I was asked recently if my poems were autobiographical. I thought to myself before answering, aren’t they always? "Rose Quartz" is full of memories, of experiences that shaped me. "Pony" is a memory. I remember carrying a jar around my aunt and uncle’s property near the Nooksack river, collecting change, convinced I could save enough for a real horse. I was a kid dreaming of having something impossible. I think what happens and eventually leads to a poem is in the way that image of my younger self stays with me and haunts me, until finally over twenty years later I begin to unpack it. I look closely at it until I see what’s underneath, this desire to be something else. And it becomes a poem examining my identity as a Coast Salish person, as a mixed heritage person, and how representation or the lack of representation had such an impact on me.
Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe on "Pony" |
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Darius Atefat-Peckham Mourns His Iranian Roots
"Atefat-Peckham published his debut chapbook, How Many Love Poems, during the fall of his junior year. This semester, he completed a creative senior thesis titled 'Book of Kin.' 'It’s an exploration of grief after the loss of my mother and brother, a portrait of my family in a poetic space, but it’s also thinking about connection....I’m Iranian-American, but I’ve never been to Iran. My mother was a tether to my heritage that I lost growing up.'"
via THE HARVARD GAZETTE |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Isabel Zapata (Mexico City) on Ecopoetry Now
"I wrote the book Una ballena es un país (translated as A Whale Is a Country by Robin Myers), in an attempt to say what the language of the academy and the language of activism hadn’t allowed me to say....I conceived this book as an invitation to challenge the boundaries between action and reality, between poetry and essays and stories, between the role we think we play on this planet and the role that climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction demand we take up." |
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