Jesse Lee Kercheval Discusses Idea Vilariño
Q: Poemas de amor, in which "I Write Think Read" and "I Am Here" were published, was first published in 1957 and revised multiple times throughout her life. Were the "I Write Think Read" and "I Am Here" published in different forms as well? How did the book change in its subsequent versions?
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Dustin: So I understand that this novel took you nine years to write. Can you explain your process of writing the novel over those nine years?
Xu Xi: Okay nine years is sort of deceptive. What happened in those nine years was I moved from New York back to Hong Kong, and to find a full time job I put out two books, three, actually, if you count the one I was editing plus some second editions of other books that came out. So all this other stuff was happening but the actual writing of the book took a little longer than nine years. I hit a point about five years along where I’d thought I’d finished it, and this was in Switzerland at a writer’s residency and I was like “Yay, the book is done!” I went back to Hong Kong and I went “Oh my God, this is all wrong.”
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In the "throw-things house" where the speaker of Patricia Colleen Murphy's debut collection Hemming Flames grows to adulthood, a father asks of his wife, "could you / try not to murder yourself / in front of the children." Murphy opens with Bolsheviks; her mother, a Stanford graduate, communist, a woman with mental illness; and the speaker finding her mother after another suicide attempt. This entry into the family is casual, the implication that it's a commonplace occurrence, that at the dinner table, peas passed in irritation, we come to that query and enter into a family with more to show than can fit in a dining room window peek, so the pane (pain) is thrown wide open.
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Willie VerSteeg discusses the epigraph, formal technique, & Donald Justice
KJB: Like the epigraph that opens the piece, there is a diffusion of things seen in this poem. If the light that Justice speaks of conveys happiness, the speaker in "Porch Season” seems to diffuse the scene with a tone that is almost-sentimental ambivalence. The dusk “tumbles in”, the flower petals get stuck like “misplaced romance”, even the boy ignores the speaker. Yet, the ending carries readers to a sense of relief, which can quite easily be associated - though isn’t parallel to - happiness. Was this poem an attempt to rectify these two similar emotions with one another, or to hold a mirror up to Justice’s concept of happiness?
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