Marilyn Chin link and comment

Enjoyed that surprise visit from Marilyn Chin on Wednesday — hope you did too :)  Here's a link to her reading  "The Floral Apron" to a PBS audience, part of Garrison Keillor's Poetry Everywhere series.

Interesting how that piece is also a kind of "work poem" —just what we were writing last week, and you have been writing so well I might add :) — doubling here as an homage to Chin's powerful "kitchen deities"—her mother and aunts wielding cleavers in the ancestral kitchen, cooking (squid) while "talking story" in ways indelible to Chin's upbringing, and sense of her own cultural and gender identities.  There's a lot of power in this poem— as in that kitchen, the work, the women.

And here's a nice excerpt from an interview she once did with Bill Moyers (from The Language of Life series)—in which she talks about the poem she recited for us—"How I Got that Name."

Really looking forward to Monday, when we start in on a new little unit on "Poetry of Witness" — at least that's what I'm thinking now.  We'll see how that develops. Look over the Addonizio/Laux chapter on "Witnessing" if you have time — pp. 64-74.

So much to cover, so little time. Hope your homework for Monday (as always, four typed copies of at least one poem) is exciting for you to work up these next couple of days as well.  I know you have in-class writings to explore & revise (homages to fictional characters and/or poems in sections after "three kinds of pleasures" by Robert Bly—from this past week) — and whatever else you've got going as well. Enjoying all your posts here too!

Have a terrific weekend.
—kw