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7-12

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Chinese 101 (A Spoken Word Visual) I Sun Luu

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11,12 curses

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11-12

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I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,

Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat

Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold

While your better selves watch from the bleachers.

I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow

You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night

In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-

Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars

Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.

I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.

Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough

To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

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American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["I... | Poetry Magazine

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I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

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Naomi Shihab Nye
A poem on Muslim Prayer

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There was the method of kneeling,

a fine method, if you lived in a country

where stones were smooth.

The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,

hidden corners where knee fit rock.

Their prayers were weathered rib bones,

small calcium words uttered in sequence,

as if this shedding of syllables could somehow

fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long

they walked like sheep.

Under the olive trees, they raised their arms-

Hear us! We have pain on earth!

We have so much pain there is no place to store it!

But the olives bobbed peacefully

in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.

At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,

and were happy in spite of the pain,

because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,

wrapping themselves in new white linen

to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.

When they arrived at Mecca

they would circle the holy places,

they would bend to kiss the earth

and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers

the pilgrimage occurred daily,

lugging water from the spring

or balancing the baskets of grapes.

These were the ones present at births,

humming quietly to perspiring mothers.

The ones stitching intricate needlework into children's dresses,

forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn't care about praying.

The young ones. The ones who had been to America.

They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.

Time?-The old ones prayed for the young ones.

They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,

for the twig, the round moon,

to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one

the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,

who beat everyone at dominoes,

insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,

and was famous for his laugh.

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Different Ways to Pray by Naomi Shihab Nye | Poetry Foundation

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(Read & Listen)

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You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,

and have to choose between the starving month's

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.

The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?

If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets

into the air and harvest the fog.

Hunger opens you to illiteracy,

thirst makes clear the starving pattern,

the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,

the angel stops whispering for a moment-

The secret night could already be over,

you will have to listen very carefully-

You are never going to know which night's mouth is sacredly reciting

and which night's recitation is secretly mere wind-

Kazim Ali, "Ramadan" from The Fortieth Day. Copyright © 2008 by Kazim Ali. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

Source: The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions Ltd., 2008)

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Ramadan by Kazim Ali | Poetry Foundation

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You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches, and have to choose between the starving month's nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings. The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter? If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets into the air and harvest the fog.

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My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

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My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

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Mohja Kahf

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My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the... | Poetry Foundation

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My grandmother puts her feet in the sink to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims She does it with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air

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Tina Chang 11-12

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Chen Chen 9-12 (See Pod Cast Below as well)

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But really
I would prefer
to sit, drink water,
reread some Russians
a while longer
-a luxury
perhaps, but why
should I, anyone,
call it that, why
should reading
what I want,
in a well-hydrated fashion,
always be what I'm
planning to finally
do, like hiking
or biking, & now
that I think of it, reading
should make me, anyone,
breathe harder, then
easier, reach for cold,
cold water, & I
prefer my reading
that way, I prefer
Ivan Turgenev,
who makes me work for
not quite pleasure
no, some truer
sweatier thing,
Turgenev,
who is just now,
in my small room
in West Texas,
getting to the good part,
the very Russian part,
the last few pages
of "The Singers"
when the story
should be over,
Yakov the Turk
has sung with fervor,
meaning true
Russian spirit,
meaning he's won
a kind of 19th century
Idol in the village
tavern, The End, but
Turgenev goes
on, the narrator walks
out, down a hill,
into a dark
enveloping mist,
& he hears
from misty far away
some little boy
calling out for
Antropka!
calling hoarsely,
darkly,
Antropka-a-a!
& it's that voice that stops
then opens my breath
that voice
& all Monday-Wednesday-Fridays
all Tuesday-Thursdays
are gone
I have arrived
in the village of
no day none
& I am sitting
with the villagers
who are each at once
young old
who have the coldest
water to give me
& songs
I think I have sung before
they sing
their underground
tree-root syllables
they give me silences
from their long
long hair

I like to say we left at first light
with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car,
my father fighting him off with firecrackers,
even though Mao was already over a decade
dead, & my mother says all my father did
during the Cultural Revolution was teach math,
which he was not qualified to teach, & swim & sunbathe
around Piano Island, a place I never read about
in my American textbooks, a place everybody in the family
says they took me to, & that I loved.
What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved?
To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?
They ask if I remember them, the aunts, the uncles,
& I say Yes it's coming back, I say Of course,
when it's No not at all, because when I last saw them
I was three, & the China of my first three years
is largely make-believe, my vast invented country,
my dream before I knew the word "dream,"
my father's martial arts films plus a teaspoon-taste
of history. I like to say we left at first light,
we had to, my parents had been unmasked as the famous
kung fu crime-fighting couple of the Southern provinces,
& the Hong Kong mafia was after us. I like to say
we were helped by a handsome mysterious Northerner,
who turned out himself to be a kung fu master.
I don't like to say, I don't remember crying.
No embracing in the airport, sobbing. I don't remember
feeling bad, leaving China.
I like to say we left at first light, we snuck off
on some secret adventure, while the others were
still sleeping, still blanketed, warm
in their memories of us.
What do I remember of crying? When my mother slapped me
for being dirty, diseased, led astray by Western devils,
a dirty, bad son, I cried, thirteen, already too old,
too male for crying. When my father said Get out,
never come back, I cried & ran, threw myself into night.
Then returned, at first light, I don't remember exactly
why, or what exactly came next. One memory claims
my mother rushed into the pink dawn bright
to see what had happened, reaching toward me with her hands,
& I wanted to say No. Don't touch me.
Another memory insists the front door had simply been left
unlocked, & I slipped right through, found my room,
my bed, which felt somehow smaller, & fell asleep, for hours,
before my mother (anybody) seemed to notice.
I'm not certain which is the correct version, but what stays with me
is the leaving, the cry, the country splintering.
It's been another five years since my mother has seen her sisters,
her own mother, who recently had a stroke, who has trouble
recalling who, why. I feel awful, my mother says,
not going back at once to see her. But too much is happening here.
Here, she says, as though it's the most difficult,
least forgivable English word.
What would my mother say, if she were the one writing?
How would her voice sound? Which is really to ask, what is
my best guess, my invented, translated (Chinese-to-English,
English-to-English) mother's voice? She might say:
We left at first light, we had to, the flight was early,
in early spring. Go, my mother urged, what are you doing,

It was spring & I could smell it, despite the sterile glass waving at me, crying? Get on that plane before it leaves without you.
& metal of the airport-scent of my mother's just-washed hair,
of the just-born flowers of fields we passed on the car ride over,
how I did not know those flowers were already
memory, how I thought I could smell them, boarding the plane,
the strange tunnel full of their aroma, their names
I once knew, & my mother's long black hair-so impossible now.
Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel,
elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost
country. First & deepest severance that should have
prepared me for all others.

for Michael Burkard
Still winter. Snowing, still. Can it even be called action, this patience
in the form of gravity overdressed in gray?

Days like this, the right silence can be an action, an axe,
right through the frozen sea, as Kafka calls for. A necessary smashing,
opening. Though silence can also be a shattering, closing.

Think of peace & how the Buddhists say it is found through silence.
Think of silence & how Audre Lorde says it will not protect you.

Think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made
a frozen sea. Think of speaking as a violence, when speaking is a house
that dresses your life in the tidiest wallpaper. It makes your grief

sit down, this house. It makes you chairs when you need
justice. It keeps your rage room temperature. I've been thinking

about how the world is actually unbearable.
About all those moments of silence we're supposed to take.
Each year, more moments, less life, & perhaps

the most monastic of monks are right to take vows
of silence that last a decade.

Though someone else (probably French) says our speaking
was never ours; our thoughts & selves housed
by history, rooms we did not choose, but must live in.

Think of Paul Celan, living
in the bone-rooms of German. Living, singing.

What does it mean, to sing in the language of those
who have killed your mother,
would kill her again? Does meaning shatter, leaving

behind the barest moan? This English, I bear it, a master's
axe, yet so is every tongue-red with singing & killing.

Are we even built for peace? I think of breath & my teacher,
Michael, one of the least masterly, most peaceful people I know,
& Kafka's number one fan. I think of the puffy blue vest Michael wears

when his breaths turn white. Even when I'm doing my best
think axes & walls, brave monks & unbearable houses,

the thought of Michael in his bit-too-big deep blue vest
leaks in. & I don't think I will ever stop trying to sneak
into casual conversation the word "ululation." If only all language

could be ululation in blue vests. If silence could always be
as quiet as Michael, sitting with his coffee & his book, rereading.

