For a long time, my mum would send me these texts asking to check her spelling, grammar, etc. This is a classic brown parent thing, but once, she sent “read”, when she meant “red”— this triggered the conception of this poem; for cruelty to be distilled into three letters. Here, I think of english (and my relationship with it) in ways that are more taboo to the Western world: english as erasure, english as a border, english as a brutality.
Janiru Liyanage on "Ars Poetica" |
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"Ethiopia’s Thriving Amharic Poetry Scene"
"A poem is not just the meaning. Some poems shout or cry, and it’s very difficult to convey the poet’s voice. I would have liked to have the Amharic original included in the anthology, or an accompanying CD....Amharic also has the flexibility that inflected language gives you in rhyming and structuring the poem."
via WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Corinna Vallianatos on Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying"
"Nothing is ever nothing—description gives nothing shape. The seeing gains power, even as the one doing the seeing recedes. The bounty of what’s come before, the berries and their juices and the milkbottle the speaker uses to collect them, which brings to mind the body and domesticity, lifts at the end into the elemental, something seemingly less comforting but, to me, more so." |
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Poetry Daily stands with the Black community.
We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality.
We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter. |
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