This poem riffs on a Korean idiom used to describe people who succeed in spite of humble beginnings. Through experimental translation, I dig into the ditch of the idiom and try to fill it with different possibilities. I dig into the trope of the immigrant success story with my identity as a member of the Korean diaspora. The idea of home sometimes feels like a hole, a blank space—sometimes a trap, sometimes a space of endless potential. |
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Nam Le on Danez Smith's "Bluff"
"A city is always more than what we make of it. It contains actual multitudes; every day it poses and fails to answer the question of how to 'square utopia with humanness.' In these searching, stunning poems, Smith metaphorizes city into body politic, showing us the interstate running through all our hearts; demonstrating that we all contain protest and police, cowardice and commitment, money and kindness, looting and food drives. There’s no poem to free us and, anyway, there’s no freedom from ourselves, no future without slave ships in its past, no world where God/reason/the stars didn’t sign off."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Pinsky on David Ferry's "Johnson on Pope"
"Tell all the truth but tell it slant—. The moment I begin saying to myself Emily Dickinson’s first line, my tongue flicks rapidly to the roof of my mouth for the first sound in the first word “Tell.” The same exact little movement happens at the end of the line’s last word, “slant.” In this pre-industrial, bodily way the reader becomes the poet’s instrument. In a way, it is as though they were one. But in another way, the bodily nature of the line enacts the double solitude: the reader’s body absolutely itself, utterly separate from the equally solitary poet who made the line: solitaria. Ferry’s poem is about the empathic loneliness Johnson’s prose suggests but cannot embody." |
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