Review: Fall 2021 Poetry Fellows Reading
Review: Fall 2021 Poetry Fellows Reading, held December 8th 2021.
By Menat Allah El Attma (Feb 2022).
Say: I read your poem
I read your poem to be close to you.
Review: Fall 2021 Poetry Fellows Reading, held December 8th 2021.
By Menat Allah El Attma (Feb 2022).
Say: I read your poem
I read your poem to be close to you.
Review: Camille Dungy & Ross Gay: Black Nature, Poetry, & Coexistence, in conversation with Aya de León and Maurya Kerr. Reading and conversation held October 20, 2021.
Process notes for Heliotrope (manuscript in progress)
This year I gave up the idea of maps. Otherwise known as the net cast over the body of the earth for conquest.
When approaching this idea of coexistence, I found my thoughts being magnetized towards nature. Ecological doom. Water wars. Resource scarcity/ hoarding. Anthropocentrism at its finest. After being in cohort with folks and after being given some space to pick through the ways coexistence exists…I started thinking about horror.
The word coexistence has a spatial component, and implies the sharing of space or cohabitation within overlapping territories; it also has a temporal dimension, suggesting simultaneous presence with others in the same moment in time.
What happens when those same people cling to the idea of forgiveness in order for them to sleep at night? They forgave to forget. And they expect me to do the same. I have. But they give themselves the power to forgive people who are unforgivable.
As a writer, my life straddles a basic division – I’ve often found myself attempting to translate experiences I had in a different part of the world, and more tellingly, in a different language.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Borges, blind, dared to say that anything that happens to an artist that does not destroy them is a gift. I don’t know if the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita would agree that his, for instance, extreme suffering at the hands of one of the world’s ugliest regimes, led by the CIA-backed Agosto Pinochet, was a gift.
Celebrating Cave Canem: Cornelius Eady, Morgan Parker, & Cameron Awkward Rich, in conversation with Chiyuma Elliott & Vincente Perez By: Menat Allah El Attma, November 29, 2021 Why not start at the darkest place? Morgan Parker, before reciting any poetry from the page, speaks it naturally. Imagine her words: yourself, to begin with darkness. If we […]