A Convergence of Gazes: Gjertrud Schnackenberg on "Afghan Girl"

I was enjoying my second coffee on a quiet morning some time ago when this message from Gjertrud Schnackenberg arrived in my inbox. Dear Susan, At last I’ve finished the poem I’ve been working on day and night since October, 2012. When I began the poem I was overjoyed because I thought it would be a short poem, and I always want and hope to write short poems — but as weeks turned into months and years, the writing began to feel like a dream in which I was using magic scissors to cut into it and cut into it, and with every cut, the poem grew longer and longer. She had attached a file. I put down what I was doing and opened it, and began reading. And re-reading. It was, to put it simply, astonishing. “Afghan Girl” ( New England Review , June 2017) pays tribute to Steve McCurry's iconic photograph of a young woman, later identified as Sharbat Gula, in an Afghan refugee camp. Her arresting gaze is the starting point for Schnackenberg’s interrogation of conflict,