Christian Gullette on Grief's Layers
"Defying expectations that a poem should convey a single feeling in a very direct way actually amplifies and elevates the tensions. Grief can make me want to look away or deny or crave pleasure. Sometimes all at once, with no real resolution. That resistance feels very personal and from the heart to me; elegies, like the eponymous poem in the collection, can contain a jarring mixture of joy, beauty, horror, and silent loneliness tempered with ambivalences about how to feel."
via LIT HUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Hua Xi on Language as Form
"Each stanza introduces a new scene and in doing so, a new plane of thought. Sipping tea, the necessity of money. caves, arteries….appear in turn. Each of these subjects raise new questions, but in continuation with each other, like the formation of some secret pattern. There is something in the poem which 'touches itself everywhere at once,' as Kapil writes, a preponderance of edges but not jagged or sharp ones." |
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