I’ve conceived of this poem as a deep cut, as one of 24 frames of film that flit by your eyeball in a second. Viewing it in isolation I’m brought back to the sources. The summer of 2017, when I jotted down the opening blues couplets. The fifth anniversary of my friend Ernie’s death. A personal hero passed that summer as well, whom I place in the expanded blues pantheon of my mind: rapper Prodigy of Mobb Deep. Along with death, I see the prospect of aging, of shedding skin and transitioning in and out of human form. Hence the faraway ancestors, babies new to this place, friends who are gone but can’t resist lingering here and there. I was hoping I could talk to them, that they could tell me what to do.
Gabriel Palacios on "The Spanish Trail Motel/Who the Captain Is" |
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"Cold Case" Mystery of Poet Buried in Notre Dame
The exact whereabouts of the tomb of Joachim de Bellay, a French Renaissance poet, has puzzled researchers for many years. De Bellay, a member of a literary group known as La Pleiade, died aged 37 in 1560....De Bellay's family asked for him to be buried in Notre Dame's Saint-Crepin chapel. But when the site was renovated in 1758, no trace of his remains could be found.
via CBS NEWS |
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What Sparks Poetry: Karen An-hwei Lee on "Dear Millennium, a Jade Rabbit on the Far Side of the Moon”
"About a year or so before the global pandemic of 2020, China landed a rover on the far side of the moon. The rover’s name was 'Jade Rabbit,' a robot that was part of the series of Chang’E missions. This mixture of facts and metaphors inspired me to reflect on our relationships to dead metaphors and their intricate web of mythologies and cultural stories leading to these metaphors—for instance, the moon as green cheese, the man in the moon, the rabbit under a cassia tree in the moon, and the lady who drank the elixir of immortality and floated there." |
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