At the height of his heroin addiction, my brother would regularly steal things from our house—spoons, my piggy bank, the VCR, etc. He went missing in 2009 on the day of my high school graduation. For me, poems like this one exist at the hinge between absence and closure.Steven Espada Dawson on "My Brother Stole Every Spoon in the House" |
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Interview with Fady Joudah
"I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant. In poetry, the range of metaphors and topics is limited, predictable, but the styles are innumerable. Think how we read poetry from centuries ago and are no longer bothered by its outdated diction. All that remains of old poetry is the music of what it means to be human. And perhaps that’s all we want from poetry. A language of life.'"
viaTHE YALE REVIEW |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Katie Peterson on Other Arts
"I find this to be common with poems, which are like my favorite kind of children – give them a job to do, and they'd rather do anything else. But give them nothing to do, and they hate you. A poem ends up being equal parts what you must do and what you want to do, but in a way, with a proportion, inhabiting a mood you can't predict. A map offers a perfect occasion for this, since, like a family portrait, what it leaves in points towards what it leaves out. The poem became about everything the map couldn't record." |
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