I wanted to work through contradictions around the permanence of labor, particularly feminized labor, and the contingency of value. How do I make sense of the idea of personal worth with so much evidence against it in my own experience, in the generations of people I come from? The poem is shadowed by the 1965 anti-Communist mass killings in Indonesia, which targeted union members, peasants, writers, and ethnic Chinese.
Cynthia Dewi Oka on "Meditation on the Worth of Anything" |
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Robert Bly Dies at 94
"'One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life,' he wrote. 'I recognised that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character and events of one’s own life.'"
via THE GUARDIAN |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Devon Walker-Figueroa on Jorie Graham's "Salmon"
"This was a language not so much spoken as felt from deep within … and it made me, all at once, begin to ask myself new questions: what are the choreographies by which our consciousness might move—the patterns in which astonishments congregate? Can the poet witness her own inception? What tempos might our impressions take up—only to shed them later on?" |
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