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lifeinpoetry

when I imagine myself

I am always leaving

I couldn’t draw my own face if god asked

— Andrés Cerpa, from “The Vault,” published in The Offing

tsptsptsp

from “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects” by Danez Smith, Poetry Magazine March 2018

timbllr

from weheartit

llovinghome

Great Stour River, Kent

driflloon

fyeahmovies

In the Mood for Love (2000), dir. Wong Kar-wai

cantcontrolthegay-deactivated20

where is the lie

philosophomoric

“And I tell the truth as an expedient thing, for the reader and myself. I don’t obscure the truth with the mundane. I don’t build my work on the aesthetic I learned in the MFA classes at school, on suggestions that I slow down, that I remove the poetry and ambiguity from my prose, that I produce competent writing. Long before I graduated with my first degree, I was tired of competent writing. Competent books, with protagonists with names like Siobhán, who live in brownstone apartments and are never gratuitous or explicit or poor. I can’t afford to let white academia drag me into mediocrity.

But it’s hard to articulate how one goes from a server to a camgirl to a master’s student to someone holding a degree in her hands so tightly the paper became wet and she had to throw it away. Because I’ve existed in extremes for much of my life, I’m reticent to write from a middle place, where there is no urgency. I can hear my graduate program’s workshop facilitator, a white man, saying, “Terese, slow down.” He wants the tourist experience. He wants me to curate pain and titillation, and tell what each room looks like, because, without that, my work is not enough. He doesn’t believe that these experiences felt this fast, but they did. He wants to see the struggle, but he doesn’t deserve it.”

here