So, many of the propositions for poems in the beginning section of are really, 'What if it is like this? Or maybe it's like that?' "And the way of answering that in a poem, I think, is to invent a way that the answer can be yes. "The real question that I had was something that doesn't have an answer: Where has he gone? Is he still somehow connected to me? Do I have access? Suddenly, this backdrop of this unknowable distance seemed like a really helpful place to be in - thinking about questions of loss, thinking about the afterlife, thinking about whatever it is that we might return to when we leave here." Examining tough issues through poetry "My father became ill while I was working on this book and he passed away rather unexpectedly. Space became a really different kind of place, a more private, more real place, when elegy became a mode that I began writing in. "Space became a really different kind of place, a more private, more real place, when elegy became a mode that I began writing in. I had a lot of fun playing with these images and visions of a dystopic future. "Questions that have to do with what we do to each other as citizens, as people in our private lives. "Initially I thought that playing with genre might give me a different perspective from which to explore some of the questions that come up again and again in my work.
The former director of creative writing at Princeton University, Smith is now professor of English and African and African American Studies at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
0 kommentar(er)
