What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fourth series, Object Lessons, poets meditate on the magical journey from object to poem via one of their own poems. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
No more than aggregate of settled dirt at spawn, fearsome churning poison-river sludge in the boat of days. Provenance undeclared. The oath of public service, taken on the hill but drawn quickly into the (meaningful) landscape shown below — secret equalising flower, spout of the ordinary state. Cement is the realest moat to ring around the future. A castle to call my own.
We are rough; cement is rough. We carry what we know in it. That night we learned to respire despite the particulate air, you traced your long finger on an inlaid design, a circle inter-cut with lines: a mandala in a mandolin, an invite, watching it mould us in its slower, limestone cipher.
from the book UNIVERSAL BEACH / ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni
"Most of all, however, Curt was interested in cement, its powerful malleability. Cement could allow you to fashion new things never before seen on the landscape, or it could just as well slink back to imitate the forms that were already there. I, on the other hand, was not a ready fan of this material. I couldn’t deny that it disgusted me, had always disgusted me, but now especially, when the hum of construction was all-present in Indian cities as to never stop. Cement was simply a mainstay in the air we breathed."
"As I write this, yellow peril and anti-Asian hysteria have returned with a vengeance during the COVID-19 pandemic. An Asian American family was stabbed in Texas during the early days of the pandemic. A Chinese woman was attacked with acid in Brooklyn while taking out the trash. Chin’s poems do not shy away from the difficult traumatic histories that she has inherited as an Asian American immigrant—the whole genealogy of exclusion, xenophobia, discrimination, and war."
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