I remember years ago when my American friend brought me a gift from Arizona, I accidentally spotted the “Made in China” label right away at the bottom of the item. I said to my friend that it was quite a trip for the present—going all the way to the U.S. and coming back home again. …
Everyone knows that the writing of poetry, of becoming a poet, entails a long apprenticeship. Mine began at age nineteen, which was when I wrote my first poem. Both an initiation and a damnation, it was Plathian and full of deep, female associations: mother, womb, kitchen knife. In the years to come, I would carve …
I recently returned from a trip to Greece, which has me thinking about Homer. Years ago I was astonished but convinced by the argument that the Iliad was not originally written, but was composed orally. Part of the evidence was gathered by Albert Lord, who journeyed through the Balkans and found men singing long traditional …
a letter from our friend Rong-Bang Peng in Taiwan Dear Mike, Jamie, and Una, Thank you for the heart-warming email. Mike, don’t blame yourself for not knowing what to say; in face of the Real, no words really convey. You know Li-Shen and I talk a lot, but in front of her suffering, I don’t …
Intertextuality, allusion, remembered scraps of poetry: all gifts we didn’t know we needed till they arrived. Three recent and very different, but all happy, examples: 1) Here in the country, I’m getting to spend some time with my 25 year-old son for the first time in many months. The other night, I said something to …
“Are you praying?” my mother asked, her voice quavering through the phone. She repeated it again and a sick silence followed. “No Maam…,” I stared at the floor and saw nothing. “Girl, you have to pray.” I nodded as if she could see me. In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful. But she …
Memorial Day: We should mourn for all who have died because of militarism. May 31, 1993 I remember the first time I prayed for an enemy. It was just outside An Khe, a village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. A helicopter gunship rocketed some North Vietnamese regulars who were about to attack us. I …
Last night I joined several other poets and an audience that crammed into an independent bookstore in my city. We were there to celebrate Uncle Walt—Whitman, that is. The host and organizer, a young poet who writes under the name of SliC (Stuart Livingston Canton), had assembled a range of readers from the poetry community, …