They handed me the shovel and ordered me to dig. With each pound I gained. With each wrinkle I acquired. With each stretch mark I earned. Every time, they barked at me to dig. “Dig!” The Victoria Secret angels strolling down the runway, condemning me …
“In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations….” – Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California.” Like most people, I go to the grocery store. Unlike most people, I spend a lot of my free …
The first weekend of May, I attended Vortex, a three-day writers’ conference that took place at Whidbey Institute, on Whidbey Island, Washington. Organized by Hedgebrook, a leading organization helping women writers, Vortex is an annual event that celebrates women authoring change. During the conference, I was fortunate to lodge on site, on the property of Whidbey Institute, in a tiny cottage surrounded by tall evergreen trees and narrow trails that branched like sunrays, leading deeper into the forest.
This morning you are going to pour yourself on digital paper. The weak winter sun attempts to open the apartment with light and warmth. With your hands around your morning cup of coffee, you patter about the place, thinking of how you should start the …
In the anthology, American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (the first volume of the series), editors Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine gather a selection of contemporary women poets whose poems, included within the volume, represent some of the most pressing and potent examples of the innovative and radical possibilities of the poetic lyric. One continually exercised possibility is the use of lyric as a means of questioning language and its relationship to meaning, as determined by the self or by a wider community.
W(illiam) S(tanley) Merwin died on March 15, 2019, in Haiku, Haiku-Pauwela, Hawai’i. He was blessed with a long and prolific life, publishing more than 60 books, as author and translator, and receiving numerous accolades, including two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry (1971, 2009) and two appointments as U.S. Poet Laureate (Special Joint-Consultant with Louise Glück and Rita Dove, 1999; Poet Laureate, 2010). His well-documented emergence into the poetry scene of the early 50s began with his first collection, A Mask for Janus (included in The First Four Books of Poems), which received the Yale Younger Poets Prize, in 1952. His career steadily came to a close, signaled by his final collection of original poems, Garden Time, published in 2016. He suffered from macular degeneration, robbing him of his sight. This physical loss compelled him to dictate the poems, collected in Garden Time, to his wife Paula Merwin—who preceded him in death, in 2017 (Imada).
“Would you like a visitor?” “Sure. Can you help me sit up? I have never got the hang of these hospital beds. I am always dropping the remote.” “How did that get so far under the bed? Here, let me get that for you. Is …
People observe cities differently. One friend looks from the ground up, another from the top down. I look for reflections, my friend L pays attention to the city’s movements. She embraces or rejects places; I meditate on them. Perhaps, all these thoughts came to me as the result of L’s sudden urgency to relocate to Los Angeles. Perhaps, I am envious because I didn’t find that seductive sentiment of belonging that I sometimes see in other places away from home. That grounding, earthly sense that takes over my body in New York, pulling me deeper and deeper into the city. Is this the fault of the city’s geography, colors, shapes, attitude, or character? None or all of the mentioned?
To a dog lover like me, the notion of seeking consolation from a cat is comparable to seeking compassion from a pathological narcissist. Nevertheless, my father alleged that, as a pre-teen, he found solace in his family’s cat, Peter. There’s even a photo of Dad …
As writers, we do what we know and whatever we can in order to understand, measure, examine, endure the world we live in. The world that amazes us, confuses us, hurts us. The world that accepts us or works against us. The world we cannot separate ourselves from.