"Tell me whom you love, and I'll tell you who you are." - Creole Proverb

The man whose throat blossoms with spicy chocolates
Tempers my ways of flurrying
Is my inner recesses surfacing
Paints the bedroom blue because he wants to carry me to the skies
Pear eater in the orchard
Possesses Whitmanesque urge & urgency

Crooked grin of ice cream persuasion
When I speak he bursts into seeds & religion
Boo Bear, the room turns orchestral Poetry housed in a harmonica
Line dances with his awkward flair
Rare steaks, onion rings, Maker's on the rocks
Once-a-boy pilfering grenadine
Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska
Wicked at the door of happiness
At a longed-for distance remains sharply crystalline
Fragments, but by day's end assembled into joint narrative
Does not make me who I am, entirely
Heart like a fig, sliced
Peonies in a clear round vase, singing
A wisp, a gasp, sonorous stutter
Tuning fork deep in my belly, which is also a bell
Evening where there is no church but fire
Sparks, particles, chrysalis into memory
Moth, pod of enormous pleasure, fluttering about on a train
He knows I don't need saving & rescues me anyhow

Darling, fill my cup; the bird has come to roost Our often-misunderstood kind of love is dangerous

turns out
there are more planets than stars
more places to land
than to be burned

I have always been in love with
last chances especially
now that they really do
seem like last chances

the trill of it all upending
what's left of my head
after we explode

are you ready to ascend
in the morning I will take you
on the wing

When I say Black, what I mean is the curl of my hair is tight enough to snag the teeth of a wide-tooth comb. So, I don't comb my hair when I'm in the comfort of my home. This comfort is the standard by which I determine who, what, where is home. I rarely feel home in my father's home.

▪

When I was 21, my father kissed my forehead and this was the first time he ever kissed me. My father's lips recall a different story. But this is my tale of a boy whose hard head grew tender from his father's kiss. The words I love you, boy seeped into my newly-softened skull. For just a moment, my father returned my boyhood so he could feel the gratification of kissing his son goodnight. It had to be that way.

▪

The only way to rake my hair into a neat brush of manageable coils is to first wet it thoroughly. Before I leave my home, I sometimes-most times-tame my hair with water to allow it to floss the teeth of the comb, to bear the brunt of its bite. I sometimes long for watered-down brown tresses that know to bow to the comb's might. I sometimes wish my hair would grow into an impenetrable forest, endless and black as starless nights.

▪

When I say Black, I mean my father's hardened bosom has left me disheartened-desensitized to all but the snatch of a fine-tooth comb. I've been taught a man must be made a boy before he can receive a kiss from another man, and such ancient magic must be sparingly used. Sometimes-most times-I sleep with one eye open and hope to reunite with the strange magician who makes boys of men with forehead kisses. On these nights, I lie in bed and wait for him to cast his spell. As I sleep, my father combs his fingers through my hair and plants his lips on my eager forehead. On these nights, I wake floating above my bed in boyish bliss. On these nights, I feel home.

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But reallyI would preferto sit, drink water,reread some Russiansa while longer -a luxuryperhaps, but whyshould I, anyone,call it that, whyshould readingwhat I want,in a well-hydrated fashion,always be what I'mplanning to finallydo, like hiking or biking, & nowthat I think of it, readingshould make me, anyone,breathe harder, theneasier, reach for cold,cold

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I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party by Chen Chen

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I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party by Chen Chen

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(Poetry Unbound Podcast analysis)

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9-12 Dilruba Ahmed

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Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and the longer that I've written poetry and read poetry, I realize that poetry is asking me to be brave, to go into the moments of my own failure and to narrate those, not as projects of self-hatred, but as projects of observation, in the possibility that I might be able to offer some kind of compassion in the space of a poem to the self that's writing, as well as, from that, begin to offer compassion in the wider world.

[ music: "Praise The Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: "Phase One" by Dilruba Ahmed:

For the seedlings that wilt, now,
in tiny pots, I forgive you.
For saying no first
but yes as an afterthought.

[ music: "Every Place We've Been" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: One of the questions that you always ask when you read a poem is, Who is the speaker in the poem? The speaking voice of the poem isn't always the poet. Sometimes they take on a persona, or they adopt an all-knowing point of view, speaking to themself in the past, from the vantage point of the present - or the future, even. And the first time I read this poem, I thought, Who is this speaker? They sound like a total dick. And then it became clear to me, as the poem went on, that the speaker in the poem had such intimate knowledge of the person they were speaking to that it could only be a person speaking to themself, because they know so much. And then I thought, Oh, they don't sound horrible. They sound intimately aware of the things that we hold against ourselves.

And that's what I think this poem is about, in many ways, the things we hold against ourselves that prevent us from being loving in the moment, because we're so caught up, perhaps, in the stories of failure, some of them deserved, and some of them not deserved, the stories of failure that we hold against ourselves from our past, or from the ideal version of ourselves that we think we should be.

[ music: "First Grief, First Air " by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: This person seems to be tired a lot, seems to be in a rush. They're exhausted from parenting. They forget things. They are concerned about how they are perceived, and they are trying to appear perfect. And they're giving themselves forgiveness for all those things, and treating their mother poorly. And they're filled with capacities for love and loneliness. All of these things in this poem seem to be deserving of forgiveness.

The really interesting thing in this poem is that the word "forgive" occurs 13 times. And then that phrase, "I forgive you," occurs six times. The first time, it appears just as a single sentence. It occurs just by itself, those three words, "I forgive you." And then the next time it appears, it occurs twice, "I forgive you. I forgive you." And then the final time it appears, it's three times: "I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you." It's like this poem is trying to learn a mantra to say to itself, and in the hope that a life can learn a mantra to say to itself, knowing that saying it once isn't enough and, also, that forgiveness is something that we return to over and over again, even self-forgiveness - that it needs to be a mantra. It needs to be a thing we say to ourselves, in order to get out of our way, in order to be able to love.

That's the really interesting part of the final part of this poem, is that it says, "to forgive yourself first so you / could then forgive others and / at last find a way to become / the love that you want in this world." This poem is saying that self-forgiveness isn't the end. Self-forgiveness is the beginning, in order to be able to love.

And that makes you think of the title, then, "Phase One." This is just the first step in the project of being human and in the project of being human at this age, whatever age the speaker of the poem is. I love that Dilruba Ahmed has done this in such a way to say that self-forgiveness comes early so that all these other things can come after that; so that you can be present to your life without holding the life that you never had, against yourself, in such a way that you might never live the life that you have.

[ music: "What Did You Not Hear" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: I think sometimes there can be a concern that a focus on self-forgiveness is somehow selfish. But the focus on self-forgiveness is, in a certain sense, trying to remove yourself from being always the center of the drama of the public life you're living.

And what this poem is saying, and what I think self-forgiveness does, is to recognize that if we are holding enormous things against ourselves, it can be very difficult to be present and loving in those moments. If you are spending so much of your energy putting yourself at the center of your story and hating yourself, it can be very difficult to be present with other people, because we do tend to give to others what we've given to ourselves. And if we're constantly sharpening an iron against ourselves, well, then, we might be using that same iron against the people that we meet, whether those are small encounters on the bus or encounters with a partner or our children or somebody else that we live with or see regularly. And so, I think, starting with yourself in this moment might be the beginning of having a place of practice where you can start, then, with others.

And those things are reciprocal. You can give to others what can be difficult to give to yourself, but sometimes, when you give something to yourself, it can make it easier to give to others, as well. You can begin to imagine being compassionate to them, because you've had to do the hard work of being compassionate to yourself.

[ music: "Ashed to Air" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: For many years I led a project that looked at forgiveness. I must've read hundreds of definitions of forgiveness. But the one I keep on coming back to is, holding something against someone. That someone might be yourself. And to hold something against someone requires energy. They mightn't even know it.

Like if I've been angry at somebody, they mightn't know that most mornings, do you know, while I'm having a cup of tea, I rehearse that argument that I wish that I'd had with them and that final, declarative, tour de force of a comeback that I wished I'd given. I might be stoking the fire of anger for a week or a month or a year. And I'm holding something against them. They mightn't even know it, but I'm spending a lot of energy with that up against them. And that is deepening the pain. And I think it is giving a lot of attention somewhere where I would hope, perhaps, we could give attention creatively.

There's all kinds of reasons why we get caught in anger, and anger is a magnificent and important defense. And if forgiveness is ever to happen, there needs to be a level of safety. And sometimes anger is a reminder to ourselves that safety hasn't been achieved, yet, so anger is the protection. And anger has a deep intelligence in that moment.

