Poemswell

And this year, being closed off in my family home and then lurched into a new life in different places, many times it felt like I was watching myself live rather than living it. Always feeling guilty about not writing the poetry of it; though Sharon Olds says of her work:

I never think about poetry when I’m living. I never think of it. I’m living. But sometimes the next day or the next week, something will start to take shape into this form. That’s my way of reacting to life. It isn’t like something I do because I can. I need to do it. The experience really starts forming for me into a shape and a music that asks to be let out onto the paper.

And how much I take it for granted, to be living. So I'm approaching poetry again with cautiousness and forgiveness, letting the last year take its shape in me.

This month, I have three poems from my Discards series in The Rumpus! I had sent a group of poems to The Rumpus and was so surprised when the poetry editor Cortney Lamar Charleston chose these three pieces to go together. They were the shortest ones, the quickest flashes of a moment in time; the third poem came out of me all done and all at once; but now I can't see the three apart ever having been apart.

My Discards series is a set of poems exploring what we leave behind in the course of migration in assimilation, what we put aside, what we are forced to put aside, what fragments are left in the space behind. Recently, I've been thinking of, haunted by Hala Alyan's "Interactive Fiction :: Expats", a must read interactive poem-triptych on borders and place. "You must name the country to love it."