What Sparks Poetry: Readers Write Back
"I keep circling back to Temperance Aghamohammadi’s 'Blue Harp'— perhaps fitting for a poem which declares grief 'a circle a circle / never escaped.' I’m drawn to the speaker’s simultaneous disorientation and direction, how definitively she 'go[es] to no one,' how decisively she avers that 'something / will die.' And, of course, that final punny, tender assertion, showing poetry’s capacity to playfully embody the solemn. To—in a world where Eve herself has been beheaded—demand connection, even to the void, even with a barren environment that appears not to have much connection left to share. Demand anyway. What else do you have to lose?"
Marilyn Gates |
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A Conversation with Han Vanderhart
"Now I know how strongly anger is tied to grief. I wanted white people to acknowledge their positionality, and I questioned what the performance of guilt in poetry was for, what it accomplished. I wanted to tear down statues and burn down barns. I wanted to yell at my mother (and I did). It is wild, but emotions like shame or guilt, you can deny having them—but oh, oh, you have them. Poetry keeps digging into these depths inside us."
via SALVATION SOUTH |
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