But the intuition of this poem is that the forgiveness that Dilruba Ahmed is offering to herself is a forgiveness that's freeing, that's opening her up to being present to other people in love.

[ music: "The House You Wake In" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: I think this is a very, very humble poem. And I think it can be very difficult for somebody to say, "Let me make a list of the things that I think I should forgive myself for," because if you haven't forgiven yourself for something, the likelihood is, is that you think you don't deserve forgiveness for something. So maybe the invitation of this poem is to make a list of the things that you hold against yourself.

And I think about the times that I have held things against myself, times when I've disappointed people; and then, certainly, when I had responsibility, not being able to live up to the idea of myself, about who I'd be when I had responsibility; times when I've hurt a partner, hurt family and friends - those are the kinds of things that I think, I don't deserve forgiveness, so I don't even want to make a list of the things I should forgive myself for, because I don't think I deserve to make that list. But these are certainly the things I hold against myself. And I hold them over me. And what might it mean for me to repeat "I forgive you" in increasing repetitions, about - this poem stops at three repetitions, so maybe I need 50. But it invites us, I think, to consider those things, especially when we don't think we deserve them.

"Phase One" by Dilruba Ahmed:

For the seedlings that wilt, now,
in tiny pots, I forgive you.
For saying no first
but yes as an afterthought.

Lily Percy: "Phase One" comes from Dilruba Ahmed's, Bring Now the Angels. Thank you to the University of Pittsburgh Press who gave us permission to use Dilruba's poem. You can find a link to the poem in our show notes, along with Pádraig's guiding question for this episode.

Poetry Unbound is Chris Heagle, Erin Colasacco, Serri Graslie, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Christiane Wartell, Karen Navarre, Karyn Towey, Sue Ariza, and me, Lily Percy. Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. This podcast is produced by On Being Studios, which is located on Dakota land. We also produce other podcasts you might enjoy, like On Being with Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise, and This Movie Changed Me - find those wherever you like to listen or visit us at onbeing.org to find out more.

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Dilruba Ahmed - Phase One | The On Being Project

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Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and the longer that I've written poetry and read poetry, I realize that poetry is asking me to be brave, to go into the moments of my own failure and to narrate those, not as projects of self-hatred, but as projects of observation, in the possibility that I might be able to offer some kind of compassion in the space of a poem to the self that's writing, as well as, from that, begin to offer compassion in the wider world.

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9-10 Zaffar Kunil

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Pádraig Ó Tuama, host: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and one of the things I love about poetry is that often, poetry isn't trying to describe your full life, if you're writing about yourself. Poetry is trying to describe something that happened once, that it can drop into a moment and, by observing that moment, you can see all kinds of aspects of the various people that you were, in that single moment.

[ music: "Praise The Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: "The Word" by Zaffar Kunial:

"I couldn't tell you now what possessed me
to shut summer out and stay in my room.
Or at least attempt to. In bed mostly.
It's my dad, standing in the door frame
not entering - but pausing to shape advice
that keeps coming back. "Whatever is matter,

must enjoy the life." He pronounced this twice.
And me, I heard wrongness in putting a the

before life. In two minds. Ashamed. Aware.
That I knew better, though was stuck inside
while the sun was out. That I'm native here.
In a halfway house. Like that sticking word.
That definite article, half right, half
wrong, still present between enjoy and life."

[ music: "Ashed to Air" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: There's so much in this poem that I admire and like. I'm brought instantly into an experience of being a teenager and trying to figure yourself out, and the world is shining outside. You've got long, languorous summers given to you in summer holidays, and yet, you're not outside, you're inside.

And then Zaffar Kunial adds this extraordinary element to it, in terms of the question about fluency in English. Zaffar Kunial is British-born, in Birmingham; his parents speak Urdu, and so his father isn't speaking in his first language. And so his father is technically making grammar mistakes, I suppose, and Zaffar Kunial is awkward and aware and ashamed - ashamed of what, though? That's partly what this poem is about. Is he ashamed of having a father whose English isn't perfect, doesn't sound native? Is he ashamed of himself for being ashamed of that? Is he ashamed of himself for being stuck in this awkward phase of teenagerhood, or having a dad who's standing at the door, giving you advice whether you want it or not?

[ music: "Into the Earth" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: The very clever thing is that this poem is looking back, because it's easy to forget that the very first line is, "I couldn't tell you now what possessed me / to shut summer out and stay in my room." So this is a poet looking back to a particular summer. And it does feel like this poet is more aware now than the version of himself that they're narrating in the poem. And the poem has great tenderness. The poem doesn't use the formality of "father," it uses the informality, the affectionate, of "dad." "It's my dad, standing in the door frame / not entering - but pausing to shape advice."

And I wonder, was that courtesy? Was that wondering, what is the gulf between a father and a son? How do they speak to each other at being migrants, wondering what the culture that the son inhabits while the father's inhabiting another one? Freud said that part of the role of being a teenager is to make your parents hate you enough so that they'll be able to cope when you move away. And I think that's such an insight, in terms of some of the ways within which anxiety and anger can flare up between children and their parents, when you're a teenager or when you're in your early 20s, as you're living at home and trying to figure out what this in-between space between adult and child is, and how you figure out how to be independent while also, in a certain sense, continuing to be dependent.

There seems to be a lack of understanding, but yet, the words here, "dad," "pausing," "shape" - those things are deliberate words, kind words, affectionate words and familial words.

But the father, too, comes into this frame with courtesy, with this deep desire for the son to "enjoy the life." The poem focuses on the grammatical mistake of "enjoy the life," where, perhaps, it should have just said, "enjoy life" or "enjoy your life." But those grammatical mistakes are only surface. What's deeper is care, because the father says, "Whatever is matter, / must enjoy the life." And "whatever is matter" - I get the impression that the father knows that something is up. Something is the matter. There's something happening in this son of his that means he's shutting himself up in his room. And the father is trying to, from the door frame, say, "Whatever's the matter, you must enjoy your life. You must enjoy life. Whatever it is that's going on" - there's so many possibilities that's present in these gorgeous, loving words that he's saying, trying desperately to reach out to his son, but the son, perhaps, not entirely sure how to take the raft of those words and make them work for him.

Ó Tuama: So often, when we're in a situation, we feel like, "If only I had this, then I'd be able to enjoy my life." And then, years later, we look back on that period and think, My God, you had all these other things. Why weren't you able to enjoy it then?

I'm now the age my dad was when I was 13. I wouldn't want to be the parent of me as a 13-year-old, so I have all the sympathy for my dad. And when I was 13, I had all kinds of ideas about what a good person was, and I had all kinds of criticisms of everybody, really, my dad included. And these days, if dad is ever critical of himself, I'm the one who wants to tell him to be softer on himself. And I realize now that when I looked at my parents when I was younger, so often you think that they thought they were brilliant, and that they were just ordering us around. Now, as an adult, I realize that my parents probably felt lost and that they were looking at us, thinking, What kind of planet do you live on? And how do we speak to that planet? And how do we speak to each other? What's this great gulf between us, this gulf of language, this gulf of culture, this gulf of arts and understanding and interests? And I think I look back on them now with a softness and with a sense of congratulations for all that they did and congratulations for the kindness and generosities that they offered, even though I couldn't appreciate it at the time.

Ó Tuama: I think this poem works on a number of levels. On the one hand, it invites us to be curious and cautious about the things that cause us anger or shame, in relationship to the people who are closest to us, to think that that might be a button that's opening something in us, rather than something for which somebody else is to blame. It's also an invitation to imagine what it might be like to look back on a time of difficulty in your life, with the benefit of time. This poet is a number of years past this experience and still can't explain it, but is able to narrate himself with a kind of pastoral sensitivity, as well as narrate his dad. And time has its own work to do. And sometimes, explanation is not the final analysis. The final thing, perhaps, is being able to look on ourselves, and look on the other people in our lives, with kindness.

[ music: "Every Place We've Been" by Gautam Srikishan]

Ó Tuama: "The Word" by Zaffar Kunial:

"I couldn't tell you now what possessed me
to shut summer out and stay in my room.
Or at least attempt to. In bed mostly.
It's my dad, standing in the door frame
not entering - but pausing to shape advice
that keeps coming back. "Whatever is matter,

must enjoy the life." He pronounced this twice.
And me, I heard wrongness in putting a the

before life. In two minds. Ashamed. Aware.
That I knew better, though was stuck inside
while the sun was out. That I'm native here.
In a halfway house. Like that sticking word.
That definite article, half right, half
wrong, still present between enjoy and life."

