About the Poems - KS
About the Poems
by Kate Schapira Making a vision, receiving and giving in the same motion. False confidence, the limits of fluency (in English, not in Chinese, which I still don't speak). Struggling with vision as it refuses simplicity, exclusion, in the receiving motion, but is forced to exclude some in the giving motion. Tracing the variousness of these attempts and shortfalls. And also I wanted to model a way of talking about places that are not "our" places, to take on my status as a foreigner and guest rather than assigning foreignness to the place, the home, where I was. Living in the United States makes it easy to think of other places as irretrievably somewhere else and eternally in a relation, controlled by us, to us. I wanted to model a willing relinquishment of (and reveal my failures to relinquish) that illusory control, a waiting and seeing. Waiting to see, before assessing–maybe continuing to wait–and touching you with what I've seen as myself.