“In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.” -Bashō, trans. Jane Hirshfield In some sense, homesickness is always a longing for a place that no longer exists. Which is to say that it is always, to some extent, existential. Yet with the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic, I have never […]
“Homesickness”, Poem in Rattle Poets Respond (Online) Read More »
It is strange to be an American watching America from afar right now. I live in England, near the village of St. Albans, which has been continuously inhabited since Roman times. I often wonder what it must have been like to be a Roman living in Britain around the time of the fall of the
In the wake of rising authoritarianism in the US, and isolationism here in the UK, I have found it hard to sit down and write poetry. Clearly this seems to be a time for action more than words. Revisiting an essay from 2007, written in the wake of US censorship of Iranian poetry, I began
