perspective. Tense cannot be avoided in English, so by mixing verb tenses in the translation, we tried to dislodge the reader from being fixed in a single tense." |
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