[ music: "Praise The Rain" by Gautam Srikishan]

Lily Percy: "The Word" comes from Zaffar Kunial's book, Us. Thank you to Faber & Faber, and Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency who gave us permission to use Zaffar's poem. You can find a link to the poem in our show notes, along with Pádraig's guiding question for this episode.

Poetry Unbound is Chris Heagle, Erin Colasacco, Serri Graslie, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Christiane Wartell, Karen Navarre, Karyn Towey, Sue Ariza, and me, Lily Percy. Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. This podcast is produced by On Being Studios, which is located on Dakota land. We also produce other podcasts you might enjoy, like On Being with Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise, and This Movie Changed Me - find those wherever you like to listen or visit us at onbeing.org to find out more.

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Zaffar Kunial - The Word | The On Being Project

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Pádraig Ó Tuama, host: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and one of the things I love about poetry is that often, poetry isn't trying to describe your full life, if you're writing about yourself.

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(Good Reads Synopsis) High school senior Frank Li is a Limbo--his term for Korean-American kids who find themselves caught between their parents’ traditional expectations and their own Southern California upbringing. His parents have one rule when it comes to romance--“Date Korean”--which proves complicated when Frank falls for Brit Means, who is smart, beautiful--and white. Fellow Limbo Joy Song is in a similar predicament, and so they make a pact: they’ll pretend to date each other in order to gain their freedom. Frank thinks it’s the perfect plan, but in the end, Frank and Joy’s fake-dating maneuver leaves him wondering if he ever really understood love--or himself--at all.

10-12

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9-12 Ethan Smith

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Ethan Smith - A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be

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Amanda Gorman 7-10

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Mat Johnson

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Lives

Credit... Illustration by Melinda Josie

I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia, during the Black Power movement. I put my dashiki on one arm at a time like every other black boy, but I was haunted by the moments I'd be out with my mother and other black people would look at me as if I were a cuckoo egg accidentally dropped in their nest. The contrast between "blackness" and how I looked was so stark that I often found myself sifting through archaic, pre-20th-century African-American racial definitions to find a word that fit me. Mulatto, 50 percent African. Quadroon, 25 percent African. Octoroon, 12.5 percent African. The next stop down, at 6.25 percent African, was mustefino. I'd never heard anyone call himself mustefino, and I didn't want to personally relaunch that brand.

Some people wondered why, in a society that represses black people, I would even want to be black. But I never wanted to be black. I was black. What I wanted was to retain my connection to my heritage, my community, my family. To my mom. And I wanted proof. So last summer, after exhausting my attempt at amateur genealogy, I spit into a test tube for a DNA test. Only then did I realize, in a panic, that my life of racial ambiguity would soon be over.

My mother is light-skinned, which means she has continents besides Africa in her genetic makeup. In the '70s, she had an Afro, but to make it sit up like a ball and not sag into a bell, she would pull me with her on the trolley deep into West Philly to get a placenta treatment for it. The magic potion came sealed in a glass pod and had to be shattered open like an egg. It was a ritual reclamation of her blackness.

My father's Irish relatives made up the extended family I knew and adored. Connections to my mother's family were few. She had run away from her Illinois home on her 18th birthday to stay with her older sister in Philadelphia, both of them estranged from their abusive, alcoholic father. The worn gray picture of her grandfather that she held onto didn't make me think of Africa. It made me think of fjords.

When I was 6, my mom learned she had multiple sclerosis. While I struggled to figure out my identity, my mom's tether to her own began to fray. For a while she believed that her father wasn't her father, that her real father was a mysterious Puerto Rican. My aunt insisted that this was my mom's way of evading the truth, that their dad was a monster. My mom stuck with this story until I was 25, when she got a call from a distant relative. "My father's dead," she said as she hung up the phone, and she never questioned her paternity again.

My battle to prove my blackness ended in a truce in adulthood; I became "mixed." Or rather, like many with my background, I embraced a multiracial approach to identity. I even celebrate Loving Day, the day that commemorates the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling legalizing interracial marriage nationwide. My mixed identity isn't a rejection of my mother or of blackness - it's an integration of blackness with the rest of who I am. But still, mixed with what?

Twenty-six percent. The test came back 26 percent African. I'm not even sure how accurate those tests are, but as far as I was concerned, it was a Kwanzaa miracle. I wasn't a mustefino. (Who has even heard of a mustefino?) I surpassed octoroon status too; I was a quadroon with a percentage point to spare.

My mom now lives in a senior home near me in Houston, an apartment covered in African masks and old photos. Mentally, she has good days and bad days. On bad days, it feels as if she's disappearing right in front of me, but some ideas still stick in her head - like wanting to take a DNA test herself. So I spent the $108.95 to have hers done too. When the results finally came in, I drove over to her place to show them to her in person.

It was pretty straightforward: 55 percent African, 45 percent European. The only unexpected result: 3 percent of that European DNA might be "European Jewish." Who knew?

Afterward, we ran errands, as we do every Friday. Back at her building, I teased that I should start making sure her food was kosher. She looked at me as if she had no idea what I was talking about.

"I'm not Jewish," she said, annoyed.

"Mom, I told you, you're 3 percent Jewish," I said, just trying to mess with her. M.S. hasn't diminished her sense of humor, and I love being reminded of that. "And you're half white now!"

"I'm not half white!" she shot back at me. "I'm black!"

I noticed her lip quivering, her eyes tearing up. So I took her to lunch at Luby's, even though I hate that franchise. She loves it. No point in trying to change her mind.

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Lives I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia, during the Black Power movement.

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Natalie Diaz

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one percent of the population of America.
0.8 percent of 100 percent.
O, mine efficient country.

I do not remember the days
before America — I do not remember the days
when we were all here.

Police kill Native Americans more
than any other race. Race is a funny word.
Race implies someone will win,
implies I have as good a chance of winning as —

Who wins the race which isn't a race?

Native Americans make up 1.9 percent
of all police killings, higher than any race,
and we exist as .8 percent of all Americans.

Sometimes race means run.

We are not good at math.
Can you blame us?
We've had an American education.

We are Americans and we are less than 1 percent
of Americans. We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.

When we are dying, who should we call?
The police? Or our senator?
Please, someone, call my mother.

In Arithmetic and in America,
divisibility has rules —
divide without remainder.

At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the U.S.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.

I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.

But in this American city with all its people,
I am Native American — less than one, less than
whole — I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let's say, I am only a hand —

and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover
I disappear completely.

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Verse Daily: American Arithmetic by Natalie Diaz

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one percent of the population of America. 0.8 percent of 100 percent.O, mine efficient country. I do not remember the days before America - I do not remember the days when we were all here. Police kill Native Americans more than any other race. Race is a funny word.

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This episode of Code Switch features four BIPOC poets who first read and then discuss their poems around the theme of "being counted." My suggestion is to isolate one or two to take into your classroom.

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

subscribe to Code Switch podcast

We've spent the past year trying to analyze, dissect and intellectualize all the ways that our world has changed. But sometimes the best way to understand our circumstances isn't through data and reports - it's through art and poetry. So this week, we're hearing from some of the country's most critical observers: poets.

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Spit A Verse, Drop Some Knowledge : Code Switch

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We've spent the past year trying to analyze, dissect and intellectualize all the ways that our world has changed. But sometimes the best way to understand our circumstances isn't through data and reports - it's through art and poetry. So this week, we're hearing from some of the country's most critical observers: poets.

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8-12 Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam

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9-12 Richard Blanco

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Someday compassion would demand

I set myself free of my desire to recreate

my father, indulge in my mother's losses,

strangle lovers with words, forcing them

to confess for me and take the blame.

Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet

by sheet on the patio and gathered them

into a pyre. I wanted to let them go

in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding

beside the azaleas and ficus bushes,

let them crackle, burst like winged seeds,

let them smolder into gossamer embers-

a thousand gray butterflies in the wind.

Today was that day, but it rained, kept

raining. Instead of fire, water-drops

knocking on doors, wetting windows

into mirrors reflecting me in the oaks.

The garden walls and stones swelling

into ghostlier shades of themselves,

the wind chimes giggling in the storm,

a coffee cup left overflowing with rain.

Instead of burning, my pages turned

into water lilies floating over puddles,

then tiny white cliffs as the sun set,

finally drying all night under the moon

into papier-mâché souvenirs. Today

the rain would not let their lives burn.

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Burning in the Rain by Richard Blanco | Poetry Foundation

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Someday compassion would demand I set myself free of my desire to recreate my father, indulge in my mother's losses, strangle lovers with words, forcing them to confess for me and take the blame. Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet by sheet on the patio and gathered them into a pyre.

