Verse chronicle December 2010
On I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston; Walking Papers: Poems 1999-2009, by Thomas Lynch; The Sun-Fish, by Eliéan Ní Chuilleanáin; Toxic Flora by Kimiko Hahn; Maggot by Paul Muldoon; and Heavenly Questions by Gjertrud Shcnackenberg.
Since The Prelude, the poem-memoir has been surprisingly rare, especially in a day when lives are scarcely lived before they’re committed to Facebook or laid open like fresh corpses in blogs. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, Maxine Hong Kingston’s breezy and peculiar new memoir, is cast in verse, which to a prose writer must seem a wonderful idea.[1] Writing verse is so easy, after all—why, it just spills down the page like Jackson Pollock’s dribbles. You break the lines wherever you like—never too long, never too short—and soon a humble-jumble work briefer than The Great Gatsby is splashed across two hundred pages or more.
I am turning 65 years of age.
In 2 weeks I will be 65 years old.
I can accumulate time and lose
time? I...
