Waylaid by the deaths of my wife, mother, and sister, I accepted the invitation of a new immigrant to this country to hike the San Andreas Fault. I soon came to realize that both physically and emotionally, I was straddling fractures between trauma and renewal, past and present, the personal and the geological. I felt the hikes become a kind of secular version of the Stations of the Cross.
Forrest Gander on "[Now the Joshua trees are withering]" |
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"I Swear This Poem Didn’t Make Me Cry": A.O. Scott on George Oppen
"The poem concentrates on tactile, concrete details: the child’s coat, the man’s nose, the apple in her hand. But the intensity of the moment pulls it toward metaphor — the surprising and touching idea that a father can be, in the eyes of his child, a feature of the landscape, unmoving and familiar. And here, maybe just because an apple and a dad are in the same frame, the poem swerves into a compact and devastating meditation on parenthood, mortality and the passage of time."
viaNEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry: Soham Patel on Language as Form
"Place is a process with past(s), present(s), and future(s) that, according to geographer Doreen Massey, can be fragmented, dislocated, forgotten and reformed. Massey’s thinking through place in this era of super speedy space-time compression helps shape my sense of a poem’s ability to attend to place as an unending yet impermanent entity. A poem is a place where space-time compression must occur, and why place in all its durations inspires me." |
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