from Two Inch Fables

“Just as [William] Blake saw the world in ‘a grain of sand,’ with oppositional force, I try to capture the world’s injustice in one temporal ‘Chinese American quatrain.’

The first piece is comprised of two classic call-and-response quatrains. The first voice offers an argument and the second voice counters it. In the second piece I employ what I call the ‘cruel juxtaposition’ strategy.  I juxtapose the history of oppression against women by using disturbing elliptical images of the dead mother’s body parts against a reference to Basho’s famous frog poem, which describes the perfect Zen distilled moment. Two heavy incongruous ideas happening on one tiny lotus pad. The third piece offers a cruel juxtaposition self-consciously contrasting an entitled American poet’s easy life against those of dying boys in a faraway war. And just in case the reader misses the message, I duplicate the quatrain for emphasis.”
—Marilyn Chin

Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.