Trace Peterson
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Identity Pangs
Who are we? What do we want? Who do we want? Sometimes our biggest struggle is figuring out who we are and where we are going. Our longest journey is finding and then loving ourselves. Learning to accept where we came from, appreciating it and then moving on. These poems help weave a delicate wave of confusion, sexuality, acceptance, observation, and understanding. Identity is a crucial human experience, learning be who we are and then sharing it with others and the world.
View playlistWhat's a Prose Poem to Do
I—a habitual writer of sequences, and particularly of untitled prose poem sequences—have been trying to write an Individual Poem. I’m interested in the single moment, but I distrust it. So I met myself halfway in this playlist and looked for prose poems with titles, whose main unit was the punctuated sentence. We start with Yona Harvey’s “Q.," whose sentences catch Harvey’s wonderful & particular rhythm, and with Ashley Toliver’s exquisite emotional miniature, “Housekeeping.” But, as usually happens when I write with constraints, they crack a bit by the end. In Jenny Xie’s haibun “Corfu” we see how a line break differently holds tension from the sentence, and in Trace Peterson’s funny and whip-smart HRT poem “The Valleys are so Lush and Steep” the propulsive energy of the sentence travels across each section break. Each of these poems find potential in the focused attention to the texture of their language that a prose form provides.
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