The Folger Library's New Rita Dove Poem
"The poem, which is about the length of a sonnet, took more than a year to write. Dove wanted each line to stand on its own so a passerby could read just a short bit and still get something out of it. And the unusual medium presented challenges. 'There’s a difference between what looks good on a page and what looks good in marble where shadows might fall,' says Dove."
via WASHINGTONIAN |
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What Sparks Poetry:
James Shea on Yam Gong's "Startling Hair"
"My co-translator Dorothy Tse and I, however, took a small gamble by shifting to present tense for the speaker’s memories. We felt there was an opportunity to signal the fluid sense of past and present in the Chinese, so we used an em dash to prepare the reader for a shift in temporal perspective. Tense cannot be avoided in English, so by mixing verb tenses in the translation, we tried to dislodge the reader from being fixed in a single tense." |
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