Americans' Favorite Poems by Favorite Poem Project (U. S.)

I’m out-of-doors, which is to say nature is hemmed in by doors, which is to say With fragrances we douse our clothes-lined laundry in each week The piquancy of coriander neighbors allowed to flower mingles It’s that time in America when the air is overgrowth. Pigeons hued reddish are garrulous and incomprehensible as drunks Precisely, the lit up jackrabbits appear in peculiar blue candor She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flower bed,ĭining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America The poems, then, attempt to present a composite subjectivity born as much of the “stuff” of our cultural-historical moment as they are of my experience of it. Instead, they’re amalgams of language I encounter in reading political magazines and scientific journals, in television shows and movies and music, in English and in the other languages I’m able to speak and read. While I deploy elements of autobiography in the work, none of the speakers presented there is actually me. I worry less about telling a story or making a point and more about getting words and tonalities into my poems that don’t usually appear in poetry or don’t usually appear together in the same poem. In terms of tactic, I’m most interested in linguistic juxtaposition.

The struggles of immigrants to the U.S., conflicts of class consciousness and racial difference here, and the complications of American politics and foreign policy alongside more abstract metaphysical and existential concerns are never far from the minds of my speakers even as they experience loss, longing, and hopefulness in the small spaces of their own lives.

I can best describe my poems as an attempt to localize global concerns.

Americans' Favorite Poems by Favorite Poem Project (U. S.)