I can’t help but think of this question in terms of Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day.” So I guess a good day starts with breakfast and no hog. More so, over the last few months I have been working on two longer / longish poems. And I find that poetry is a great place to turn a question over and over until it becomes something else-maybe not an answer, but something akin to knowing. At the time of the writing of this poem, I had been reading about lynching and viewing images and photographs about lynching (via the Without Sanctuary exhibition). And as I began to look around the image and the poem, I saw another body there, that of a black boy. What animals, other than humans, are made unwilling witnesses to something like lynching? What are the ethics of lyricizing, making beautiful, something like the lynching of Emmett Till? The poem began with imagining a horse rotting in a creek or river. Quite simply, the poem began with questions. “The Mare of Money” began as a thought and image experiment. From King Me, Copper Canyon Press, 2013. The water when they drop a black boy’s body He will read for the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series on Friday, April 4, at Dumbo Sky with Kamilah Aisha Moon and Tina Chang. His first book, King Me, is just out from Copper Canyon Press. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois–Chicago. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and two Cave Canem Fellowships. Kim Addonizio selected his “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology, and he has been awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, a 2013 Pushcart Prize, a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Roger Reeves’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review and Tin House, among others.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |