Singaporean poet Alvin Pang met several HFR editors at AWP in Minneapolis and, upon discovering that many of us would be in Singapore that summer on various fellowships, casually suggested meeting up. One May afternoon, he kindly crammed as many of as us as we could fit into his car and took us for a tour of Singapore. Between pointing out the most haunted building in Singapore, lunch at a hawker center, and wine at the Flower Dome, he sat down with us in the National Library for a conversation.
-Sue Hyon Bae
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It always echoes back to me. You could call it a haunting. You could say ghosted. You can just as easily say that the same loneliness brimming through the old woman’s body brims and finally unfastens me as well.
When I started reciting these old stories with my elders, I felt the slimmest lump in the throat begin to take on a growing heft. These are some of my greatest memories as a mentee under my elders. And it was after the end of our roundtable discussions on the texts that we would begin to read aloud each word, each line, sense the warm touch of every glottal and stressed vowel. Every click of the tongue echoed a little more in my young indigenous, nimíipuu self.
Read MoreHaving translated part of Amarsana Ulzytuev’s “anaphora manifesto” for my introduction in the print issue of the magazine, I have already addressed his point about the dominance of end-rhyme so characteristic of Russian verse having been a detriment to the development of anaphora. I would only add that anaphora, being so primal to English verse – in the syntactic sense due to the influence of the King James Bible, and in the broader sense, of alliteration (or “front-rhyme” as Amarsana has it,) characteristic of its earliest strata of Old English alliterative verse – in my process of translating Amarsana’s poems, I did not sense a need to consciously find words that alliterate (after all, an accident of composition) so that the “Englishing” proceeded, as I’m sure did the writing of the originals, in a natural way.
Read MoreEnjoy our prose-poem of the month, a lovely piece by Jenna Le.
HFR: "Book Report" clearly takes an interesting form -- in a way, mimicking the form of a book report or journal entries; and in the broader sense, a prose poem form. What was your thought process in creating this unique form? Did the title come before or after the final result?
JL: I was inspired to write “Book Report" after reading Ocean Vuong’s poem “Aubade With Burning City” in the February 2014 issue of Poetry. Because Vuong’s poem is written in long lines, I initially envisioned “Book Report” as a poem with long lines, even though I usually write poems with short lines.
Read MoreI had heard good things about HFR through some grapevine or other, so I was pretty thrilled when one of the editors approached me in late 2013 and asked if I’d like to submit one of my translations for Issue 54. That was my first, brief reaction.
Read MoreWith the end of the year comes the end of the current staff at HFR… but it also brings with it a new staff! They're already hard at work on the fall issue, and they've even launched a flash fiction contest. Kacie Blackburn sat down with Brian Bender and asked him how it feels to be stepping up to the international poetry spot.
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