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Alexander Chee

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Alexander Chee's first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize, and was a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers' Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony. He was the Visiting Writer at Amherst College from 2006-2010 and the Picador Professor at The University of Leipzig in 2012.

More about the author →

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Portrait of My Father | Alexander Chee | Granta Magazine

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Alexander Chee's first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize, and was a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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9-12 Alexander Chee

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There is an exercise I have my students do, one I invented. Think of a story your family tells about you to any newcomer, usually from your early childhood. If you don't have one, think of a story your best friend tells to any new friend you introduce to them. Write it down.

Think of the memory you have of it. Is that memory in the third person?

It always is.

This memory, I say to them, is not a memory. It's a fiction you made, to have a relationship to something you don't remember but that is supposedly you.

That's your first fiction, I tell them. Everyone does it. I do this because sometimes my students have doubts about what it is we are doing there. What I try to explain is that we do what everyone does. We just take it a lot further, and we write it down.

***

The first story I ever invented for public consumption was in a book report back in grade school. I had made a vow to read every book in my grade school library, and at some point, as I made my way through them, I remember very clearly understanding that there was simply no way my teacher would know about every book ever published-this was before the Internet-and so I decided I would make one up and see if she noticed.

She did not.

This little counterfeit was, in a sense, my first story. It seems fitting to me, given how morally questionable it was, that I don't remember the invented story per se. But the victory was so thrilling, I would say it required more. I think of it now as the seed for all that came after. And it is why, if I was asked why I write fiction, I would say I write fiction because I have always enjoyed lying to people.

No one ever says that, I think. It seems if not implausible, at least offensive. I'm known for being a very truthful person, and I am. But if I am, it is because I learned to get out all my love for lying in fiction-to lie here, on the page.

For years after that book report, I was not a fiction writer. I was a child, and something of a liar in the way many are. You lie to test your power, I think. You also do it to make room for what is a secret in yourself that you are unsure about-you don't know if there is room for it yet. Or at least, that was why I did it then. I worked hard to be the good boy, who mostly got good grades and was never in trouble. Or mostly not in trouble. I used that ideal of myself as something of a shield whenever I did get caught. Hey, I am not a bad boy, right? This was a fluke. But to a large extent, reading got me into trouble, or taught me trouble, before it taught me how to get out of trouble.

I'm known for being a very truthful person, and I am. But if I am, it is because I learned to get out all my love for lying in fiction-to lie here, on the page.

I was so obsessed with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House novels, for example, I would read them in my lap below my desk in the 5th grade, certain I looked like I was looking at my notebook. My teacher in that grade had a temper, and threw chalkboard erasers at you if you weren't paying attention. One came at me, and I simply raised the book, deflecting it, causing the class to burst into laughter as a chalk dust cloud rose around me.

The teacher also laughed but clearly resented me more than ever.

I was in the grip of a spell by then, a spell cast by fiction. I taught myself to walk and read so I wouldn't miss out. I stayed up late with lights hidden under my covers, I would hide in the closet with a flashlight so I wouldn't be found. I was busy, following a rope through a blizzard outside of a settler's house, or walking Mars, or sledding my way out of Nazi-occupied Norway, flying on the backs of dragons, following the magical light of a glowing orb through dangerous caves and tunnels.

I found my love for telling stories through Dungeons and Dragons, though. I was a Dungeon Master early, at age 13. There I developed a love for people hanging on my every word, being surprised with either good news or bad news. Yes, dice rolls determined outcomes, but narration made it interesting, and there are few lessons in narrative-and the way ability and chance meet each other-quite like the way a sheet of character attributes and a dice roll meet up inside of a story.

In high school I tried my hand at being a columnist-I was a suburban Michael Musto, up in southern Maine, telling my classmates to burn their parachute pants in a column called "What's New" that was about fashion trends at the high school. I quickly developed enemies among my fellow students and fans among my teachers. It was around this time everyone began to say to me, "You should be a writer."

And I would go off to college and try, after first trying for a few years to not be a writer-to be a visual artist instead. But then I was barred from the art major by a studio art professor who didn't want me in the major, and after a summer spent feeling like I was up against the wall-that wall that allows you no other choice in life-the way forward appeared when a friend from school called up and asked if he could borrow my typewriter. He needed to type up a story for a fiction writing class he was applying to.

Sure, I said.

Before he arrived, I sat down, composed a story at the typewriter, and after he left, put it in the mail to apply for the class also. That first story, I remember: a young man is haunted by a bicycle accident that has taken the use of his legs, and he dreams of it again and again. He's visited by a priest who is afraid he'll lose his faith, and he ultimately rejects the priest's efforts.

I got into the class-Phyllis Rose's class at Wesleyan.

My efforts at art the years previous were not in vain. In the drawing class that had ultimately barred me from the major there was an exercise we did, where we had to combine three of our figure drawings into a single landscape to create an original, imagined composition. Mine was okay but I was better at life drawing. But that is essentially what I did to make my story-I had spent the summer relentlessly cycling. I was still grieving my father, who had died four years earlier from complications after a car accident that had left him paralyzed down the left side of his body, and dreaming constantly, at night, of the accident. A priest really had visited me to speak to me about my faith after my father died, more or less turning me against organized Christianity forever. Somehow, as I sat and typed, I had done this without really questioning what I was doing, turning it all into something about someone like me but not me, in situations I knew, all from something like direct experience. I had often watched my father sleep, lost in his nightmares, wishing I could help him the way I once had when he was in a coma in the first months after his accident. The doctors had told us to read to him and speak to him. "He can follow your voice back to consciousness," they said. But waking him from his nightmare wasn't going to help him-with his brain damage, it would only have needlessly frightened him. And I suspect, even in the nightmare, at least in the first part of it, he had a memory of himself before his trauma that was perhaps the slightest consolation, though I'll never know.

I felt obscurely better though after writing the story. Imagination and empathy as well as intentional invention-also catharsis. That's what fiction is, or, if it is not, those are the walls to what is inside it.

***
In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty's Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser Intimates were unhappier still. The way she waited on him day after day only stirred up feeling against her, and perhaps this growing burden of resentment was what affected her health and obliged her often to withdraw in misery to her home, but his Majesty, who could less and less do without her, ignored his critics until his behavior seemed bound to be the talk of all.
-Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

As I thought about why we write fiction, I became curious. What was the first novel? And why-what would make you make something that had never existed before? The world's first novel is thought to be The Tale of Genji, written in 11th Century Japan by a woman known to us only as Murasaki Shikibu. The short biography of her that accompanies the novel's Modern Penguin edition translation says, "After the death of her husband, she cloistered herself to study Buddhism, raise her daughter, and write the world's first novel, Genji Monogatari, the tale of the shining Prince Genji."

What do we know of this woman who wrote the first novel? We know her only as Murasaki Shikibu, Shikibu translating as "Bureau of the Ceremonial," and Murasaki, the name of a plant, the source of purple dye. This name she gave to her heroine. She was recently widowed and had been married only two years when her husband died. She was a talented poet and kept diaries also. And from her diaries we know she was a woman who taught herself Chinese by listening outside the door as her father taught her brother. She was married long enough to have borne a child, a daughter who would go on to become a great poet. If she had not written the first novel, and at such length, I might even be tempted to write a novel about her.

The Tale of Genji, at six volumes, is a behemoth. Beyond its enduring value as a novel-the prose is still as alive as ever-it also offers some of the closest observation historians have to this day of court life during this era. The power of fiction as a social document remains that it provides contexts historians might not otherwise have access to. Context may seem abstract or flimsy, but it remains the way we are able to understand what is of value and what is not in our culture or any other. And this is also said of the West's first modern novel, La Princesse de Clèves, published in 1678, by Madame de Lafayette in France.

But that is not of course why Shikibu wrote Genji -she did not think, 'Years from now, perhaps historians will value this.' Why do it? Why do something no one has ever done before?

The Tale of Genji's first line, that brief parenthetical-( whose can it have been?)-charms. A sly wink as the author proceeds into her novel of court jealousies and intrigues. Whose reign can it have been? Yes, who indeed? It is a shield thrown up against consequences, the consequences one imagines she knew might result from what she wrote. We can only wonder what she hoped for, as she wrote it.

