March 8, 2018
Patricia Clark, “Entering the Poem: Allowing Detail to Transform a Moment and Transport the Reader”
“That is how close one can come by memorizing a poem, a process I highly recommend. The poem becomes very close to you, part of muscle and sinew, and one can learn unexpectedly from the poem. I’ve tried by rereading, reciting and repeated hearing of ‘The Journey’ to unlock some of its mysteries.”
“Claire’s mind and words reach and spin across time, tendrils stretching forward and backward through generations. She fiercely believed in continuity beyond the borders of our lives, exhibited in her poetry’s sense of time travel, past and future mingling.”
Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan,
“Beauty and Its Opposite Conceit”
(August 30, 2010 / March 8, 2018)
“To this day, I still hold deep affection for Sonnet 127 and Sonnet 130, poems that speak more to me now, as a poet in my late thirties, writing my own poems and working through themes of affectation and affliction, beauty and the Protean attainment of it. Shakespeare taught me to use hyperbole, oxymoron, metaphor, influence, and paradox. But more importantly, he convinced me of the Dark Lady’s beauty, of an aesthetic to weave into the fabric of my own writing.”
“Interview with Sarah Rose Nordgren”
“[W]hat I find so compelling about [Tranströmer’s] poem is the way it keeps me right in the middle of knowing and unknowing, the familiar and the strange, the foreboding and the funny. Like a dream in which one finds that their childhood home is actually located on Mars, Tranströmer leads me through the poem with my eyes open, but not before making me spin around a few times first so I’m sufficiently dizzy. His images and language are clear and direct—the matter-of-fact tone creating the dark, ironical humor in places—but as soon as I see something, it transforms or dissolves into something else.”