![]() And so, it’s more about what would I have understood or thought at the time? You know, what does a 12-year-old do when he’s anxious, for example? So yeah, I think, just kind of rooting it in the specificity of your 13-year-old version of yourself is gonna deal with anger, or sadness, or heartbreak very differently than your 20-year-old version, right? And so, yeah, I think, I think as a writer, because the book, for example, opens and I’m 12 years old, there’s literal distance, you know, I’m in my thirties now. With How We Fight for Our Lives, my memoir, yeah, I mean, first, I mean, in terms of creating the I, it was just, you have so much more canvas and time (LAUGHS) to work with. And so, that’s why a poetry collection is so great, because you can develop a character in brushstrokes over the course of several poems. Like it’s a moving image, but you really only kind of have a couple of seconds, you know, to describe action and character. You know, so I think with poetry, it’s really like a snapshot or, you know, TikToks are kind of long, but like, when Vine was around, which was to say like those six-second videos, that’s how we would describe a poem. Helena de Groot: There’s one thing that I always wonder about when I read a memoir, and that is like, how do you create the persona of the I? Like, how do you create you, basically? But Jones doesn’t find out how bad things really are for his mother until, not long after he graduates college, his mother slips into a coma and dies.įor his new poetry collection, Alive at the End of the World, Saeed Jones turns his gaze from his own life to the end-times we’re all living in. Saeed Jones about being gay, his mother about being sick: she has congestive heart failure. The memoir is built around these brutal silences. Not long after he found out he was sick and killed himself.” His mother is already headed for her bedroom, but little Saeed Jones can get just one more question in. Eventually I learned that she was just testing me, to see how serious I was about finding out.” And eventually she does tell him. “When I was younger,” Jones writes, “I would give up during Mom’s pauses because I thought the answer wasn’t going to come. Jones writes, “the smile felt intimate, inappropriate, like a hand sliding down where it should not be.” Later, when his mother comes home from work he asks her about him, but she says nothing. It’s a picture of a man he’s never seen before, looking straight into the camera and smiling. In the opening chapter, Saeed Jones, who’s 12 then, and living with his mother in Texas, finds a Polaroid between the pages of a book. A lot is being left unsaid in Saeed Jones’s memoir from 2019, titled, How We Fight for Our Lives. Maybe because poets understand white space, and how much you can say by not saying it. Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf.
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