Word: poems
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...Edwin Thumboo and Lee Tzu Pheng, who typically concerned themselves with questions of national and cultural identity (indeed, Thumboo has spoken of Wong's "remarkable inwardness"). Wong worries less about his cultural provenance and more about his own isolation amid the boom and bustle of the cityscape. In one poem, he bemoans his distance from his mother: she "sits in front/ of the television every day,/ afloat in a dress too large/ for her body, fanning herself/ with a magazine, feigning contentment." He compares his father, who has refused to accept Wong's sexuality, to a cockroach hiding...
...Some of Wong's rawness was tempered in Unmarked Treasure (2004) and Like a Seed with Its Singular Purpose (2006) - two volumes praised for their probing, reflective study of love and desire. In the poem "Practical Aim" from Like a Seed, Wong asks: "After deep loss, what does the heart/ learn that it has not already understood/ about regret? When all light finally/ forsakes a room, do we take the time/ to interrogate the dark, and to what end?" Other poems simmer with sexual energy; an aircraft landing on the tarmac becomes heady foreplay with the "slow lick...
...introduced to the Sackler Auditorium crowd by Homi K. Bhabha—the head of the Humanities Center at Harvard—who said that Vendler’s “critical presence draws together rare moments of insight and instruction that renew the life of the poem...
...graduate Khadim Ali. Raised in Quetta, the son of Afghan refugees, Ali taught himself to draw using charcoal scavenged from bakeries. His artistic inspiration was his family's only book: an illustrated copy of the Shahnameh, a 10th century Persian epic revered in Afghanistan. The Taliban co-opted the poem's hero, Rustam, as a propaganda figure, telling Afghans that they, like him, were winged heroes endowed with arrows to defeat evil. Ali's phantasmagoric show, "Rustam," features a devil-figure with horns, wings and the unmistakably Pashtun features of many Taliban. Occasionally, an Arabic numeral floats mid-frame...
...story will be familiar even to those who don't know the poem. The kingdom of old Hrothgar (voiced and modeled by Anthony Hopkins) is troubled by the predatory sorties of Grendel (Crispin Hellion Glover). Accompanied by his "14 brave thanes," Beowulf (Ray Winstone) comes across the sea to slay the monster and, not incidentally, add another laurel to his own legend. He repels a Grendel attack on Mead Hall, severing the beast's arm. Grendel limps back to his lair, where his mother - she has no name, so we'll call her Grendma - watches him die. When Beowulf discovers...