Poem of the Week | March 10, 2014
M. Soledad Caballero: "Losing Spanish"
This week we’re delighted to feature a new poem by M. Soledad Caballero. Caballero is an associate professor of English at Allegheny College. Her scholarly work focuses on travel narratives, Gothic Literature, and British Romanticism. She was a finalist for the Editor’s Prize in Poetry for The Missouri Review in 2013. Thanks to her time at Grub Street in Boston, MA a few years ago and the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, she has found avenues to continue writing poetry.
Author’s note:
For this poem I wanted to think about the juxtapositions of images, the starkness of the oil pumps, the white snow on flat plains in Oklahoma and the peace of a young girl who fits and does not fit in that landscape and then the haunted history in another landscape with snow and violence amidst the natural but also urban cityscapes. I had been writing about birds, birds of paradise, but all the images I worked at and kept working at were flat, empty. I kept falling short of capturing the strange, miraculous thing that is a bird of paradise. And then I realized that this image worked as a metaphor for a young girl in the snow. To me this is a poem that is simultaneously about dislocation, suffering, and joy. It is a poem about trying to make memories out of broken history. The poems I am writing right now are about being haunted by history, a political history that is not quite mine but is also part of being an immigrant so I claim it as mine. I am drawn to the idea of collective memory in a family, in a culture, even if it is a brutal one.
Losing Spanish
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