Royall Tyler, the British poet and translator to the Penguin edition, described the legend surrounding the writing of it in an essay for Harvard Magazine: "A book-length, fourteenth-century commentary on the tale relates that a certain princess once asked the empress whether she had any new stories. Having none to offer, the empress asked Murasaki Shikibu to write one. The lady therefore went on pilgrimage to Ishiyama-dera, a temple near the southern end of Lake Biwa, a day's journey by ox carriage east of Kyoto, in search of inspiration. According to legend, Murasaki had been close since childhood to a gifted courtier unjustly exiled to Kyushu. That night at the temple, the full moon of the eighth lunar month shone up from the lake's waters, and while she lost herself in its beauty a vision of the tale rose before her. She saw her hero, Genji, languishing in unjust exile on the shore of a moonlit sea, and the image was so compelling that, lest she forget it, she immediately wrote down what became chapters 11 and 12. After that, the legend says, she simply added the others until she had 54 in all."

Novelists are people who, in my experience, hang on, well past when others would keep hanging on.

I find myself equal parts credulous and skeptical, reading this. That the first pages became chapters 11 and 12 is part of what convinces me this could be true-I know from experience that the first chapter you write is not necessarily the first chapter of the final version of the novel. What rings false is the part about the childhood friend. If true, though, she meant to dramatize the injustice done to him without also naming him.

Novelists are people who, in my experience, hang on, well past when others would keep hanging on. A dogged pursuit of sentences and story usually indicates other tenacities. I can admire a six volume pursuit of justice for a childhood friend. But if I did write a novel about her, I would probably have her tell someone this, to cover the role her grief might have played. In my imagination, she loved her husband, and he loved her, and it is easier to imagine the poet summoned back from her mourning to write a story for the court, writing Genji as a way to spend time with the man she'd lost, away from the court intrigues around her, which would be perhaps unendurable for a new widow. I could imagine the novel as something like a grave for him, and a monument to her love of him. But then I am probably more of a romantic than she was. What I do know, from remembering my own first short story, is that what I did helped me grieve-that afterward, I felt like I knew myself better and my father also. I experienced this as a gift-I didn't expect it to happen-a gift that came out of what I was driven to do. I wonder if she did too. If that happens to us all-if that is even why we do it. A way of learning who we are by inventing the lives of others.

I also know that novelists are lightning rods, too-and that our ideas find us this way, sometimes, coming to us, all in a single vision, without explanation. Moonstruck but all of it falling on a page.

If this hasn't yet happened to you, just wait.

***

My first novel was something I discovered I was writing, catching myself in the act.

For years friends would say of my stories, "These feel like they want to be novels," and this was frustrating, as if I were some sort of neglectful father who wasn't listening to them closely enough.

This could also be true.

In the summer of 1994, under the guidance of such comments, I tried to assemble most of my MFA thesis into a single novel. The result, The Descendants of a Movie-Going Republic, was the attempt to tell the stories of two AIDS activist couples, on the East and West coast, during the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A section I sent to a friend at The New Yorker was not quite enough to get me published there but she was impressed enough to pass it along to a friend of hers at William Morrow, and that in turn got me an agent. William Morrow passed on the novel, deciding it would be too massive-600 pages or more-and the agent said, "Write it and it will be as long as it is."

I went home and sat down with my pages, and frustrated, I turned to unpacking-I had just moved to New York from Iowa-and discovered a folder of work I had created in Iowa, partials all, but that felt somehow related to one another. "When we get to New York, tell me what you are," I had said over the folder as I'd packed up. Here we were.

We're a novel, was that eventual reply.

As I read through the sections again I could feel what was missing, a shadowy sense of what else was there. It was as if they were made by a visitor who had hidden them variously in front of me as a prose poem, a partial draft of an essay, and sections from an earlier abandoned novel, written before graduate school. And now I knew what they were.

I called the agent. "I'm not going to write that other book," I said. "I've decided I'm going to write a loosely autobiographical first novel just like everyone else." I said it like I'd chosen it, but it had come for me.

Six years later, in 2000, when I had finished that novel, Edinburgh, what I had was a story based on my own experiences, invented to fit the shape of what I knew was true about something I had seen firsthand. They were figures from different landscapes combined into a fictional tableau, much like that first short story. The plot was that of a contemporary Greek tragedy, structured according to Aristotle's rules for tragedy in the Poetics, and together it reinvents a myth about the Japanese fox demon.

Why fiction? Maybe the question is the problem. Why do we ask the question? What I know: I make it up but it feels like truth.

My second novel, The Queen of the Night, was no fugitive. It woke me up instead, a few days after sending the first one. A woman's voice, speaking to me as I lay partly asleep in bed. I got up, put coffee on and threw my computer open, and began writing what she said to me.

Why fiction? Maybe the question is the problem. Why do we ask the question? What I know: I make it up but it feels like truth. I don't feel like it belongs to me and yet I know it does. Novels come for you in the dark or the light, in the sea by moonlight, or in your half-unpacked apartment. They may or may not involve grief, love, or the pursuit of justice. They are to me more like visitors, and the sentences of the novel are something built to speak with them. And we do this because to not do it feels like death.

People often say a favorite novel haunts them-I've always found that sweet but maybe inexact, a way of saying something else. Are novels like ghosts afterward? Or are they like those invented memories? That word, "haunt," seems a way to say you don't forget them. The novels I love stay with me. The novels you love leave something with you that becomes a part of you, like a memory but not a memory, and a way to know the world and yourself at the same time. Let me tell you what I know in a way like no other, Murasaki Shikibu might have said, as she invented the novel. Let me show you yourself and others in a way you won't ever forget.

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There is an exercise I have my students do, one I invented. Think of a story your family tells about you to any newcomer, usually from your early childhood. If you don't have one, think of a story your best friend tells to any new friend you introduce to them.

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9-12

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Shonda Rhimes on Ruling the World Through TV (and Other Reasons We Love Her)

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Shonda Rhimes will be back on ABC next season with her hit shows 'Grey's Anatomy' and 'Scandal' as well as a new one, called 'How to Get Away with Murder,' starring the lauded actress Viola Davis.

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America Ferrera

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America Ferrera: My identity is a superpower -- not an obstacle

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Hollywood needs to stop resisting what the world actually looks like, says actor, director and activist America Ferrera. Tracing the contours of her career, she calls for more authentic representation of different cultures in media -- and a shift in how we tell our stories. "Presence creates possibility," she says.

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9-12 Elizabeth Acevedo

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The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 (Graphic Novel)

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The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 (Graphic Novel)

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7-10 Shing Yin Khor

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10-12 Brit Bennett

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9-12 Erika L. Sanchez

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7-12

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Bookish S01E04 | Kwame Alexander & Jason Reynolds

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7-12 Sam Berns, TEDx Talk

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My philosophy for a happy life | Sam Berns | TEDxMidAtlantic

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9-12 Rowan Ricardo Phillips

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"Purple Elegy": A Poem for Prince, by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

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Sonia Sanchez

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(after the spanish) forgive me if i laugh you are so sure of love you are so young and i too old to learn of love. the rain exploding in the air is love the grass excreting her green wax is love and stones remembering past steps is love, but you.

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8-12 Sonia Sanchez

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For President Václav Havel

It is essential that Summer be grafted to
bones marrow earth clouds blood the
eyes of our ancestors.
It is essential to smell the beginning
words where Washington, Madison, Hamilton,
Adams, Jefferson assembled amid cries of:

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This Is Not a Small Voice - This is not a small voice

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7-12 Rudy Francisco

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Rudy Francisco - "Things I Strongly Believe" (Button Live)

