Though it's unusual for me to compose this way, I started this poem with its title, which expresses an intention I’d had for years but failed and failed to manifest: to write something that evokes the complexity of my inheritance, something that makes sense of the fact that I regard what looks like lack—what is, in fact, lack—as an inheritance at all. In any case, I do, and a rich one, and I hope it shows.
Melissa Crowe on "I want to tell you what poverty gave me—" |
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"Joy Harjo Uses Words to Show Humanity"
"A warrior is a protector—of land, water, culture, children. A warrior is not necessarily about being involved in battle; if it comes down to guns, you know something has failed big-time. It’s about standing up and promoting that which feeds the spirit of a people and certainly poetry does that."
via THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH |
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What Sparks Poetry:
James Longenbach on William Butler Yeats' "The Tower"
"The series seemed to me scary in a way poems rarely are when I first read it in 1981; it seems if anything more so today. 'O what fine thought we had because we thought,' says Yeats, and a couple of months ago that iambic pentameter line shot out at me as it never had before: is thinking itself the part of the problem, the way we depict thinking in language, the way we’ve learned to recognize it?" |
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