Women's Voices For Change

The poem captures the relaxed, meandering qualities of still-light-at-night community meals in high summer. Community, family, plenty, gratitude—we feel all this in the poem, and understand the way ordinary experiences can sometimes transcend themselves. 

This poem was born the child of observation and memory. It recalls the first time I saw grapes growing in cultivation, and the wonder I felt at the light, the grapes and the arbor.

“The Bay” is about loss, but also about what is not lost; about death, but also new life; about stasis and stagnation, but also about the breeze picking up and new life quickening in stem, blossom, and vine.

“Know, Heart” ends in a place of utter desolation and loss, with the heart so baffled by suffering that it cannot feel anything or even conceive of a future. All it can do is look blindly back into memory.

I wrote this poem while thinking about the way that marriage is a form, not unlike a poem, which demands certain kinds of commitments (and identities) from us and in turn shapes us in response to our commitment to it.

Even the best mother-daughter relationships are necessarily tormented. Some give rise to poems like today’s: fraught, even agonized at times, but also honest and still holding a place for love.

To make a study of something is to contain it. Containment, both physical and figurative, is a prominent concern in Monica Youn’s “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)."

That’s an effective strategy, choosing a title that multiplies associations in the reader’s mind even before the poem is read. Will the poem involve any of these things, or instead, play off of my expectations and surprise me?