This poem is in conversation with Kendrick Lamar's song "The Art of Peer Pressure," specifically the line "we was just circling life." I grew up in a zip code/neighborhood where I watched innocent people get caught in the crosshairs of gang violence. It seems only luck and resources kept me from getting stuck in this cycle. What if my homies would have been given another chance? One lucky night with the homies…
Vincente G. Perez on "Neighborhood Séance" |
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"Louise Glück’s Late Style"
"In the content and affect of her later poems, there was a general shift from the exploration of myth to the exploration of fable. A myth we might define simply as a story that has always been there and that lives through its numerous, inconsistent retellings. A fable, meanwhile, is a fiction, and a fiction can be and often is new. Alongside its theological sibling the parable, the fable purports to teach a lesson. It is, we could say, about how to be, while a myth is about how things came to be."
viaTHE YALE REVIEW |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Ariana Benson on "Dear Moses Grandy, ...Love, The Great Dismal Swamp"
"The first time the land spoke to me through poetry, its message arrived in the form of a letter, not addressed to me, but from one lover to another. In “Dear Moses Grandy, …Love, the Great Dismal Swamp,” the murky, forested, ever-shrinking land of Southeastern Virginia (that was the backdrop of much of my childhood) writes to and commemorates her first lover: Moses Grandy, an enslaved man, who, in his single-person boat and with his rustic, handmade tools, carved canals out of the murk and morass that had scared many intrepid explorers away for good." |
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