Emily gets a letter from a second-year at UC Berkeley… on Amanda Gorman.

“I do want to be aware of those tensions (between academy and creativity, between ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation’), and find a way to play off them without being tortured or paralyzed by them or pulled too far in one direction or the other.”

Grey Space poems are like placards, billboards, vertiginous verbal icons; they are often verse vendettas, self-mythologizing though not self-aggrandizing documents, punk percussion protests, dirty ditties, saucy stanzas, and crazy collages that are collisions of sound, sense, and structure.