Jul 12, 2022
The Way Into the Poem Is the Decision to Write the Poem
The fear of writing a “bad” poem keeps me from writing at all. But I can’t write a “good” poem without writing any poem.
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2021), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country, forthcoming in 2021 from Make Me A World/Random House. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
The fear of writing a “bad” poem keeps me from writing at all. But I can’t write a “good” poem without writing any poem.
I don’t know if I’ll ever go home again. I don’t know who I’ve seen for the last time.
