What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In the first series, The Poems of Others, our editors pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 

The first day i shot dope
was on a Sunday.
i had just
come home from church
got mad at my
motha cuz she got mad at me. u
dig?
went out. shot up
behind a feelen gainst her.
it felt good.
gooder than dooing it. yeah.
it was nice.
i did it. uh. huh. i did it. uh. huh. i
want to do it again, it felt so gooooood.
and as the sistuh sits in her silent/
remembered/high someone leans for
ward gently asks her:
sistuh. did u finally
learn how to hold
yo/mother?
and the music of the day
drifts in the
room to mingle with the sistuh’s
young tears.
and we all sing.

from the book I'VE BEEN A WOMAN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS / Third World Press
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Yona Harvey's handwritten line from "Summer Words of a Sistuh Addict"
What Sparks Poetry:
Yona Harvey on Sonia Sanchez’s
"Summer Words of a Sistuh Addict"

"How is it that we come to know this young sistuh so intimately? There’s her cool revelation that shooting up actually felt 'gooooood' and 'gooder than doin it' and that she wants to 'do it again.' There’s no shame in her sexuality or her 'remembered high.' We come to learn all these details, but never through the lens of exploitation, sensationalism, or judgment. This is because Sanchez never intrudes on the poem. The explicit 'i' narrator does not exist in this poem. A lesser poet would relish some kind of confession or faux street credibility for witnessing. But Sanchez’s poem is the anodyne for voyeurism."

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Cover of Harold Bloom's Possessed by Memory
Harold Bloom: A Sympathetic Heart
 
On the cusp of 89, Harold Bloom publishes five new volumes in his 'Shakespeare's Personalities" series, and a meditative critical volume, Possessed by Memory. Reviewer John Timpane argues, 'The books before us stress what has always been there, if sometimes obscured by controversy or cantankerousness: his beautiful writing and sympathetic heart.'

via PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
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