What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In the newest series, Life in Public, we ask our editors to examine how poetry speaks to different aspects of public experience. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.  

A Basket to Haunt

from fish-traps and cradles to coffins, a basket can hold many things: food / babies / love / trinkets /water/ sustenance/ bones/ burdens / secrets; a basket can carry shared histories forward in new ways with old and new materials, like the carefully crafted hand-written letters from our grandmothers in state archives; a basket can be woven to carry the load a bit lightly — a basket can haunt.
 

I Weave Back to You

I tear out their words          their words        from these records
this shredding of words         I tear out                    for you.

 

I weave your words            your words         from these records
this basket of words            I weave back                   to you.


 

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"In using the state’s archive against itself, in forcing the state to remember its many forms of violence against indigenous people, in releasing ancestral voices from their archival confines, Harkin counters oppression with 'infinite ways to imagine/ infinite possibilities to/ transform/ beyond this colonial-archive-box.' Her inventive and necessary interventions into Aboriginal Affairs records offer back to the state its own language not as a narcissistic exercise in nation-building but rather as an indictment of its alleged successes."
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"But it is the clear-sighted and profoundly emotionally intelligent character of Elaine’s own verse that has influenced many poets working in English today, as well as delighting readers and audiences around the world: she was a charismatic performer. Ted Hughes wrote that her poetry 'follows the track of the nerves,' while George Steiner described it as 'instinct with caring, with a rare intelligence of pain.'"

 

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