This poem took ages to write. It’s a bit of a tricky premise to convey: “ok so the speaker is somehow miniaturized and sent to subsist in the surreal landscape at the bottom of her own full-size purse, but is also a Persephone figure, and speaks to women’s sense of isolation, futility, and rage during democracy’s dark winter…” Fun fact: the title used to be “Pursephone.” Get it?! People were like, “Um, do you mean cellphone??” Karyna McGlynn on "I Wake up in the Underworld of My Own Dirty Purse" |
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Meet Jenny Xie, Poetry Daily's New Editorial Board Member
Jenny Xie was born in Anhui province, China. She is the author of Eye Level, a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and The Rupture Tense, a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the Josephine Miles Award. Jenny Xie is currently assistant professor of Written Arts at Bard College and lives in New York City.
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"A Conversation with Kenzie Allen"
"I’m very interested in the communal 'we,' although of course it’s a bit of a fuzzy distinction. The audience is no monolith. Maybe we can only speak for an individual experience, via the 'I,' with any accuracy. But there’s a feeling of kinship in that move toward the collective, which really appeals to me. Poetry allows shifts to happen very quickly between 'I,' 'we,' 'they,' and so on. You have to look to shared experiences that way, to understand which 'we' is being spoken of at any given time. 'We' can very quickly break into 'they,' even if you do continue to share some of the characteristics, when differing goals or ideals delineate new boundaries."
via THE RUMPUS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
G. C. Waldrep on Ecopoetry Now
"For me as a poet there’s a joy in sheer description, as there is also an excitement in the act of address....Description is always an act of translation. And in so doing propose, to some notional reader, that something could be shared. To address, meaning to conjure that notional reader (or auditor) explicitly, via deixis: you. You there. Not you, but you. You, defined as whatever or whomever the poem is addressing. Sometimes I think 'you' is the most complicated word in the English language. 'You' is always a revelation to me." |
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