Naomi Campbel By Hugo Comte For Interview Magazine - April 2021

Naomi Shihab Nye, from Fuel: Poems; “Darling”

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, “Not As Smart As I Think I Am”

Submitted by a-sea-of-memories.

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

‘Flowering Trees of the Orient’ (1921).

Garden catalogue from A. E Wohlert, the Garden Nurseries.

 U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library.

archive.org

Matthew Dickman, from “Montpelier” [ID in ALT]

Cherry Harvest

“As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

— From the essay ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ in Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

“I whet my lips to speak your name. To kiss your hands, curling into the posture of prayer, they could almost have been carved from stone. I swear: If idolatry was my only sin, then it’s because god wasn’t watching.”

— Torrin A. Greathouse, from “Ekphrasis on Nude Selfie as Portrait of San Sebastian,” Poetry (vol. 221, no. 2, November 2022)