Still Present Pasts

Christine NaMee Eriksen

Poetry

"For me, art is not just a hobby; in fact sometimes it’s not even fun. I’ve written poems crying, I’ve been kept up at night, all my words stacked up on my chest weighing me down till I write them out. I have this conviction, deep down, that maybe if I just pick out the right ones, if I just put this one here and that one there, they’ll flow together into our freedom. Maybe it’s about Us, maybe it’s about speaking our story for the sake of justice, but it might be just about me, and this crazy desire to put it out there so at least I can hear it. It’s like a deal was made, long ago, “mom, someday I’m going to be an artist,” not “I want to be an artist.” But I said it, I named it, and somewhere between my Korean mom and my American mom it became sort of a translucent fate. If I had been the daughter my American family really had, or if my Korean mom had been a richer lady, and I never had to ask the questions no one in my life had answers to, would I still be a poet? Could I rely on someone else to save me, to make it right? I write to take the load off, to lighten the weight of a heavy story. Hoping somewhere between the verbs and the particles I can piece together some sort of rainbow, some sort of magic and make sense of it all, I write. Maybe this is how I became an artist."

Christine’s poetry is available for reading in the Poetry Library at Intermedia Arts.