Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.
Part of my reaction to my diagnosis of infertility was deeply sarcastic and critical, part of it was morbid, part of it was numb, part of it was neurotic and desperate. To mush all of those notes together would cancel them out. I ended up just trying to keep them as separate as possible.
When you think about the concept of infertility, for example, it's not just medical; it's a repository of so many personal and societal meanings - religious, legal, sexual - encompassing mortality and sin and family and eternity.
I don't experience "emotions" then "analyze" them; they always reach me pre-analyzed.
I can't even imagine having twins.
I tell my students to think of poems as language plus, language with value added beyond its everyday use.
I'm blissfully not writing anything. Just doing a lot of reading and hopefully some thinking as well.
When you talk about "infertility" you're already using a land-based metaphor - a woman's body compared to property, to be considered fruitful or barren. And "estate" encompasses both legacy and landscape. Think of Emerson, referring to his son's death as "the loss of a beautiful estate. "
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Don Ed Hardy
Jayde Nicole
Takashi Nagai
Richard Hell
Mike Rutherford
Grace Napolitano
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