Example letter

March 5, 2012

Dear Li-Young,

When I first started reading your book, Behind My Eyes, I admit I couldn't handle it. I grew irritated and couldn't hold more than one or two poems in my mouth at once, which in reflection isn't necessarily a criticism. I read the whole of it. Then, again. And as usual, that which is my first irritant became my next last love.

I wanted to ask you about "To Hold," how in the middle of the last stanza there's a shift to "what isn't for our having" and how "to abandon what I know I must relinquish/ in time." I love that choice in line break between "relinquish" and "in time" because for a moment I'm able to focus on the relinquishing as though it must happen right now. In a sense, it is happening right now, as I read the poem. Then when I come to "in time," it almost suggests the speaker has considered relinquishing immediately, but has decided to put it off until a distant moment in the future when that letting-go would be better, more appropriate, or perhaps just right.

The aside is so brief, yet when we return to "the light/ of a joint and fragile keeping" between the speaker and his wife, it seems like an attempt at condolence. There's real pain in the fear of eventual relinquishing that paints the sweetness of the end. On the surface, by placing these lines about the "fragile keeping" at the end, this suggests the poem is meant to be about this "fragile keeping" between the two, but is it really about the speaker's fear of loss, even a loss of possibility?

With deep regard,

A. Kay Emmert