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, empire, religion, beauty and presence. It's a poem that meets the gaze
of Sharbat Gula with its own intensity, unfolding in rhythmically propulsive
short lines its quest to understand what that gaze expresses and what it stirs
in the viewer.
I wrote back. How do you do it, break my heart in a poem and lift it up at the same time? The conversation that follows, with the kind participation of Gregory Fried, is Trude's extended answer to my question. Gjertrud and Gregory spoke with me via email over a period of several months.
I wrote back. How do you do it, break my heart in a poem and lift it up at the same time? The conversation that follows, with the kind participation of Gregory Fried, is Trude's extended answer to my question. Gjertrud and Gregory spoke with me via email over a period of several months.
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| Steve McCurry's June 1985 National Geographic cover. |
In reference to the paradox of this poem's subject, an image taken from an image-forbidding culture, the poet Mary Jo Salter has spoken of "the unwinnable, unlosable argument of imagery." Her phrase goes directly to the heart of how poetry thinks, and I think it furthermore hints at the bond between imagery and negative capability. That is, the way that poetry thinks, which is so often in imagery (and in imagery that imagines thoughts about images), is one of the ways that poetry slips the cuffs of ideologies and beliefs (and of the self and its viewpoint, too) while retaining the value, even the moral value, conferred by witness.
