It took three oceans, a windstorm, a failed holiday, and a future memory to carve this harp. Each word is a spell. Each is a confession. This poem played the music for the interregnum between two griefs, a music to which I performed survival. I lived in the space between its vibrating blue strings until I could finally believe that the work of our lives, my life, could be beautiful.
Temperance Aghamohammadi on "Blue Harp" |
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"Steven Duong on Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New Poetry Collection"
"I started writing seriously with poetry. That’s what I encountered first in my undergraduate education. For a long time, when people would ask me what I prefer, I used to say that poetry feels like my home base. That was where my native waters were. Then I venture out into fiction, and I use a lot of my skills from poetry like attention to language and the line and the sentence. I bring that to my fiction, but I don’t know if it feels that way anymore. I don’t necessarily feel devoted to genre so much as I feel devoted to certain forms at certain times. There are so many weird things a story can do."
viaTHE DAILY IOWAN |
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What Sparks Poetry: Matthew Cooperman on Reading Prose
"How will we spend our days? How will we attend to our rapidly accelerating planet? One habit of response is to read bracing prose, and for me, it’s often “the consolations of philosophy,” to quote an excellent recent example by Alain de Botton. From the Affective Turn to the Queering of Nature, Object Oriented Ontology to Anthropocene Studies, there’s an incredible florescence of philosophical writing going on internationally, as if climate change has triggered all our cells to wake up." |
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