"I reject my impulse to work fast..." ~ Kathryn Hargett-Hsu | Poet of the Week 6.9.24
7 poems & an interview with Senior Poetry Fellow at Washington University
Kathryn Hargett-Hsu is the author of Good Listener (2024), winner of the Frontier Poetry Breakthrough Chapbook Contest. She is Senior Poetry Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Find her in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Pleiades, The Hopkins Review, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, The Margins, and elsewhere.
Symphony of a Restless Night
after Fernando Pessoa Time crinkled like a brown bag given to the hyperventilating. Yet still the night was blue, its skein unruptured, no hand had come to drag me into what prophesy I’d spun from the window. Like anyone my mouth wants to be gentle. Still my lover told the dispatcher She’s screaming in agony. The paramedic said I’d sleep it off, spin together by morning. Night’s right arm itches the left. Lonely Soares wrote, Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. Still I am the girl waiting for who she should have been, the finch smacking against the silverware waiting for her wings to sprout in a blitz of viscera. Still I am the woman trembling beneath the shock blanket light shining across her eyes. How many times has the world ended for me? I’ve always been the same. Nude in my devotion to elsewhere. With my miraculous dreams. My spinning sundial.
“Like a lot of poets, I am deeply neurotic, and I came to poetry as a means of negotiating my neuroses….
Logistically, I write nearly every day, alternating between my journal — documenting the day and its emotional vortices — and my laptop. I go through many drafts between my indecipherable chicken scratch, Google Docs, and printed copies for markup. When I feel stuck, I’ll take the poem and write it longhand in my journal, eliminating the line breaks and focusing solely on the sounds of the language. I also read and research widely, looking at other poets’ work and losing hours to Wikipedia. I reject my impulse to work fast. I scrape out the bowl of my memories. I talk to my brilliant poet friends.”