"Oriental” is a word my mother was taught to describe herself by American missionaries in Korea after the Korean War. Her strange choice to purchase a retirement home in an all-white, Florida trailer park is not unlike my tendency to retreat from her as I have navigated my own identity. At the trailer park, we are both spectacles–but also forging and fumbling our ways through to ourselves.
Joan Kwon Glass on "The Oriental and the Hummingbird at the Trailer Park" |
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Ishion Hutchinson Interviewed by Jesse Nathan
"I think that instinct is natural to my own writing, in that a sort of narrative suggestion is always a present overtone in the lyric form, so narrative—in terms of storytelling—is not what I am most interested in or striving for in a poem. I want, for the poem to be effective, harmonics, a pattern in which words are interacting with each other and crystalized into an irreducible and memorable event, which goes beyond the experience of the poem being a finished thing."
via MCSWEENEY'S |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Eli Payne Mandel on Reading Prose
"As a poet and therefore complicit in the making of poems, I have tried to weasel out of this problem—the problem of poems in and against the world—by writing prose poems and poems about prose. Conventionally, the world is prosaic. It unfolds in ribbons of tweets and advertisements. Also: graffiti somewhere in the northern Italy. If my poems attended to and participate in this prose, perhaps they would tell me, or you, something about the crisis we call the present." |
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