PEN American Center
It was about 8PM, already dark. As we greeted a man and his mother in a narrow, unlit street of the camp, soldiers on rooftops swooped down on us. I was questioned there and then two Palestinians and I were taken to a holding cell in Bethlehem near...Read More »
Joy Harjo will be participating in Speaking in Languages on the Edge and Read More »
Clearly authoritarian states are afraid of even small, solo voices. Less mucked-up states with grandiose images of themselves are afraid of truth-speakers as well. But they can just paper over the dissenters with very clever advertising and most...Read More »
I hope that what we are working for, when we work for freedom of expression, is the right of writers and editors to be irresponsible in language without threat or actuality of punishment. By irresponsible, I don’t mean free to incite violence or...Read More »
Self-obsession is an inevitable by-product of capitalism. And capitalism has become—mistakenly, I think—inextricably tangled up with most folks’ sense of what “the American way” is (but it’s hard not to feel free when you’ve got money in your pocket...Read More »
On December 11th members of PEN American met in the Center’s offices to send messages of solidarity and support to imprisoned writers and their families around the world. Does this matter?Read More »
I sometimes wonder what critics would say if they couldn’t mention race until the second paragraph. It’s a shame, because the book is really about so many other things. You almost never read in the first paragraph of a review, “This is a book about...Read More »
The village where I spent my childhood summers, away from the city and school, is the landscape that has become my tabula rasa, the primary point of any departure. If I were to strip myself off everything, one onion layer after another, what’s going...Read More »
Some of my poems start as songs (dummkopf simple songs, I wish I would write a bridge). When the words curve around the music, there’s a path that swerves the words but is also flexible, adulterable itself (the music can change and adapt). Read More »
Eros, or eroticism, functions in my poetry as rhythm. Poetic thinking, as opposed to transactional thinking, is quite fast because it is associative—there is no formula on which the mind can rely. So, once the poem is born in my brain it has to be...Read More »