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7-12 Lizzie Velasquez

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I'm really, really, really excited to be here. I kind of want to tell you a little bit more of the - I don't want to say basics - because we really don't know anything about my syndrome. I was born with this very rare syndrome, that only two other people in the world including myself, that we know of, have. Basically what this syndrome causes, is that I cannot gain weight. Yes, it does sound as good as it is. (Laughter) I could eat absolutely whatever I want, whenever I want and I won't really gain any weight. I'm going to be 25 in March, and I've never weighed over about 64 pounds in my entire life. When I was in college, I hid - well, I didn't 'hide' it, everyone knew it was there - but it was a giant tub of Twinkies, donuts, chips, Skittles, and my roommate would say, "I could hear you at 12:30 am, reaching under your bed to get food." But I'm like, "You know what? It's alright, I can do these things!" Because there are benefits to this syndrome. There are benefits to not being able to gain weight. There are benefits to being visually impaired. There are benefits to being kind of really small. A lot of people think, "Lizzie, how in the world are you saying there are benefits when you can only see out of one eye?" Well, let me tell you what the benefits are because they are great. I wear contacts-conTACT. Half-off conTACTS. (Laughter) When I wear my reading glasses: half-off prescription. If somebody is annoying me, being rude: Stand on my right side. (Laughter) It's like you're not even there. I don't even know you're standing there. Right now, if I stand like this, I have no clue that there's this whole side of the room. Also, being small, I am very willing to volunteer myself to go to Weight Watchers or to some gym, and say, "Hi, I'm Lizzie. I will be your poster child. Put my face on whatever you need, and I will say, 'Hi! I used this program. Look how well it worked.'" (Laughter) Even though there are amazing things that have come from this syndrome, there are also things that have been very, very difficult, as you can imagine. Growing up, I was raised 150% normally. I was my parents' first child. And when I was born, the doctors told my mom, "Your daughter has no amniotic fluid around her. At all." So when I was born, it was a miracle that I came out screaming. The doctors told my parents, "We just want to warn you: Expect your daughter to never be able to talk, walk, crawl, think, or do anything by herself." Now, as first-time parents, you would think that my parents would say, "Oh no. Why? Why are we getting our first child with all these unknown problems?" But that's not what they did. The first thing they told the doctor was, "We want to see her, and we are going to take her home and love her, and raise her to the best of our abilities." And that's what they did. I credit pretty much everything that I've done in my life to my parents. My dad is here with me today, and my mom is at home watching. Hi mom! (Laughter) She's recovering from surgery. She has been the glue that's held our family together, and she's given me the strength to see that she's going through so much, but she has this fighting spirit that she's instilled in me, so that I have proudly been able to stand in front of people and say, "You know what? I've had a really difficult life. But that's okay." That's okay. Things have been scary, things have been tough. One of the biggest things that I had to deal with growing up was something I'm pretty sure every single one of us in this room has dealt with before. Can you guess what that is? It starts with a 'B'. Can you guys guess it? Audience: Boys! Lizzie: Boys? (Laughter) Bullying! (Laughter) I know what you all are thinking. (Laughter) Why can't I sit here with them? (Laughter) I had to deal with bullying a lot, but as I said, I was raised very normally, so when I started kindergarten, I had absolutely no idea that I looked different. No clue. I couldn't see that I looked different from other kids. I think of it as a big slap of reality for a five year-old, because I went in to school the first day, decked-out in Pocahontas gear. I was ready! (Laughter) I went in with my backpack that looked like a turtle shell because it was bigger than me, and I walked up to a little girl and smiled at her, and she looked up at me like I was a monster, like I was the scariest thing she had ever seen in her life. My first reaction was, "She is really rude. (Laughter) I am a fun kid, and she's the one missing out. So I'll just go over here and play with blocks. Or boys." (Laughter) (Lizzie laughs) I thought the day would get better, and unfortunately, it didn't. The day got worse and worse. A lot of people just wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with me, and I couldn't understand why. Why? What did I do? I didn't do anything to them! In my mind I was still a really cool kid. I had to go home and ask my parents, "What's wrong with me? What did I do? Why don't they like me?" They sat me down and said, "Lizzie, the only thing different about you is that you're smaller than the other kids. You have this syndrome, but it's not going to define who you are." They said, "Go to school, pick your head up, smile, continue to be yourself, and people will see that you're just like them." And so that's what I did. I want you to think, and ask yourself this in your head, right now: What defines you? Who are you? Is it where you come from? Is it your background? Is it your friends? What is it? What defines who you are as a person? It's taken me a very long time to figure out what defines me. For so long I thought what defined me was my outer appearance. I thought that my little tiny legs, and my little arms, and my little face were ugly. I thought I was disgusting. I hated when I'd wake up in the morning when I was going to middle school, and would be looking in the mirror getting ready, and thinking, "Can I just scrub this syndrome off? It would make my life so much easier if I could just scrub it off. I could look like other kids; I wouldn't have to buy clothes that had Dora the Explorer on them. I wouldn't have to buy stuff that was 'Bedazzled', when I was trying to be like the cool kids." I would wish, and pray, and hope, and do whatever I could so I would wake up in the morning and be different, and I wouldn't have to deal with these struggles. It's what I wanted every single day, and every single day I was disappointed. I have an amazing support system around me, who never pity me, who are there to pick me up if I'm sad, who are there to laugh with me during the good times, and they taught me that, even though I have this syndrome, even though things are hard, I can't let that define me. My life was put into my hands, just like your lives are put into yours. You are the person in the front seat of your car. You are the one who decides whether your car goes down a bad path, or a good path. You are the one who decides what defines you. Now let me tell you: it could be really hard to figure out what defines you, because there were times when I'd get so annoyed and frustrated, and say: "I don't care what defines me!" When I was in high school I found a video, unfortunately, that somebody posted of me, labeling me the world's ugliest woman. There were over four million views to this video; eight seconds long, no sound, thousands of comments; people saying, "Lizzie, please - please - just do the world a favor, put a gun to your head, and kill yourself." Think about that, if people told you that, if strangers told you this. I cried my eyes out of course, and I was ready to fight back and something kind of clicked in my head, and I thought, "I'm just going to leave it alone." I started realizing that my life is in my hands. I could either choose to make this really good, or I could choose to make this really bad. I could be grateful, and open my eyes and realize the things that I do have, and make those the things that define me. I can't see out of one eye, but I can see out of the other. I might get sick a lot, but I have really nice hair. (Laughter) (Audience) You do, you do! Thanks. You guys are like the best little section right here. (Laughter) (Lizzie laughs) You made me lose my train of thought! (Laughter) Okay... where was I? Audience: Your hair! Hair! Hair. Ok, ok, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So I could either choose to be happy or I could choose to be upset with what I have and still kind of complain about it, but then I started realizing: Am I going to let the people who called me a monster define me? Am I going to let the people who said, "Kill it with fire!" define me? No; I'm going to let my goals, and my success, and my accomplishments be the things that define me - Not my outer appearance, not the fact that I'm visually impaired, not the fact that I have this syndrome that nobody knows what it is. So I told myself I'm going to work my butt off and do whatever I could to make myself better, because in my mind, the best way that I could get back at all those people who made fun of me, who teased me, who called me ugly, who called me a monster was to make myself better, and to show them: You know what? Tell me those negative things, I'm going to turn them around, and I'm going to use them as a ladder to climb up to my goals. That's what I did. I told myself that I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I wanted to write a book, graduate college, have my own family, and have my own career. Eight years later, I'm standing in front of you, still doing motivational speaking. First thing, I accomplished it. I wanted to write a book; in a couple of weeks I will be submitting the manuscript for my third book. (Applause) I wanted to graduate college, and I just finished college. (Cheers and applause) I'm getting a degree in Communication Studies from Texas State University in San Marcos, and I have a minor in English. I really, really tried to use real-life experience while I was getting my degree, and my professors were not having it. I wanted to have, lastly, my own family and my own career. The family part is kind of down the line, and my career part, I feel like I'm really doing well with it, considering the fact that when I decided I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I went home, I sat in front of my laptop, went to Google, and typed in: "How to be a motivational speaker." (Laughter) I'm not even joking. I worked my butt off. I used the people who were telling me that I couldn't do this to motivate me. I used their negativity to light my fire to keep going. Use that. Use that. Use that negativity that you have in your life to make yourself better, because I guarantee you - guarantee you - You will win. Now I want to end, with asking you again. I want you to leave here, and ask yourself what defines you. But remember: Brave starts here. Thank you. (Applause)

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Transcript of "How do you define yourself?"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Born with a rare disorder that prevents her from gaining weight, Lizzie Velasquez has faced more negativity and bullying than most. Over time, she's developed a simple but effective coping mechanism. "Tell me those negative things," she says.

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9-12 Maysoon Zayid

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“I have cerebral palsy. I shake all the time,” Maysoon Zayid announces at the beginning of this exhilarating, hilarious talk. (Really, it’s hilarious.) “I’m like Shakira meets Muhammad Ali.” With grace and wit, the Arab-American comedian takes us on a whistle-stop tour of her adventures as an actress, stand-up comic, philanthropist and advocate for the disabled.

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Rowan Ricardo Phillips

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This past Sunday night, as the particular perfume of Thanksgiving faded from our house, I nibbled on Chinese food while watching the New York Knicks lose to the Houston Rockets. It was a game they had no business losing, even if they were without their best player, Carmelo Anthony, against a Rockets team that last season fell just two wins short of the NBA Finals. In theory, the Rockets are one of the strongest teams in the league this season; in practice, they've settled into an unsightly mediocrity that strangely seems to suit them. You might just as easily say that the Knicks lost a game that the Rockets had no business winning.

