The Art of Poetry No. 107 (Interviewer)
“By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”
Cathy Park Hong is the author of the essay collection Minor Feelings, as well as three books of poems, most recently Engine Empire. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic.
“By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”
Garçon, you snore so rhapsodically but hup hup,
peach schnapps & Coke Zero
with a gumball-green mermaid swizzle stick—
A heartvein throbs between her brows: Ketty-San’s
incensed another joke’s made at her expense,
With characters of granite schist, she hashtags a ban
I want to write like a man, probing
my glitchy mind like it’s the rarest orchid.
But I’m cowed,
The whole country is in a duel and we want no part of it.
They see us ride, they say
all you men going the wrong direction.
Ate stew, shot a man,
Bandy body spraddled, so full of lead
Cabron can’t even walk uphill.
Choi Seungja writes, with terrifying alacrity, the existential despair of living in a hierarchical society where free will is a joke.
Watching Richard Pryor, I had a revelation: What the fuck am I doing here? Who am I writing for?