The last line caught me off guard: "Everything, he said, is a way of remembering." This lie is the most true. Everything we do is engrained in our knowledge of what worked in the past. Every response to a situation has been experimented before; everything has been said before. As writers, all we can do is try to say something old in a new way. In her reflection of her dead father, without out-right announcing his death, Yi-Mei Tsiang manages this with evocative images and an account of true lies.
Even if a memory is not real, it can still be true. The ironic truth of this poem is that it is completely comprised of lies. Yi-Mei Tsiang popped this poem out of a writer's workshop full of constraints that somehow begot this simple masterpiece. For me, the beauty of this poem is in the organic descriptions and the flowing, dream-like storyline.
The last line caught me off guard: "Everything, he said, is a way of remembering." This lie is the most true. Everything we do is engrained in our knowledge of what worked in the past. Every response to a situation has been experimented before; everything has been said before. As writers, all we can do is try to say something old in a new way. In her reflection of her dead father, without out-right announcing his death, Yi-Mei Tsiang manages this with evocative images and an account of true lies.
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How true that our present lives are inevitably engrained in the past. I think it's interesting also to think of this poem as a meditation on the nature of memory. For the speaker in this moment, even a dream or a hallucination can be a kind of memory, since it is necessarily built from the fragments of the past that the speaker has compiled and reinvented in her mind...
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