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No Apology: A Poemifesto
Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes
in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize
for the sight in my eyes. Susan Briante
I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.
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Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, Her forthcoming book. Nostalgia Has Such a Short Half-Life, will be published in 2023. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she is a Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She has served as the publisher of Noemi Press since 2002.
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Roberta Levitow, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 2020.
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Author: Terence Winch
