PoemLink No. 2: Learning Distance
Welcome to POEMLINK, a poetry roundup which promises to be a not-so-infrequent curation of pieces that have recently caught our attention in literary journals and magazines online. POEMLINK aims to provide an eclectic selection of pieces we find special, innovative, or simply amusing. Let us scour the world of internet poetry so you don’t have to.
Students and educators alike have been figuring out what it means to be learning online—in and out of sync. Yet connectivity issues, screen freezes, digital self-management, and methods of knowledge delivery, among other things, are just some of the budding concerns arising out of remote education.
Questions of access, ability, and pedagogical models are being raised, hopefully allowing for the retooling of what intellectual work can and should be. In the spirit of distance learning, this edition of POEMLINK reflects on the lessons of separation and dis/attachment that may permit us to explore the poetics of collaborative insight. Here are some poems that challenge and revisit what we think we know—and how we know it. Though often difficult, clandestine knowledge can be vital for our own self- and community retrievals.
—PL
1. Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s “Learning Late Letters” contemplates the lessons of not-so-distant spectres: “Every dream is a chamber where the language drills, like vital winds, hum me anew, blowing me closer to the waters where my father lies. Every night he still sleeptalks his fatal rhythm through my broken tongue.” Translated from Vietnamese by the author, winner of the 2020 Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Contest.
2. Arielle Twist navigates the spaces between trans reality, asking how trans might coexist in the gaps left by grief and desire in “Rework” published in THIS Magazine.
3. Canisia Lubrin’s “In the Middle of the Burning” reflects on the early 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings amid COVID-19:
days like these pleat whatever the hollow year must offer
between the not-yet-dead and those just waking up
it will not be the vanished thing that we remember
it will be what we exchanged close to midnight
4. “If I died once. If I left the body.” The 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize winner for Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, Liz Howard, on the distance of the corpse and what it means to mourn the time of departures—future, past, and present—in “True Value,” published in The Puritan.
5. Kimberly Alidio on cry melodies, Language Poetry, noise, and translatables in “My Native Language is Noise”:
I wonder: Do we belong to one another when languages are at work and at play without interpretation, translation, or understanding? Do the languages we use belong to us? Do I have voided claims over languages I cannot make use of? Can I claim languages I do not speak through my intimacy with their emotional prosodies? Must I speak them to anyone other than myself?
Prathna Lor
Prathna Lor, the poetry editor of Shrapnel, is a poet, essayist, and educator currently living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Their writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, and Canadian Literature, among other places.