Unlocking Our Imaginations: An Interview with Petra Kuppers
By thinking of these poems as invitations and scores, as open-ended instructions for how to see and feel one’s self in space, I hope to activate new perspectives.
By thinking of these poems as invitations and scores, as open-ended instructions for how to see and feel one’s self in space, I hope to activate new perspectives.
Sometimes I look at him, and he’s a medical doctor, so he’s been aware of death and the possibility of death and mortality daily, but I sometimes look at him and think, Oh, you’re not an orphan. You don’t understand. I feel that that is a profound change. It’s a kind of wisdom. It makes you porous in a way that is, I think, positive.
When a poem is sent to the world, like a letter inside that bottle in the sea, a community of readers associates it with some meaning, familiar or unfamiliar, and they add their own layers of meanings to it, and that's what makes it alive. The poem offers space, and readers immigrate to it. In poetry, I am the native citizen who welcomes others, the way I was welcomed by others who came before me.
Growing up Mexican American, particularly growing up Catholic, we have this connection to saints and holy figures and the possibility of miracles in the normal every day. It makes multiple realities possible at the same time.
According to his website, Cortney Lamar Charleston is a poet whose words “paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present.” Identity, he says, is, “functionally, a transition zone” between “race, masculinity, class, family, and faith.” In his latest collection, Dopplegangbanger, there is a conflict of the soul. The opening poem, “The Unauthorized Biography of …
The Polarities of a Black Boy: a review of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Dopplegangbanger Read More »