While writing this poem, Lucie Brock-Broido’s line, “It is true that each self keeps a secret self which cannot speak when spoken to” kept surfacing. As the child of an adopted parent, I find basic facts of the “self” are often quite literally a secret: my ethnicity, culture, lineage. A stranger lecturing you about your presumed ancestral home while you awkwardly drink a cocktail is one result of this circumstance.
Cameron Quan Louie on [I'm sorry I've never been to China.] |
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"C. S. Lewis Satirised Oxford Peer in Secret Poems"
"The Chronicles of Narnia author simply could not stand H. C. Wyld, deriding his lectures as elementary and dismissing his snobbery and his bullying of students, referring to him in his diary as 'the cad.' It has now emerged that Lewis even inscribed derogatory verses about him across the blank pages of his own copy of Wyld’s 1921 textbook, A Short History of English."
via THE GUARDIAN |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Liza Katz Duncan on "The Uncles"
"'The Uncles' are not actual people but attempts to personalize the tragedy of Superstorm Sandy through memories, anecdotes I had heard from neighbors and read in the news, bits of conversation, and places and images that continue to haunt me to this day. I chose the sestina’s six ending words to drive home exactly what was being lost, and what we continue to lose, both concrete (bay, fence, birds) and abstract (home, ways of knowing)." |
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