Up by fourteen points in the fourth quarter, the Knicks, with their subs on the floor, squandered their lead in the blink of an eye, giving up a game-tying three-pointer in the dying seconds. They proceeded to lose in overtime, allowing sixteen points in extra frame-a feat that, if you're actively attempting to prevent the other team from scoring, is difficult to accomplish.

It felt all too familiar.

The Knicks won seventeen games last season, a record low for the franchise. For the majority of this century they've been a rudderless mess. But this season has been different: the Knicks had, until recently, won more games than they'd lost, while playing one of the league's toughest schedules, at that. They've beaten some good teams, and even in their losses have played a competitive, resilient, purposeful game, as if they were working toward a later benefit.

Nevertheless, something bothered me about Sunday's loss. Houston, for all their good players, is a team as close to death-in-life as you'll find in the NBA today. Their head coach, the legendary Kevin McHale, was recently fired, even though, on the heels of last season's success, the management had just rewarded him with a multiyear contract this summer. They also traded for a player who faces multiple DWI charges and had the temerity to name him a starter until a terrible play buried him on the bench. James Harden, the star of the team, plays like he's Super Mario, bumping into anything near him in search of points; the other Rockets players have the stilted body language of Scooby-Doo villains. Even their seven wins have the whiff of accidents to them: none of them have been by more than six points. The night after their overtime win in Madison Square Garden-a win the interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff referred to after the game as "a lesson in perseverance" before praising his team's "mental toughness and fortitude"-Houston played in Detroit and was down 28 to 52 before you could say Luigi. They ended up making the final score respectable, but there was no rousing comeback this time. The Rockets' record sank to 7-11 and the Pistons' improved to 9-9, the waterline of respectability for teams trying to learn to win: .500, the hope barrier. The Knicks were on the good side of that barrier but a week ago; now they sit at 8-10. They and the Rockets have both become teams acquainted with losing, resigned to it, seeking even to perfect it. In a matter of months, a team can go from powerful to pathetic. Why is this so?

*

As Sunday's game got away from the Knicks, I sat on my floor, still and stoic, my arms folded, my gaze straight ahead as the ice melted in my spiked eggnog. Bad memories welled up inside me. The ghosts of Knicks past began to dance in front of the screen and rattle their chains. Suddenly, there was nothing to give thanks for. If the Knicks can't handle their business even when they have a late and luxurious lead, what does that say about them?

A poem by Elizabeth Bishop called " One Art" came to mind. "The art of losing isn't hard to master," it begins, and right before the final word, disaster, Bishop gives herself a command in parenthesis: "( write it)." Instead, I found myself saying to myself: ( don't write it). Don't write about this. This isn't a disaster. The Knicks tried to win, they played hard, they suffered from some unlucky bounces, they played against good players who figured the game out. The Knicks are no longer terrible. They're trying to learn how to win.

Fine. But how does a team learn how to win? Is it the same as learning how not to lose? And is it possible to turn losing, as Bishop claimed, into an art itself? If it is an art, then it's all too easy to master: something like what Milton, in Paradise Lost, called "not nice Art," all artifice and flimsy deceit.

After the loss, the press interviewed Kristaps Porziņģis, the Knicks' prized rookie from Latvia by way of Spain. He'd just eased his way into a twenty-point, fourteen-rebound performance with seemingly no heavy lifting involved, no sublimity or wonder. In the matter of a few weeks, his production has been gripped by a frightening normalcy; he's made the spectacular look as ordinary as Helvetica. (Remember when Ice Cube talked about messing around and getting a triple-double in " It Was a Good Day"? Porziņģis is like that.) But tonight he'd been on the receiving end of a devastating two-handed dunk by Dwight Howard, off an alley-oop. When Howard slipped his screen and rolled to the basket, the outcome of the play was clear to anyone who watches the game: the clear lane, the space, Howard accelerating to the basket in a slight crouch that signifies imminent liftoff. When you see a dunk coming, the tried-and-true reaction is to avoid it-no one likes being on that side of the highlights reel-but Porziņģis came from the weak side of the court anyway, and the rest, as Howard said in his own words, is history.

Porziņģis took responsibility for the mistake-a welcome change of pace for the Knicks. People seem to assume the team needs a big free-agent signing to change their fortunes, but the Knicks have never signed the biggest free agent on the market. Ever. Their best players have come from the draft, as Porziņģis did, or from smart trades, as Earl Monroe did. And their best teams have been resilient: they've bonded with New York, they've shown an abundance of chutzpah. If the Knicks failed to display much in the way of street smarts on Sunday, the simple act of assuming responsibility for it-and then thinking out loud about payback, as Porziņģis went on to do-may be a sign of promise, even if it's pyrrhic in the short term. The long game is the only game.

The only problem is, Porzingis will have to wait a long time for his revenge. The Knicks don't play Houston again this season. When they do face each other, in the murky future of the 2016-2017 season, who knows where their fortunes will stand? For now, the undefeated Golden State Warriors rule the roost, and neither the Knicks nor the Rockets can claim to have mastered the art of losing: that honor goes to the Philadelphia 76ers, who have one win right now. At this point in the season, we're beginning to see teams take a good look at themselves in the mirror. Some lament the loss of their past selves, but the best are squinting deeper, past the blemishes, in search of some sign of the future.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the Daily 's basketball columnist. His second book of poems, Heaven, was published earlier this year. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award, and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

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The Art of Losing: Rowan Ricardo Phillips on the NY Knicks

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Elizabeth Bishop would have some words for the New York Knicks. This past Sunday night, as the particular perfume of Thanksgiving faded from our house, I nibbled on Chinese food while watching the New York Knicks lose to the Houston Rockets. It was a game they had no business losing, even if they were without ...

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Celest Ng

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Excerpt from Little Fires Everywhere | Penguin Random House Canada

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The blockbuster, critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, now in paperback.

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Ashley Bristowe

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Excerpt from My Own Blood | Penguin Random House Canada

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Mothering under normal circumstances takes all you have to give. But what happens when your child is disabled, and sacrificing all you've got and more is the only hope for a decent future? Full of rage and resilience, duty and love, Ashley Bristowe delivers a mother's voice like no other we've heard.

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9-12 Kaveh Akbar

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Aria Aber

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The aunts here clink Malbec glasses
and parade their grief with musky, expensive scents
that whisper in elevators and hallways.
Each natural passing articulates
the unnatural: every aunt has a son
who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble
for two years, until that knock of officers
holding a bin bag filled with a dress
and bones. But what do I know?
I get pedicures and eat madeleines
while reading "Swann's Way." When I tell
one aunt I'd like to go back,
she screams It is not yours to want.
Have some cream cheese with that, says another.
Oh, what wonder to be alive and see
my father's footprints in his sister's garden.
He's furiously scissoring the hyacinths,
saying All the time when the tele-researcher asks him
How often do you think your life
is a mistake? During the procession, the aunts' wails
vibrate: wires full of crows in heavy wind.
I hate every plumed minute of it. God invented
everything out of nothing, but the nothing
shines through, said Paul Valéry. Paris never charmed me,
but when some stranger asks
if it stinks in Afghanistan, I am so shocked
that I hug him. And he lets me,
his ankles briefly brushing against mine.

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The aunts here clink Malbec glassesand parade their grief with musky, expensive scentsthat whisper in elevators and hallways.Each natural passing articulatesthe unnatural: every aunt has a sonwho fell, or a daughter who hid in rubblefor two years, until that knock of officersholding a bin bag filled with a dressand bones.

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Sway them in Color (Podcast)

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We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy.

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Listen to this episode from Sway Them in Color on Spotify. When you're raised as the only Black family for miles, in a place like Ogden Utah that has very little racial diversity, as a Black person, you get used to being ignored.

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Curiosity, Messing Up, and Approaching Diversity and Inclusion

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Curiosity, Messing Up, and Approaching Diversity and Inclusion

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Sway Them in Color (esp 16:43-24)

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Labels make life simple but they provide so many stumbling blocks to truly understanding and connecting with one another. Anyone who leads has big ol' blind spots when it comes to relating to people, groups, and experiences not like their own, and my guest Rebekah "Bex" Boruki and I dive into the many ups and downs of diversity and inclusion, including:

+ why admitting your mistakes and collaborating with people who can speak to what you don't know makes you a more powerful leader + how to build empathy and connection when people mess up + why learning about the lives and needs of people not like yourself isn't only imperative but a necessity for thriving

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Curiosity, Messing up, and Approaching Diversity and Inclusion as a Leader

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Listen to this episode from Sway Them in Color on Spotify. Labels make life simple but they provide so many stumbling blocks to truly understanding and connecting with one another.

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10-12 for brief language.