Echo Wren: “I escaped Vietnam with my mother as a small child. I have no memories of my homeland, but somehow I recognize the soil, the sounds and smells. This language of impressions, preceding my capacity to understand, still forms the foundation of my being. I love poetry because it captures things half-remembered and lost. I write poetry because I am looking for home.”
Echo Wren: “I escaped Vietnam with my mother as a small child. I have no memories of my homeland, but somehow I recognize the soil, the sounds and smells. This language of impressions, preceding my capacity to understand, still forms the foundation of my being. I love poetry because it captures things half-remembered and lost. I write poetry because I am looking for home.”
Simona Chitescu Weik: “I immigrated to the United States from Romania when I was fourteen years old, and after trying to write everything else, my experience under Communism, as well as being a child of two worlds, insinuated itself into my writing constantly, until I begrudgingly embraced the stories that demanded to be told. Coming to the United States at a later age than most of my other immigrant friends has also informed a love affair with language, an attention to textures of sound and synesthetic experiences that only something as dynamic as idiom can provide. Also, dislocation has created in me an obsessive attempt at finding, naming, reimagining the notion of home(land). I write because I belong among words and whispers.”
Gene Tanta: “I grew up in the Socialist Republic of Romania (1974–1984) under the Ceausescu regime. Even as a kid, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I also felt the impossible weight of it. And so did my parents, and wanting nothing but the best for my fingernails and toenails, we emigrated from Romania when I was ten. As a first-generation immigrant, I acquired English as a second language by watching TV reruns like Gilligan’s Island and perking up to Chicago street slang. To strategically essentialize based on my experience, I would agree that ESL poets tend to hear English from the outside of its figurative echo chamber because the need to communicate with a new language demands sensitive attention to it as material. It does for me, anyway. The shock of the idiomatic delights my foreign ear because, as a foreigner, I hear the wisdom of a culture in its slang and in its clichés. This way, the road to our myth of origins is paved with the give of the figurative, with those attempts to catch a glimpse of the essence of a place in time. As an estranged person with creative tendencies, I take delight in these loaded everyday sayings and renew my poetic license at every turn of phrase.” (web)
Divya Rajan: “I spent over two decades of my early life with and in a chaotic, beautiful, eerily sensible space called Bombay, often described as a multicultural mosaic. Because of this umbilical good fortune, my earliest impressions have been pretty varied in terms of aesthetics, literature, and arts. I’d have always gravitated towards writing no matter the place or language influences, but it wouldn’t have been the same. This particular poem was derived from an epiphany I’d had about sense and chaos.”
Yamini Pathak: “I am an Indian-American mother, poet, and freelance writer. I moved to the United States almost twenty years ago and became a citizen last year. Many of my poems are an exploration of the cultural no man’s land between my birth and adopted countries, where I often find myself. Some are based on questions that were bothering me at the time the poem was written. Writing helps me clarify, if not resolve questions about home and identity. Mostly, I write because I am irritable and impossible to live with if I don’t.”
Sue O’Dea: “I am a Brit who has been living in New York City for three years. I moved from the leafy suburbs of London to slap-bang in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. The noise, the pollution, the general lunacy of the place sends me a little crazy. But I love the way this city never ceases to surprise me. Every day, at least one remarkable and strange thing happens. And this, of course, works as good inspiration toward writing poetry.”