Category: World Literature

Reading/Writing/Seeing

for Emily, Kelley, and Lindsay 1. In reality every reader is, while she is reading, the reader of her own self.  The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to…

This Palestinian Life

Mounif is calling me In America From Qatar About Fahim’s martyrdom In Beirut And burial In Kuwait And about the necessity Of informing Sitti Umm ‘Ata In Deir Ghassanah And his maternal grandmother In Nablus…

Thơ

Little Sister At the end of our lesson At the Bread Co on South Grand You gave me a simple assignment: “Write a four-line poem in Vietnamese” You came to this country at age eight…

Subversives

In the New Directions collection, Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, Ernesto Cardenal includes an “Epistle to Monsignor Casaldáliga (whom Mev Puleo interviewed in her book The Struggle is One, and from which I quoted…

Composing “HOWL”

Here’s Allen Ginsberg talking about the process of writing HOWL, which is reminiscent of Natalie Goldberg’s project in Writing down the Bones, to free the writer within: I thought I wouldn’t write a poem but…

Ko Un

1. Ko Un‘s Ten Thousand Lives is a remarkable sample in English of his twenty-volume work in Korean, known as Maninbo.  In his early years, he was a Buddhist monk.  Later, he was part of…